CHAPTER 14
When Jane found Elise, she was in her study with the shutters half drawn and the day pretending—very badly—to be ordinary.
The girls were practising their copy-books in the next room. The older ones were bent over their pages, and the younger ones were engaged in appearing industrious whilst contriving to do no work at all. Elise sat at the mistress’s desk trying to decide what to do. She did not know if she could bear it if Blake died because of her. There was also the matter of Holt, who would apparently stop at nothing short of murder to find the cipher.
Jane entered without ceremony, for she had long ago resigned the pretence that Elise required it. She shut the door behind her with a care that spoke of more than quietness.
“Elise,” she said. There was fear in that single syllable—fear forcibly controlled, as Elise had taught her to control it.
Elise looked up. She did not ask what was wrong. It was in Jane’s face, in the too firm clasp of her hands, in the way she kept her shoulders squared.
“You were gone,” Jane said, her voice low, “at an hour when you never go. You were not in the kitchen, nor in the chapel, nor in the study, nor in any corner of this house where you maypretend you have been all along. Do you mean to tell me where you were?”
Elise’s fingers squeezed the pen. The nib scratched a small blot into the paper and she set it down at once.
“I went to the wharf,” she replied.
Jane’s expression did not soften. “That is not a complete answer.”
Elise drew a breath measured enough to be called calm by anyone who had not lived beside her for years. “Blake was injured.”
The words fell between them like a stone in water. Jane stared at Elise for a moment, as if she had not properly understood. Then her face changed—the colour retreating, her eyes sharpening, and every instinct waking.
“Injured,” she repeated. “How? A fall? An accident? Or?—”
Elise answered her with silence.
Jane’s voice dropped further. “How badly is he hurt?”
“Badly enough,” Elise said, and forced herself to continue before Jane could shape the next question into something Elise could not bear to hear aloud, “that I could not leave him. And badly enough that I fear it was intended.” What an inane way to say he had been attacked and stabbed, she thought in self-condemnation.
Jane’s hand went to the back of a chair, steadying herself. It was a familiar motion, from the days when a letter arrived with an Admiralty seal and Elise read it without trembling, and Jane trembled enough for them both.
“Intended…” Jane said, “meaning someone did it to him on purpose?”
Elise nodded once.
Jane’s lips parted and shut again.
Elise rose and crossed to her, laying a hand upon Jane’s sleeve as if she could lend steadiness by touch.
“Jane,” she said quietly, “listen to me. There may be trouble.”
Jane’s laugh—if it could be called such—was thin. “There has been trouble since the instant Mr. Leigh arrived with his London manners and his soldier’s walk.”
Elise winced, though she would not allow herself to flinch from the truth that name carried now. Mr. Leigh: a presence that was becoming, against every intention of hers, threaded into the fabric of their days—lifting beams, securing roofs, steadying old men, watching her with that quiet, infuriating attention.
“What can you tell of Mr. Leigh?” Jane demanded, not as gossip but as strategy. “Is he—does he know?”
“He knows Blake is injured,” Elise said. “He helped me bring him to safety.”
Jane’s eyes widened. “He brought him here? Elise?—”
“I had no choice,” Elise cut in, more tartly than she intended. She softened at once. “I could not move Blake alone, and Mr. Leigh was there.”
Jane stared at her. “Where?”
Elise did not answer directly, because to do so would invite the next questions, and to answer those would require a confession she had not yet completed herself.
