“That is a better option. It buys us more time until reinforcements arrive. I should prefer to keep them from coming back here.”
She pressed her palm to her forehead. “If we send a message now,” she said slowly, “we must ensure it reaches them.”
“The tavern,” Mr. Leigh said at once, “or possibly a boy on the docks might know where to take it.”
Elise narrowed her eyes again. “If it goes through the tavern, I must go there.”
His gaze flicked to hers. “No.”
She lifted her chin in further remonstrance. “Once again, I shall not permit you to forbid me.”
“This is not the same,” he said, his voice straining. “They have already marked you. They have threatened to burn your house. If you go to the tavern now, you will go as bait with no defence.”
“You will defend me.”
He held her gaze with fierce intensity.
She swallowed nervously.
Mr. Leigh exhaled slowly. “We must control the meeting. We choose the place. We choose the time. We choose what they believe they will receive.”
Elise’s mind raced, swift and sharp. “I will tell them I do not have it, but might be able to retrieve it tomorrow from somewhere else.”
He nodded. “They will be watching for you.” Then he looked directly at her, and something in his expression turned darker. “They will be watching the house.”
Elise swung her gaze to the windows, to the curtains and into the night beyond. “Then I cannot leave openly.”
“No.”
She felt the walls close in. “Then how?—”
Mr. Leigh stepped nearer, lowering his voice. “The tunnel.”
Her breath caught. The tunnel she had wanted to explore—the tunnel he had forbade her to approach—now he offered it as a route.
“You said?—”
“I said you could not go into it blindly,” he replied. “I did not say we could not use it carefully.”
She stared at him. The plan was forming like a shape in fog.
“You mean,” she whispered, “we leave through the tunnel, appear elsewhere?—”
“And meet them where we choose,” he finished.
Elise’s pulse hammered. It was reckless. It was brilliant. It was—terrifying.
“If we do it, however, we do it with a plan. We do it with an escape in place.”
Elise’s hands trembled again, but this time it was not shock, it was excitement. It was the terrible promise of action.
“We will use myself,” she said, and heard how calm her voice sounded, as if it belonged to another woman.
Mr. Leigh went very still. “No.”
She stared at him, the plan taking shape with startling clarity. “We leave unseen. I go to the tavern briefly. I leave the message, which will send Holt away from Belair House.”
“To the old hut,” Mr. Leigh said. “Tomorrow, at daybreak. Where we choose.”
