worldly goods

Hickey mouths the bauble where it hangs against Gibson’s neck, lapping at it busily to make a bruise. His whiskers scratch.

“It doesn’t fit my finger,” Gibson says, but he’s miscalculated somehow. “You don’t know where it’s been.”

Stitched up in some boy midshipman’s filthy drawers, jammed under the glove of some luckless man – luckless enough to lose a pretty thing to Mr. Hickey. Gibson shuts his eyes and sees the frost-chafed skin of a dead man’s finger peeling away like a glove. A wedding ring.

Mr. Hickey raises up his head, grinning. “I know it better than you, Billy.”