The sea beyond was barely visible, but she imagined it just the same, restless, waiting.
Barrington returned a moment later with a new set of documents. He spread them across the table.
As Mary-Ann stepped closer, her eyes caught on a peculiar stamp in the corner of one page, a raven with its wings spreadwide over a sharp-edged diamond. The ink was faded, almost smudged into the grain of the paper, as if someone had tried to press too lightly. Her stomach turned. Not from fear, exactly, but from the awful clarity that came with recognition. This wasn’t a merchant’s flourish or a dockhand’s stamp. It was deliberate. Delicate in its precision. And wrong. The kind of wrong that wasn’t meant to be noticed until it was too late.
A flicker of memory stirred—one corner of the booklet, the ink bled faintly, the shape imperfect but unmistakable. She’d thought it a bird then, but now she knew. It had always been a raven.
Her breath caught. She had seen that same mark before, buried among the strange symbols on the back pages of the hidden booklet. She didn’t speak, didn’t let her fingers pause too long. But the image stayed fixed in her mind, stark as a warning.
Barrington’s eyes flicked up at her, sharp for just a second. Then he nodded, slowly. “You notice details most don’t.”
“What is that?” she asked lightly, tapping the symbol with one gloved finger. Her tone was casual, even curious.
Barrington followed her gesture and frowned faintly. “Just a yard stamp, I’m sure. Likely from a northern office. They’ve been using odd symbols lately.”
A small nod concealed the quickening pulse at her throat. She didn’t correct him. She didn’t say she’d seen it before.
As Barrington returned to his desk, she stepped back slightly, pretending to review another page. But her mind stayed on the symbol. It felt like standing at the edge of a shadow, not fully inside it, but aware now that it existed. And that it might be watching back.
Her steps carried her to the table, slow and steady, her gaze catching on the edge of a map half-unrolled across the surface. Her fingers brushed a familiar port name, Berwick, and a flicker of memory stirred. Her father had once shown her how to tracea route with just a compass and a thumb. She had forgotten that until now. It was a quiet thing, but grounding. Like drawing a line between what was and what would be.
Mary-Ann stepped forward, her voice calm and clear.
“Show me where it began.”
Chapter Nineteen
Monday morning brokeunder grey skies, the morning light pressing coolly against the curtains as Mary-Ann awoke uneasy and unrested. The Seaton house was still. Mary-Ann paused at her door, listening for the creak of floorboards or the distant echo of servants’ steps. Nothing. Silence wrapped around her like a shawl she’d worn too many nights, waiting for the world to make sense again. She crossed to the desk beneath her bedroom window, her bare feet whispering against the rug. The latch on the wainscoting gave a familiar click, and she reached into the narrow cavity behind it. Her fingers brushed cloth and paper. The booklet was just where she’d left it.
She carried it to the desk and lit a small lamp, shielding the flame with her hand until it caught. Shadows stretched long across the floor, pooling near the corners of the room. She opened the booklet slowly, reverently, as if it were something sacred or cursed. The pages gave a dry rustle, the ink still sharp where it hadn’t faded.
Her fingertips traced the familiar marks, Hamish’s handwriting, she still believed, or perhaps someone just as practiced. Triangles, dots, slashes. She remembered seeing those in the margins weeks ago and thinking they were some kind of shorthand. But now her gaze moved with purpose.
She turned page after page until she found it, the raven, wings outstretched over a diamond, inked in fine black lines. It was smaller here than on the manifest Barrington had shownher and almost hidden among the other markings. But it was unmistakable.
She turned another page. There it was again. And again. Not next to every entry, but beside certain names and certain routes. Some repeated. Some she recognized from her father’s logs. One she remembered because she’d questioned the cargo manifest at the time, a crate marked textiles that had felt too heavy when it was lifted. Her stomach dropped, a slow unraveling of certainty replaced by something colder. She pressed her palm to the page as if touch could make sense of it. The symbol wasn’t just a mark. It was a warning. Or a signature. And it was threaded through these pages like a warning no one was meant to follow. What had felt like patterns now looked like purpose. Deliberate. Repeated. Dangerous. Her breath quickened as she leaned closer, heart knocking against her ribs. What if someone knew she was reading this? What if they’d left the booklet to be found? Or worse, to trap whoever did?
This wasn’t just a ledger. It was a trail.
She worked in silence, marking the entries with a strip of ribbon as she searched for patterns. The ships weren’t all the same, but the destinations were close. Northbound. Rural. One bound for Berwick. Another for a place she’d only seen in letters.
A knock sounded faintly downstairs. She stilled. But after a moment, the silence returned. Only the wind scratched softly at the windowpanes.
She exhaled and leaned back, staring at the booklet.
If this symbol meant what she feared, then Barrington’s answer wasn’t just inadequate. It was wrong. Or worse. It was deliberate.
And if it was deliberate, then someone had decided she didn’t need the truth.
She thought, briefly, of Quinton’s voice beside her, the way he used to read figures aloud in a murmur only she could hear.She missed the ease between them. Not just the warmth, but the precision. The way they fit. It wasn’t just her heart she trusted him with. It was her mind.
She copied the entries down, exact and careful, onto a fresh sheet of paper, tucking the page into her bodice. She thought, briefly, of taking it straight to Quinton. He would know what to do. He would look at her not as someone fragile or foolish but as a partner. But then she thought of his eyes, shadowed at the edges even when he smiled. In the quiet way he carried his pain, tucked beneath steady words and silence. He had survived something terrible, and she had already lost him once. If there was danger ahead, she could not bear to be the one who led it to his door. Not yet. Not until she was certain it mattered. Not until she knew he was ready.
Before she put the booklet away, she opened the drawer beneath her desk and drew out her private ledger, the one where she’d recorded the weight discrepancies. Leafing through it to the marked pages, she glanced over her notes, one column at a time. Her breath caught. Three of the ships with the raven symbol matched entries she’d flagged weeks ago. The weight differences had seemed small at the time, barely enough to raise concern. But now they weren’t anomalies. They were signs. Whoever had kept the booklet had noticed the same things she had and marked them for a reason. When she was finished, she closed the booklet and returned it to the hidden space behind the wainscoting, checking the latch twice.
Only then did she sit back, hands folded over the fabric covering her ribs, and whisper to herself, “You trusted me to find the truth. I hope you still will when I bring it to you.”
*
