He waited.
At last she spoke, her voice very quiet. “If you would watch over him until nightfall, when I can escape my duties without notice, I would be grateful. If he wins through the night… I do not want him to be alone. You may send messages to me through Sophie in the kitchen, which is up the next corridor to the right. I will tell Sophie.”
He inclined his head in solemn acceptance. “I will stay with him.”
He felt her relief even through the rigidity of her composure.
“Very well,” she said. “I will return to the girls.”
He stepped back to let her pass, but she paused in the doorway—just for a breath, as though weighing something. She said nothing more, and descended the stairs.
Edmund remained alone in the quiet corridor, listening to her footsteps fade. Only then did he allow his composed façade to crack, running a hand through his hair with a quiet sigh.
He had never met a woman so reluctant to be helped… he was certain she held more secrets, probably including the key Holt sought. How was Blake connected, though?
He returned to the bed where Blake lay.
“If you can speak,” he murmured, “you may yet tell me what she cannot.”
He gritted his teeth, resolve settling like armour. Blake had to live.
Whoever had done this to him had meant it as a warning. The question to be answered was if the attack was related to the lost cipher, and if Mrs. Larkin was the intended target.
Edmund drew a chair closer to the narrow bed and sat down, resting his forearms on his thighs. The room was spare—stone walls, a single shuttered window, the smell of old linens and dried herbs lingering faintly in the air. It had once been a storage chamber, he suspected, perhaps used in darker times for quieter necessities. Mrs. Larkin’s choice of it had not been accidental, as though she had done this very thing before.
Blake lay still, his breathing shallow but regular, the rise and fall of his chest even beneath the blankets. Edmund had cleaned the wound as best he could, applied the poultice Elise had prepared before she left, and set the bottle of laudanum well out of reach. He did not trust a man half conscious and in pain not to drink himself into oblivion.
“You were meant to die,” Edmund said quietly, more to himself than the unconscious man, “left where the tide and the gulls would finish what they began.”
Blake stirred faintly at the sound of his voice. A low, rasping breath caught in his throat. Edmund leaned forward at once.
“Be easy,” he murmured. “You are safe. For now.”
Hewassafe—for the moment. The words felt dangerously provisional.
He studied Blake’s face more closely now that the urgency had passed. The man was older than he had first thought, the lines around his mouth and eyes deeper, the skin weathered by long exposure to salt and wind—a sailor or fisherman who had lived near the sea long enough to wear its mark. His hands, though rough, bore a certain familiarity—calloused in places that suggested rope rather than oar.
Not a fisherman by trade, Edmund decided,or not just that.
“You knew Charles Larkin,” he said softly, “did you not?”
Blake’s eyelids fluttered. A faint sound escaped him—not a word, but something close to it. Edmund leaned nearer.
“You worked with him,” Edmund continued, carefully modulating his tone.
The injured man emitted a low groan this time. Blake’s head shifted slightly on the pillow.
Edmund straightened, his pulse quickening. “Can you hear me?”
Blake’s lips parted. For a moment Edmund thought he might speak, but instead Blake’s hand twitched weakly against the blanket, his fingers curling as though grasping at something no longer there.
“Key,” Blake breathed.
Edmund froze.
The word was scarcely more than a breath, barely shaped by tongue or teeth, but it struck like a shot.
“Key?” Edmund repeated softly. “What key?”
