Edmund took it, keeping his face bland, but his pulse quickened.
The paper was plain, the wax unbroken.
He did not look at the seal too closely—did not appear to recognize anything—yet he felt Mrs. Larkin’s attention like a hand resting upon his sleeve.
Her eyes were calm, but there was a question there—not suspicion, precisely, at least not yet.
He forced a mild smile. “How kind of you to bring it to me. I had not expected to receive post so soon after the storm.”
“Nor had I,” she replied. “Perhaps the storm was merely local.”
A pause followed. Had she opened it? The wax was unbroken. But wax could be softened and resealed by a careful hand. Mrs. Larkin ran a school. She was capable. She was clever… and he suspected she knew what it was to be haunted by secrets.
He kept his voice light. “I hope the town has not suffered too badly.”
“It seems the Admiral’s cottage has fared the worst. We shall go on as we always do,” she said, “with grumbling, work, and tea.”
He almost smiled. “An admirable remedy.”
She bade him farewell and left to return to the school.
Edmund could not open the letter here, in the open, but he could not wait long either.
He found a place inside the garden shed to hide and broke the seal.
Folded in plain paper were Renforth’s neat lines, written in a different cipher Edmund knew as well as his own pulse. He translated quickly.
Reports confirmarms missing from London Docks. Pattern matches prior Singleton operations.
Revenue men dispatched to Plymouth.
Possible link to former officer Holt.
Trust no one.
Holt.He must discover who he was as quickly as possible. Edmund’s mind leaped to the scar Blake had mentioned. A distinguishing mark. A man who might be trying to play both sides, now elevated in the scheme.
He thought of his brother, charming and persuasive; Edmund had been certain Alastair was acting for England even as he had sold her secrets. Devil and his gang had been dealt with, but perhaps only the visible devils had been apprehended.
Larkin had been running blockades after the war. Singleton’s gang had eliminated him after Alastair had died. It wasn’t uncommon for a new leader to emerge when one was gone, butwho would have the connexions to match those of his brother? It had to be someone even higher if they had access to the cipher. He would have to tread carefully, leaving the house at night, but he must discover the identity of this man Holt.
CHAPTER 10
It is an odd thing to have one’s life appear perfectly ordinary while one’s mind is occupied by treason.
There were lessons to be heard; there were hands to be washed; there were hems to be mended, sums to be corrected, and tempers to be soothed before they grew into tears.
All of it proceeded as it must—because a school, like the sea, is not moved by a woman’s private dread.
Nonetheless, all afternoon Elise moved through her duties as though a thread were pulled taut inside her, and every turn of her attention tugged it. She watched a girl practise her scales on the pianoforte and found herself counting not notes, but minutes. She listened to a recitation of French verbs and heard instead Blake’s rough whisper in her mind about Holt and new shipments. She corrected an exercise in penmanship and caught herself staring at the curl of an H as though it might arrange itself into Holt’s name and reveal its owner.
If Blake were to be trusted—and she had trusted him with the cipher itself—then Holt was no harmless drunk or opportunist sailor. Holt was connected to the old channels. Holt had knowledge no man ought to possess. Holt was precisely the sortof man who could appear in a place with a false name and vanish again before daylight.
If Holt was here, if the old trade had revived, then the cipher’s reappearance was no accident. It was a signal; a summons—or a snare.
Elise made herself smile at Miss Forbes’s pleasantry. She approved Miss Grenfell’s needlework. She sat with a weeping girl whose father had not written in three months and told her, gently, that ships and storms were cruel correspondents. She praised Cook’s bread and endured the woman’s opinions on every other topic under the sun. She spoke as though the world remained properly arranged.
Her mind had, however, already stepped beyond the school walls. Tonight, after dark, she would go down to the tavern. She would find Holt—or at least, she would see him—and if the night yielded nothing but noise and ale and the town’s harmless gossip, then she would go again, and again, until she did.
