If Mrs. Larkin was being watched, then a man like Holt would not be far. And if Holt was here, the cipher was not merely a rumour; it was an active artery, pulsing again. So Edmund sat with his tankard and his borrowed name and listened.
At first he paid the usual price of patience: nonsense. Fishermen complaining of weather as though weather were obliged to defer to them; sailors inventing heroics; a fisherman who had caught a ten-foot fish. Edmund let the noise wash overhim, searching for patterns: who watched the door, who sat in the shadows, who laughed too hard.
Then the tavern door opened, and a gust of cold air blew in, as sharp as a knife.
Holt had entered.
Edmund knew him at once—not because he had ever seen him before, but because men like Holt wore a particular kind of presence, as unmistakable as a uniform. Yet there was something about a man who had decided that other people existed chiefly as tools. They carried it in the set of their shoulders; in the patience of their eyes and in the untroubled ease with which they took up space and claimed it.
Holt was tall and broad, his hair dark, his jaw heavy, and a pale scar cut along his cheek as though someone had once attempted to teach him humility with steel. He smiled too quickly, too falsely, as he crossed to a table where the men waited as if they had been placed there.
Edmund did not look at him for too long. He allowed his gaze to slide, to travel naturally, to settle anywhere but on the centre of danger. It was a habit that had saved him more than once.
And then—because Providence had a taste for satire—Elise Larkin walked into his line of sight.
At first, Edmund did not recognize her. That was the mischief of it: she had done enough to alter herself, but not enough to be convincing. She wore a plain brown gown, coarser than any mistress of a school would wear, and a white but stained apron, tied low on her slender hips. Her hair was covered by a mob-cap. There was a faint smudge upon her cheek, as if she had been cleaning grates. She carried a cloth and moved with the brisk, resigned efficiency of a girl accustomed to being ordered about.
It was almost clever.
However she had not altered what could not be altered: her eyes; the set of her mouth; the way she held herself even whenshe meant to look small. She moved as if she had spent years making herself the axis upon which a household turned, and no borrowed apron could teach a woman to forget her own authority.
He watched her for the space of three breaths—no longer—and in those three breaths the picture assembled itself in his mind with a completeness that made him feel absurdly, unexpectedly angry.
Mrs. Larkin did not merely keep to herself. She did not merely walk down to the wharf with her basket twice a week like a pious widow attending to charity. She came into taverns at night and took up labour like a hired girl, and believed herself invisible because she chose to be.
It was reckless. It was also, infuriatingly, impressive.
Edmund followed her with his gaze only once more—briefly—when she bent to wipe a table and a man brushed too close. She shifted away without protest, without outrage, without even the smallest flicker of offence. She played her part as if she had practised it.
“You have,” he realized, with a tightening in his chest. “Of course you have.”
She moved through the room with a tray, collecting tankards, delivering fresh ale, and all the while her attention was not upon the work, but upon the corners. She sought someone.
And when Holt leaned forward to speak to the men at his table, when their heads bent close together, she drifted nearer—not directly, but by degrees—like a ship drawing toward a reef with deliberate caution.
Edmund’s pulse steadied into that familiar, cold clarity that preceded action. This was a woman conducting surveillance.
His unease, which had lived in him since the events in London, whetted into a clean edge. If she was here, then Blake’s warning was not merely precaution. It was necessity.
Edmund watched Holt’s mouth. He watched the men around him. He watched which words made them laugh and which made them lean closer.
Still, he waited, because the first rule of such work is always the same: do not move until you know where the trap is.
The mood in the room shifted, subtly, when Holt spoke. It was not merely the sound; it was the effect. Men around that table did not look toward him, but they oriented themselves, as iron filings do toward a magnet. One man laughed too loudly at Holt’s muttered jest. Another glanced toward the door with the uneasy vigilance of someone who expected interruption. A third—older, more careful—spoke little, but watched a great deal.
Edmund could not hear every word from his corner; the tavern was too loud, the fire too eager, but he caught enough.
“… took the bait…”
“… easier here…”
“… need the marks, the pattern…”
The words came in fragments, like torn pages. Yet fragments are often sufficient to reveal the shape of a plot.
Then Holt leaned back, his scar pulling as he smiled, and said something that cut through the noise as cleanly as a blade.
“Widow,” he said, voice rough with amusement. “… already scared,” Holt said. “… someone’s asking questions.”
