Edmund, without thinking, touched her arm—lightly, just above the elbow; a gesture meant to steady and to guide.
The contact was so slight it should have meant nothing. He felt, with a shock of unwelcome clarity, the warmth of her through cloth and the tension under his fingers—muscle held still by sheer will. He felt the way she stilled at his touch, not because she feared him, but because she felt it too. Elise looked up at him—a quick, shocked glance. For a heartbeat, her eyes softened, as if the mask had slipped—as if she might have allowed herself to lean into the assurance of another human being. Then she stepped away, and the moment vanished like breath on glass.
Edmund let his hand drop at once and inwardly cursed himself. It was unprofessional. It was foolish and it was dangerous. He had not come to Plymouth to be undone by a woman’s steadiness and a brief touch in a corridor.
Yet the sensation lingered, like the memory of a brand on skin. It was not lust, precisely—he would not cheapen it by calling it that—but awareness… the acute, distressing knowledge that Elise Larkin was real to him now, not merely a name on paper.
Things that were real were harder to sacrifice.
He forced his mind back to practical considerations. Holt was here and the tunnel was known. Blake was wounded, and the cipher was alive and being hunted. Elise—whether accomplice, guardian, or prey—stood at the centre of it.
If Edmund Cholmely could keep his wits, he might yet save the Crown’s secrets and keep his own conscience intact. If he could not… he glanced toward the kitchen door through which Elise’s footsteps had just faded and felt the ache of concern settle again, heavy and unwelcome.
If he could not achieve those objects, then Holt would not be the only danger in Plymouth.
CHAPTER 16
Elise and her new ally went first to the hidden room—not because either of them believed Blake would wake conveniently to answer questions, but because anxiety had a way of insisting upon proof. One needed to see that the injured man still breathed, that the door still held, that the world had not shifted further into calamity during one’s absence.
Mr. Leigh carried the lantern, though Elise noticed that he did not walk as if he feared shadows. He walked as if he expected them to move at his command. There was a steadiness in him, not loud, not showy, but absolute—the sort of constancy that had once belonged to Charles when he stood at a chart-table with men looking to him for direction.
It was a comparison she did not permit herself often. It felt disloyal, as if the mind might wander from remembrance into—something else. Yet she could not deny the pull she felt towards this man. Was it because of his similarity to Charles? She dismissed the thought at once.
Blake lay upon the cot exactly as Elise had left him, the blanket drawn to his chin and his face slackened by laudanum into a peace that was not wholly natural. His brow was less pinched than it had been. The bruising on his throat and jawremained angry, but the worst of the shaking had ceased. His breathing was deep and even, the sound of it a dull reassurance.
Cook, however, did not regard reassurance as sufficient excuse for lingering.
“There,” she snapped in a loud whisper the moment Elise and Mr. Leigh entered. “He’s asleep, and he will stay asleep if you both stop hovering like hungry pigeons.”
Elise’s lips twitched despite herself. “I wished only?—”
“You wished to worry,” Cook cut in, as if it were as much a vice as brandy. “Well, put it aside for now. Sophie and I are here. We will keep watch, and if he so much as twitches, you will be the first to hear of it.”
Sophie stood by the doorway with a candle and a face set in a determination Elise would not have expected from her. It did something strange to Elise’s chest to see it: loyalty made visible in a girl who had never before known danger in any form but burnt pastry and Cook’s wrath.
Cook folded her arms. “And since I ’ave no one to cook for, as the girls are gone and the house is all quiet and empty, I ’ave left stew on the stove. Fresh bread too. You two need feeding, unless you mean to fight off smugglers on empty stomachs.”
Mr. Leigh inclined his head with a gravity that might have been comic, had it not been so sincere. “You have my thanks.”
Cook sniffed. “You can thank me by eating. Now, be off with you.”
Elise allowed herself one last look at Blake—at the rise and fall of his chest, at the steady line of his mouth—and then followed Mr. Leigh from the room, climbing back towards the kitchen with the sensation that the house itself had become a ship, every corridor a narrow deck, every sound a creak of timber under stress.
In the kitchen, the heat was immediate and homely, almost indecent in its comfort. The smell of the stew and its onions,beef and herbs, made Elise’s stomach clench with sudden, unwelcome hunger. She had eaten little all day, being driven by duty and fear and the incessant tasks of keeping a school functioning whilst its foundations were being threatened.
Mr. Leigh set the lantern down on Cook’s work table, and for a moment they stood facing one another across the scarred wood.
The table had witnessed a thousand ordinary days: dough kneaded under laughter, girls called in to taste a spoonful and then scolded for daring. It had never been intended as a council table for peril. Yet there they were—two conspirators, neither wishing to call themselves such, yet both forced into it.
Elise drew her cloak closer about her, though the kitchen was warm. It was not cold that troubled her; it was the strange exposure of being alone with him in a room that in this house belonged to women’s work and women’s privacy. The house was empty of girls’ chatter. The school, usually so full, felt suddenly too quiet, and in that quiet every awareness awakened.
Mr. Leigh moved first, not speaking, simply ladling stew into two bowls with the competence of a man who had learned to make do with whatever pot was available. It should not have been remarkable. Yet Elise found herself watching his hands: steady, efficient, and accustomed to practical tasks. Those hands had lifted the Admiral and Blake, hauled branches, cleared debris, and now served stew as if it were all of a piece—one more necessary task.
He placed a bowl before her with quiet courtesy, and set bread beside it.
“Eat,” he said, as Cook might have done, only with less tyranny.
Elise obeyed because she had no energy for pride. She sat on the bench by the table, drew the bowl closer and tasted the stew.It was very good. Of course it was, she reflected. Cook would have considered failure a moral offence.
