She learned of his admittedly boast-worthy skill with numbers and probabilities, useful for generating funds quickly at the gambling table, or over a longer time frame on the Exchange. It also somehow netted him the responsibility of keeping Locksley’s organization’s books—the real ones and the ones that supported one cover story or another—but Maxwell didn’t mind that.
He learned that she dressed as she did not because she had ever earned her living working as a prostitute, but because her persona off the Shoreditch stage was as carefully-constructed as the ones she played upon it. The trousers allowed her to slip in and out of whatever role she chose at the moment. “If I manage the posture correctly, they’ll half-mistake me for a man, at least long enough to follow my orders,” she expla
