The third man—older, with a careful manner—spoke in a lower tone Elise could barely hear.
“We have no need of talk. We need the pattern.”
Holt’s mouth twisted. “Aye. We have enough of it.”
Elise felt a chill spread through her.
The older man’s voice lowered. “Careful, Holt. If you scare?—”
“Nonsense,” Holt said dismissively.
Elise’s vision narrowed for an instant. She forced herself to breathe.
The thin-faced man leaned closer to his fellows. “Revenue men have been sniffing about again.”
Holt snorted. “Let ’em sniff. With enough coins they will sniff elsewhere.”
“And if they don’t?” the older man demanded.
Holt’s scar pulled as he smiled. “Then we give ’em a reason to look at the wrong boat.”
Elise’s heart thudded.
It was not merely smuggling. It was organized, confident and planned.
She edged away, pulse hammering and mind racing.
Then she felt—rather than saw—Mr. Leigh’s gaze shift. Not toward her face, but toward Holt.
Mr. Leigh had noticed.
Elise moved back toward the bar, her hands trembling only slightly as she set down a tray. She needed to think. She needed to decide whether to approach Blake, whether to leave or whether to?—
A movement near her elbow made her freeze.
Mr. Grey, the landlord, loomed beside her, his voice pitched low. “You be getting pale, lass,” he muttered without looking at her. “Either you be ill or you ’ave seen something you ’ave no business seeing. Go and wash your face in the back.”
Elise swallowed. “Yes.”
Heart pounding, she slipped toward the back passage. As she reached the doorway, she glanced once over her shoulder.
Holt leaned back in his chair, laughing at something. Blake sat rigid in his corner, watching like a man who expected a blow. Mr. Leigh remained still, his face unreadable, but his attention fixed.
For a moment—only a moment—Elise’s gaze met his. Not as barmaid to customer but as one watcher to another.
In that instant she knew with an abrupt, unsettling certainty that Mr. Leigh had followed her—and he knew she was not what she pretended to be.
She slipped into the store room, pressed her hands to a rough wooden table, and forced herself to breathe. Outside, laughter rose again, the fiddle struck up a new tune, and life in the tavern carried on. Elise lifted her chin, smoothed her apron, and prepared to go back to the tap-room.
Tonight, she had come to discover Holt. Yet it appeared she must needs fear Mr. Leigh as well. She did not yet know which discovery was the more dangerous. However, it appeared they were indeed looking for the cipher, and she would never let them find it.
CHAPTER 11
There were moments in a man’s life which arrived with such perfect, insolent clarity that they rendered all previous suppositions not merely mistaken but ridiculous.
Edmund sat in a corner of the George with his back to a wall that had absorbed several generations of smoke and boasting, and watched the room as he had watched towns on the Peninsula—quietly, without haste, with the patience that is only ever purchased by blood. The place was crowded in the manner of a winter port: men driven inward by cold and boredom, their boots still wet with harbour mud, their tempers honed by wind, and their talk lubricated by ale.
Edmund had come for one reason: Holt.
