Edmund’s fingers stilled on his tankard.
Widow.
The careful older man said something Edmund did not catch. Holt snorted in reply.
Edmund’s attention intensified further. That meant other players, other interests. Either Holt feared competition, or Holt used fear as a tool to hurry men into mistakes.
Mrs. Larkin—still in her poor disguise—had moved closer, wiping a table that did not require wiping. Her posture remained casual; her face remained blank. Yet Edmund saw the wayher knuckles whitened briefly around the cloth. She had heard enough too.
Holt lifted his tankard and took a long swallow. The thin-faced man beside him muttered something about Revenue men. Holt replied with a laugh that had no warmth.
“Let ’em sniff,” he said. “Coins will send ’em elsewhere.”
“And if they don’t?” the older man pressed.
Holt’s smile returned—small, confident. “Then we give ’em a reason to look at the wrong boat.”
Edmund’s mind assembled the implications with grim ease. Bribery. Diversion. Smuggling methods not merely remembered, but practised. The old channels were not dead; they were only dormant.
And if Holt spoke of widows, then the cipher was not merely an instrument of trade, it was leverage. A dormant cipher held value only if what it unlocked was still dangerous.
Edmund’s thoughts went, unwillingly, to Renforth’s description of the ledger: intelligence assets, names, shipments, bribes, illegal seizures, unauthorized raids, captured ships where the prize money had vanished into respectable pockets. Yet there was something else beneath it, something particular to the smuggling ring Singleton had been accused of—something that would draw men like Holt back to the coast.
The cipher, if it was indeed Larkin’s, would not merely contain enciphered messages. It would contain routes: which coves were safe, which fishermen could be trusted, which harbour-masters were pliable. It would contain schedules: the tides, the signals, the lantern patterns. It would contain names: the men who handled goods, the men who protected them, the men who looked away.
If Charles Larkin had been tracking Singleton, then the cipher would also hold what Larkin knew of Singleton’s contacts.
It was a directory of treason, dressed as commerce; a map of vice. It was a list of those who had betrayed the Crown for profit, and those who had done worse—for ideology.
If Holt wanted that cipher, then Holt wanted more than arms shipments. He wanted the organization. He either wanted to resume the operations Singleton had begun or—worse—he wanted to take them over, to employ the secrets for blackmail and political mischief. It meant he held the ledger.
Edmund’s unease grew teeth. There were secrets in that ledger that would not merely ruin men. They would ruin families. They would ruin institutions. They would expose Renforth’s operations and, by extension, reveal the shadow-war the Crown pretended not to wage.
Also—he could not avoid the thought—those secrets would drag his brother’s treason into daylight in a manner that could not be buried by influence.
Alastair had died in the raid where his betrayal had been discovered. There had been no trial, no long public accounting; just blood, firelight, and a brutal ending that had spared the family the spectacle.
The ledger would not spare them. The ledger would not care that Edmund had tried to live quietly since. The ledger would record facts without mercy.
His throat constricted at the memory of Alastair’s face—bright-eyed, persuasive, full of conviction that had seemed, at the time, to be patriotism.
Edmund had come here to observe and confirm. He had not come to care.
However, when Elise Larkin then slipped into the back passage of the tavern with the swift purpose of a woman trying not to be seen, he felt a sudden, fierce impulse that had nothing to do with the Crown.
She turned slightly, perhaps sensing him, and their eyes met. It was a single instant—brief, electric—like lightning crossing a summer sky, illuminating everything for the barest heartbeat before leaving the world altered and strangely hushed in its wake.
Her expression altered, showing surprise first, then calculation and then a hardening that made her face as smooth as stone.
She recognized him. She had hoped, perhaps, that he would not recognize her.
Edmund inclined his head as if they were merely in the same drawing-room again, and she were merely Mrs. Larkin.
Her gaze held a question that was almost a weapon:Why are you here?
He watched her with a question in his eyes that was equally sharp:What are you doing, and how deep are you in this affair?
Her hands moved with brisk efficiency, wiping her face, smoothing her apron. She composed herself with the speed of a woman practised at refusing panic. She broke the look first, turning away and through the door as though she had no more intent than to fetch water.
