Vivian: Planning Parlor. A special room dedicated to strategizing their missions.
Quentin: What’s so special about it?
Vivian: The walls eliminate even the slightest sound from the outside world—
Quentin: WHAT
Vivian: Which means even a servant standing on the other side of the door would not be able to overhear what goes on inside.
Quentin: Do their servants eavesdrop?!?
Vivian: [begrudgingly] I doubt it. The staff is unflaggingly respectful and seem improbably content.
Quentin: [slyly] As if perhaps the Wynchesters are nice people?
Vivian:Richpeople, anyway. The table in the Planning Parlor is the size of our entire kitchen.
Quentin: Well, there are a lot of Wynchesters, and they’d need some sort of stable surface upon which to take notes.
Vivian: Actually, they use the floor for that.
Quentin: WHAT
Vivian: And the walls.
Quentin: WHAT
Vivian: For example, the floor is made of black slate and is full of white chalk outlines and plans for current missions.
Quentin: And the walls?!?
Vivian: Covered in bookshelves, maps, lists, sketches…
Quentin: None of them keep an ordinary logbook?
Vivian: Graham keeps extraordinary ones. Half of the overstuffed shelves contain journals of intelligence he’s gathered on everyone he deems important enough to surveil. And Jacob always carries a journal, though he never lets his out of sight. It’s as likely to contain unpublished poetry as mission notes.
Quentin:Youdon’t know what’s in his book? You hate not knowing things. His secrets must be killing you!
Vivian: I don’t give two figs about Jacob Wynchester.
Viv would actually give her left boot for a single peek inside that journal, and these were her favorite shoes.
Her only shoes.
But limping along with one bare foot for the next year would be worth the pain if it meant having answers to her questions.
WhatdidJacob pen in that journal? Case notes, revealing a mind far more clever than the “I live in a barn” external persona he attempted to portray? Poetry so poorly written it had made every publisher’s eyes bleed from here to Scotland? Or poems so hauntingly beautiful the greatest crime this Wynchester committed against the world was refusing to share his brilliance with others?
“Over here.” Jacob motioned to Viv. “You can sit next to me, if you like.”
The armchair he patted was on the opposite side to the pocket where he kept his journal. Not that Viv had experienced many opportunities to practice pickpocketing skills. White women like Chloe Wynchester—even before she became a duchess—could get away with a giggled “oh dear, how clumsy of me” if caught in the act.
Whereas someone like Viv only had to be in eyesight of the upper class to receive suspicious looks, as though she were permanently on the cusp of committing a horrendous crime.
“You may wish to remain silent and observe,” Jacob murmured as she settled into the chair beside his. “Our methods can be… chaotic.”
She scowled at him. The only thing she hated worse than not knowing was nottalking. It was why she was a writer. The only way to unclutter her constantly busy mind was by sharing with others. So she wrote plays and lists and correspondence and diary entries and answered the letters sent to her advice column, no matter how corkbrained the question.
