Edmund rose. “I shall leave at dawn.”
Renforth stood as well, placing a steady hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Edmund,” he said, low enough that only Edmund could hear, “this is not punishment. Nor is it mercy. It is necessity—and I trust you implicitly.”
Edmund bowed his head slightly, unable to speak.
The men resumed their banter as he crossed the room—Baines lamenting the lack of gun battles these days; Fielding andStuart commending their new-found domesticity; Manners and Renforth praising the vintage of their brandy.
But Edmund heard little of it.
At the doorway he paused, his breath catching at his thoughts.
A widow.
A house that had once hosted a Council of War.
A cipher that could ruin England.
He left the room without looking back. Tomorrow, he would ride for Plymouth.
The sea hadno right to look so calm.
Edmund pulled up the chestnut gelding that had carried him as far as the cliff road would allow. Below, the bay stretched away like a folded ribbon of pewter, neat and indifferent. It gleamed faintly under a sky that threatened rain but could not be troubled to deliver it. The wind smelled of salt, heather, and pressed the unending melancholy that seemed, of late, to have taken up residence in his chest.
Colonel Renforth, the clever devil, had known as much. He had thought to help Edmund escape it by pushing him into motion.
“A change of air,” the Colonel had said that morning in London. “The coast will do you good. Fetch the ledger, or the trail of it, and try not to brood.”
Edmund had saluted, though the action had felt absurdly formal between two men who had lived and served together through unspeakable war and tragedy. “And if the ledger is nowhere to be fetched?”
Renforth’s grey eyes had not softened. “We will also be searching here. Bring yourself back whole. That will suffice.”
He stood a moment longer, watching the sea claw faintly at the shingle far below.
His brother’s voice rose, uninvited, from some pit of memory—soft, persuasive, the very tone that had deceived so many.
The Crown will not protect you, brother. One must act for oneself.
He clenched his hands until the ache silenced the ghost. Oneself indeed. It had ended in a violent death and his name struck from the family Bible. It was due only to the rest of the family’s faithful service to the Crown that their titles and lands had not been stripped, and the scandal covered up.
Edmund rode on into Plymouth with the pale light of afternoon breaking over the downs and the sea spread out below like tarnished glass. His coat was of an unassuming cut—worn serge instead of uniform—and he bore the air of a gentleman travelling for reasons too dull to invite questions. The innkeeper, perceiving a quiet man of means, offered a room without ceremony, and Edmund accepted it with a nod. He needed a place to watch, and The Prince George, Stonehouse, gave him both a window overlooking the town and harbour, and an alehouse full of talk.
Renforth’s words echoed through his mind: Observe. Confirm. Do not engage. Larkin’s place—Belair House—is situated upon the headland above the harbour.
How the devil was a war widow who ran a boarding school involved in espionage? He supposed there had been stranger occurrences, but it seemed far-fetched when her husband had died a hero.
It was not the sort of posting any man would envy: weeks of winter weather, provincial chatter, and the endless patience required of one who hunts not an enemy in uniform but thefaint traces of a message gone astray. Still, for Edmund, whose life had been mostly melancholy since his brother’s death, the monotony had its comfort.
So here he was, deposited upon a remote headland where the War Office had mislaid its secrets and he his peace of mind. The town crouched below—a scatter of white cottages, a squat church with a high steeple, and beyond them the hint of a small harbour where masts nodded against the horizon. Above the town, a building of more austere aspect stood apart with long windows, pale stone, and a garden enclosed by weathered walls. The driver had identified it as Belair House, Captain Elphinstone’s neat country residence, famed for its “Council of War” in the summer when Admiral Lord Keith had received Bonaparte’s fate within its walls. Now it was also the location of Widow Larkin’s Seminary, a respectable institution for the daughters of officers.
That evening, as the inn’s hearth drew the fishermen in from the quay, he nursed a tankard and listened. The talk ran easily to the widow and her girls when Edmund, in the mildest tone of inquiry, mentioned the place after a few pints of ale.
“She keeps a proper hand on ’em,” said one. “No nonsense, no runnin’ wild.”
“Aye, and sends half her earnings to the Foundling Hospital,” added another. “That’s a lady, if you ask me.”
A third snorted. “Lady or no, there’s summat odd about ’er. Twice a week, she walks to the harbour. Never trusts the coach, never the errand-boy.”
Edmund’s fingers tightened imperceptibly round the pewter. He let his eyes rest upon the fire as though the matter interested him no more than the weather.
