She reached for the catalogue and turned it toward him, aligning its ragged edge neatly with the desk as though the tear itself could be made orderly. “Then let us begin with what is plain.” She tapped her finger on the third entry.
C1 | Pope | “An Essay on Criticism” | 18-14 | Restricted
“This,” Eleanor said, “is written as a pair. Hour and day. Eighteen, fourteen. Six o’clock on the fourteenth.”
His eyes narrowed.
“And the letter,” she continued, “is not a shelf. It is a district. My father used letters for locations in his own shorthand. C for the City.”
Rathbourne went very still.
Eleanor felt a small, sharp satisfaction and, immediately after, the uneasy pinch of fear that satisfaction had a cost. She swallowed, then continued, “Something will happen in the City on the fourteenth at six. And the note…Restricted…means the matter is sensitive. Or the person is.”
His voice came low, “You should have been born a decade later.”
“So I have been told,” Eleanor said. “Usually by men who prefer women to be less troublesome.”
His gaze held hers. “I could have used a mind like yours.”
The words were simple.
They were also the first unvarnished compliment Eleanor had ever received from a man who did not immediately attempt to turn it into a leash, and they landed like a hand at her waist—unwanted in its intimacy, impossible to ignore. Her pulse betrayed her. Eleanor disguised it by drawing the paper closer. “Then do not waste it,” she said.
He exhaled, controlled. “The man who broke into your house last night was seeking the catalogue. It is unlikely that the piece he tore off will satisfy him. These men are not bound by law. If you can read that page, you are a target.”
Eleanor’s fingers tightened. “So you intend to use me as bait.”
“As I said last night, I intend to keep you alive. And to keep the people on that list alive. Those goals align more often than you imagine.”
“And if I refuse?”
“More men will come,” he said. “Some less polite, and you will pay the tole.”
Eleanor thought of her mother among the camellias, clinging to the fiction of control. She lifted her chin. “If I do as you ask, I want full access to anything pertaining to my father. No half-truths. No more orders delivered as though I am twelve.”
Rathbourne hesitated, his gaze locked with hers. Then, slowly, he reached into his coat and produced a packet tied with string—letters in her father’s hand, annotated in the margins, cross-referenced with the same neat economy as the catalogue.
He placed them on the desk between them. “Within reason,” he said.
Eleanor’s brow arched.
His mouth tightened again with that hint of reluctant amusement. “You will find my definition of reason more stringent than yours.”
“We shall test it,” Eleanor said.
Rathbourne’s gaze dropped to the torn page once more, then returned to her. “I will call on you tomorrow,” he said.
“Why?”
“To discover what you have decoded,” he said.
Eleanor’s pulse quickened, but she kept her voice level. “And if I am wrong?”
“Then we will still have learned something,” he said. “About your father. About the men hunting his work.” His eyes held hers, and his voice dropped by a fraction. “About you.”
He stood.
Eleanor remained seated, though every instinct urged her to stand, because standing would have admitted how much she wanted to follow him—if only to force more truth from his tight mouth, if only to prove she was not the sort of woman left behind in a room with unanswered questions.
