She broke off as the study door opened and a small figure appeared in the doorway, hesitating on the threshold.
“Mrs. Larkin?”
The voice belonged to Alice Grenfell, twelve years old, narrow-shouldered and earnest, with a plait too tight for comfort and a smudge of ink upon her chin. Elise put her pen aside at once.
“Yes, Alice? Come in, child. What is it?”
Alice stepped forward and clasped her hands together as if they were the only thing keeping her from flying apart. “It isonly—if you please—the French exercise is due today, but I—I have mislaid my grammar. I think I left it in the chapel when we practised hymns, but I cannot be certain, and Lucy Sims says perhaps the stranger took it, and?—”
“The stranger?” Elise repeated, fighting a smile. “Does Miss Sims suppose that any gentleman who comes to Belair must at once acquire a schoolgirl’s French grammar?”
Alice coloured. “She only said that gentlemen take things that are not theirs. Miss Sims says a gentleman once stole a lady’s heart, and a heart is much more important than a French grammar, so perhaps?—”
“I think,” Elise interrupted gently, “that we shall not consult Miss Sims’s philosophy on this matter.” She rose from the table. “Come, Alice. We will look in the chapel together. If your grammar is not there, it will be somewhere else, and I promise you the stranger shall not have it. I daresay his own French is quite bad enough without adding to it.”
Jane sprang up as well, setting her basket aside. “I will see to the linen while you are gone,” she said, “and speak to Cook about the soup.”
“You are goodness itself,” Elise said over her shoulder.
“We cannot both be goodness itself, or the universe will collapse,” Jane called after her. “You must allow me my share.”
The chapel, such as it was, formed a small wing at the back of the house. It was panelled in plain wood and warmed by a modest stove. The sea’s voice could be heard there more distinctly, as if the stone walls conducted its murmur. Sometimes, when she knelt at the narrow rail, Elise fancied she could still hear echoes of a very different congregation—men in uniforms, admirals and captains, gathered in the dining room across the passage whilst Lord Keith weighed Bonaparte’s fate.
That felt like a lifetime ago, but the house remembered.
She found the missing grammar on the third pew, exactly where Alice had left it.
“You see,” she said, placing it into Alice’s eager hands, “no marauding gentleman has seized it. You may tell Lucy Sims that in this house I shall permit nothing of the sort.”
Alice gave a small giggle, then sobered. “Yes, Mrs. Larkin. Thank you, Mrs. Larkin.” She hesitated. “Mrs. Larkin… it is true there is a stranger?”
“I am afraid so,” Elise said gravely. “He has been sighted at The George, eating Mrs. Grey’s pies. I expect he is in more danger from those than from any other hazard in all of Plymouth.”
Alice laughed outright at that and, reassured, darted away with her precious grammar clutched to her chest.
Alone for a moment, Elise turned to the narrow window. From here she could see a slant of grey sky and, between the chapel and the garden wall, a glimpse of the cliff path. Motion on that path caught her eye—a dark figure moving at an easy, deliberate pace.
He wore a plain dark coat and carried a notebook in his hand. His hat was pushed back a little, and the wind ruffled hair that might, in kinder circumstances, have been called chestnut. Yet it was not these particulars that struck her. It was the way he moved—not with the languid saunter of a fashionable gentleman, nor the shuffling gait of a country tradesman, but with the measured stride of a man who walked with purpose. A soldier’s walk, for all his current occupation as a writer.
He paused at the bend in the path and looked up. For one instant, she fancied their eyes met. The distance was considerable; it was more likely fancy than fact. Yet she felt something—an odd, disconcerting jolt, as if the world had shifted slightly on its axis.
The stranger lifted his gaze to the house, surveyed its lines with that same intent scrutiny, then turned away and continued down towards the harbour.
Elise released the breath she had not known she held.
“A writer,” she murmured, “or something that wears the shape of one.”
“You have seen him,” Jane declared later that morning, when Elise returned to the parlour. She had abandoned the stockings for the household ledger and was frowning over a list of candles. “You have that look.”
“What look?” Elise asked, taking up another column of figures.
“The look you had the day the Admiralty wrote to say Captain Larkin’s effects would be sent on,” Jane said quietly. “As if something or someone had opened a door in your mind you had no desire to see unlatched.”
Elise’s hand stilled on the paper. “You talk too much like a poet for a housekeeper,” she said, but there was no heat in it. “And you should not speak of that day as if it were a matter of ordinary remark.”
Jane’s expression softened. “Forgive me. You know I would not hurt you. But you have seen him.”
“Yes,” Elise admitted. “From the chapel window. He walks like a man who has worn a uniform.”
