She no longer looked as drab and neat and clean as nobility might. The Mariner's Inn was notable for the few coins required to purchase its beverages or its delights (one was not necessarily the other) and there was nothing of the nobility in the room to seduce into believing they were birds of a feather. Irene wore tweed, the heathered blue of summer storms and her hair braided into a queue down her back. She was not present for the sotted pleasures of the barkeep nor the place, this was a rendezvous and there was little pleasure to be found in that.
There was a twist of paper in her pocket, a man's thick black script written on it large, and her fingers curled reflexively around it as she sit with her chin lifted to survey her surrounds, her mouth curved at the sight there was to see. This felt closer to home than all the candle-lit halls that great cities had to offer, parties that glittered too much like ice. This room, where it smelled like warm bodies and spilled beer, this was real and it was welcoming even as she pushed down the ever-present fear that this would drag her back and hold her under until she drowned.
Her mark, he wasn't here yet. She knew he wasn't here because his presence would have quietened some of the bawdier present and her eye was caught as the light sparked off tooled metal and worked silver. A pocket-watch, of quality, and the man attached to it didn't know how to hold his countenance. He was easy prey, and Irene watched with her smile curled into her cheek as Sal, who was here as often as she was on the streets, took a tipsy circuit of the room well-timed to 'stumble' into the man and relieve him of his watch.
She pushed one booted foot against the spindle of the chair-leg, shoved it out into his path and shared a sunny smile with Sal who scowled balefully in her direction. "Sit," she instructed, her voice ice-water cool. "You'll lose that, if you keep playing with it." The wintry tone levened with sly humor. "As is often said to men when they are small boys."