“You need to trust me or I cannot protect you,” he said quietly.
Elise laughed once, a short, brittle sound. “You say that as if you care.”
His eyes met hers. “I say it as a man who has seen what happens when threats are permitted a second attempt.”
Elise turned away, her breath shaking. The room felt too small, the walls too close. “At least no one was hurt,” she said, forcing steadiness. “The girls—thank God—the girls were gone.” Thank God Jane had heeded her request.
“They knew the house was empty.” His grave words rang with truth, the fact of which meant someone was nearby, watching. She shivered.
“Where is it, Elise?” Mr. Leigh asked suddenly.
The use of her name—her given name—struck like a hand on a bruise. It was not intimacy; it was urgency. It unsettled her all the same.
She shook her head, because if she tried to speak the truth aloud in this room, she feared the walls would hear it.
“They will not stop until they find it,” he warned.
There was a choice to be made, and really there was no choice. Fighting Holt and his men might have been possible if Blake had not been incapacitated. Her only chance was Mr. Leigh.
It was infuriating. It was also—if she allowed herself to name it—something like relief.
CHAPTER 15
Edmund had seen rooms ransacked in Spain. He had seen French farmhouses searched with bayonets and boot-heels. He had watched men with authority take liberties because they wore the livery of power and believed it excused them. Yet he had not expected to feel, in the midst of a modest girls’ school on a Devon headland, the same old, fierce anger rise again—as hot and swift as a match put to tinder.
He stood at the threshold of Mrs. Larkin’s chamber and took in the disarray with the sort of stillness that men mistook for calm. It was not calm. It was control. Control was the only thing that kept him from crossing the room and swearing a promise to God that Holt would not leave Plymouth unscathed.
Elise was bending over her desk, gathering papers with hands that tried very hard not to tremble. She did not cry. She did not even permit herself the indulgence of outrage in words. She merely moved in small, exact motions that imposed order upon chaos.
Edmund had meant to speak gently. He had meant to begin with caution and courtesy, yet the sight of her invaded room made him too blunt for tact.
“Did they take anything?” he asked.
She did not look at him. “No.”
He stepped no further in, though every instinct urged him forward. If he entered fully, it would feel like another trespass, and he had no wish to be counted among the men who presumed upon her privacy.
“Did they find what they were looking for?”
At that, she stilled. Her fingers gripped the edge of a ledger.
“I do not know what you believe they were looking for,” she said.
“You do,” Edmund replied quietly.
It was a risk—pressing her, trapping her. Renforth’s instructions had not included coaxing truth from the widow. They had been simpler, colder. However, the world had grown untidy. Holt had grown bold enough to bring violence to her threshold. Blake lay broken in a hidden room. The cipher had stirred from its grave.
She set the ledger down with exaggerated care. “They did not find what they wanted, because it is not here,” she said at last, so softly it barely reached him.
A cold satisfaction—brief and grim—passed through him. Then it was swallowed at once by the darker thought that followed it. “Then they will return.”
Her chin lifted. “I would presume so, yes.”
There were women who used agreement as a weapon—to cut short an argument, to deny a man the satisfaction of persuasion. Elise’s agreement was not that. It was the voice of someone who had stared at danger long enough to learn its habits.
“They are not to be toyed with,” Edmund said, and heard the edge in his own tone. “They have already shown they are willing to kill for what they want.”
“I am aware of that,” she returned, as calm as a winter sea, and just as treacherous beneath. Her eyes—storm-grey, steady, infuriatingly clear of guile—held him with a directness thatwould have unsettled a man of weaker conscience. “What is it you want from me, Mr. Leigh?”
