Hasn’t he left enough room between them bars to put a donkey through? Skif snickered to himself, as he slipped over the roof of the stable to the uneven triangle of shadow just against the wall of the house that the moon wouldn’t reach at this time of night. He managed it all without a hint of sound, not the rattle of a stone, not the slip of a slate. In his all-black “sneak suit,” with hands in black gloves and face wrapped in a black scarf, smeared with charcoal where the scarf didn’t reach, the only part of him visible was his eyes.

Oh, yes, indeed, Kalink was “new money” in Haven and proud of it. Proud enough to have halved the space where his garden had been in order to put in a stable for a single horse, the fool! True enough, a horse was a very expensive, very conspicuous luxury in the city, but one horse would only pull a cart (which there was no room for) or a tiny, two-wheeled, half-carriage called a “gig,” that would only carry two people at a time (and which barely fit in the stable with the horse). Your servants couldn’t use it for real shopping, it was fair useless for transporting anything large or heavy, if you had a country estate or summer home as Kalink did, you still had to hire a wagon to carry your baggage when you went back for hunting season or summer. You had to drive it yourself, for there wasn’t room for a driver. It was good for two things—for arriving at a fancy “do” with the wife, and for the wife or a daughter to go off with a servant to drive to make her daytime social calls. If wife or daughter couldn’t drive, the only way your women could use it for their shopping was if they arranged for whatever they bought to be delivered.

Which was, of course, what Kalink’s brainless bit of a show-wife always did, though she did have wit enough to be able to drive herself, so she took her personal maid instead of a manservant. Skif’s lip curled in contempt. Very nice.

And in exchange for this ostentatious bit of status-flaunting merchandise, you lost half your garden, and had to have an extra boy around to drive and to tend the creature from dusk to dawn, just to keep the beast from stinking up the neighborhood and drawing flies.

The show-wife had a weakness for jewelry, and brainless though she might be, she had a true expert’s eye for picking out the best. And a boy who volunteered to hold m’lady’s horse while she browsed through the goldsmiths’ row in search of more of the stuff heard a lot.

Especially when m’lady was discussing with her new maid what to do with her purchases. And since m’lady was in a hurry to go on her social calls as well as brainless, and the maid was new and didn’t know where the concealed cupboard for the valuables was, m’lady told her all about it right then and there instead of waiting until she was back home and showing her.