Edmund felt his mouth twitch faintly before he curbed the flash of amusement. “That is merely the sort of face some men are born with.”
He pressed a coin into the boy’s hand. “Go, and say nothing.”
The boy stared at the coin, then nodded quickly and vanished into the dark.
Edmund remained still for a moment, listening carefully, before going to his comrades. He turned and set his pace toward the headland, avoiding the more obvious lane. He kept to the shadows in the line of the hedge. When he approached the rise above the town, a figure stepped from shadow and barred his way.
“Who goes there?” came Baines’s low growl.
Edmund halted. “If you shoot me, Baines, I shall haunt you out of sheer spite.”
A low chuckle answered him. The larger shadow stepped forward; moonlight caught the breadth of Major Baines’s shoulders and the faint gleam of his grin. Baines jerked his chin toward the headland. “Renforth is waiting.”
Edmund followed, stepping through a gap in the hedge and onto the rough track beyond. The land rose toward Belair House, and the wind, off the sea, carried the smell of salt and wet earth.
In the shelter of a low fold in the ground, Renforth stood with his cloak pulled close and his hat brim shading his eyes. Even in darkness the Colonel had the air of command; it was not arrogance but a steadiness that made other men unconsciously align themselves around him, as if he were the fixed point on a map.
Manners and Fielding were not beside him; Edmund could sense their absence as keenly as he would have noticed missing men on a line. Stuart, too, was somewhere else in the dark, doing what needed doing without flourish.
Renforth stepped forward and spoke when Edmund approached, his voice pitched low. “You have made contact with Holt?”
“Sir,” Edmund said. The words came out clipped; not impatience, exactly, but the pressure of too much at stake. “I have just left him a note to meet with Mrs. Larkin on the morrow.”
Baines gave a satisfied sound under his breath, as if imagining Holt already in irons.
Renforth’s gaze held Edmund’s. “Any difficulty?”
“None,” Edmund said. “Mr. Grey is cautious, but he understands enough to be discreet.”
Renforth nodded once. “Good.”
As if summoned by the mention of discretion, Fielding appeared from the darker edge of the hedge, moving as quietly as a man half his bulk. He had always been the quickest of them, quick in wit and quicker in judgement; marriage had altered his priorities but not his sharpness.
“Chum,” Fielding murmured, and his mouth twitched. “Running messages in the middle of the night? I begin to think you are a romantic.”
“God forbid,” Edmund returned. “It is not even ten of the clock.”
Fielding’s humour did not extend to laughter; it was merely the small, saving lift of expression that kept a man from being too grim.
A figure shifted near the hedge; Manners straightened from where he had been crouched, peering through a gap toward the black outline of Belair House. Even here he managed to look as if he had dressed himself for a drawing-room, though the hem of his cloak had mud on it and his boots were plainly not meant for such work.
Manners’s gaze flicked toward the school’s dark silhouette on the cliff. “The widow is inside?”
“Yes,” Edmund replied. “With Cook and a servant girl. Blake, the injured man, is hidden.”
At the name, Renforth’s eyes narrowed in a manner so slight that an ordinary man would have missed it. Edmund had served him for too long not to see every change.
“Blake,” Renforth repeated. It was not a question; it was a note pinned in the mind.
“I sent an enquiry,” Edmund said. “I am awaiting your answer.”
“You shall have it,” Renforth said quietly. “In the meantime—” His gaze did not soften. “Tell us where the tunnel is.”
“I have not seen inside beyond the opening, but there were fresh prints on the other side of the door. I did not think it wise to explore with Mrs. Larkin,”
“Tunnels are myespeciality.” Baines’ Spanish accent was light, but his eyes were not.
Fielding added in a dry tone, “You are welcome to it.”
