Graham’s gaze stayed on the catalogue, on the way her father had disguised blood and betrayal as bibliographic order.
Eleanor drew a line from Mayfair to three alternate streets, then marked a fourth.
“If we split,” she said, tapping the first point, “we reconvene here. If that fails, we make for Covent Garden.”
Graham’s mouth tightened. “The print shop.”
“Yes,” Eleanor said. “It smells like ink and industry. Nobody looks twice at people coming and going.”
“And if that fails?”
Eleanor didn’t blink. “Then we improvise fast.”
A short, dry sound left Graham—almost a laugh, more like a man acknowledging a fact he disliked.
“I see you have not lost your optimism,” he murmured.
“I never had any,” she replied, flipping a page in her ledger. “But I do have signals. Handkerchiefs, not flowers. Red means abort. White means proceed. Blue means in danger.”
His brow rose. “You think the conduit will be watching for a handkerchief?”
“I think they will be watching for you,” Eleanor said, meeting his eyes. “No one expects the messenger to be the trap.”
His expression darkened. “You wish to use yourself as bait.”
She shrugged, the movement more fatigue than bravado. “Better me than someone who cannot read what your enemies are reading.”
Graham looked away, jaw set. For a moment he said nothing.
Eleanor watched him, noting the small betrayals of his control. The flex of his left hand, the rhythm of his foot against the floorboards. Calculating. Revising. Perhaps grieving.
She rose, crossed to the sideboard, and poured a small glass of brandy. Then another. She set his beside the catalogue. “You could say something,” she offered.
He didn’t reach for the glass. “I do not like the plan.”
Eleanor’s smile was slight and sharp. “That is because it is likely to work.”
His gaze lifted, and she was startled by the depth of it. Anger, certainly, but also a bitter, reluctant admiration.
He took the glass, drained it, and set it down with a click.
“On the fifteenth, then,” he said.
Eleanor tipped her own glass, letting the candlelight catch the amber. “Indeed.”
* * *
The next day the mews house felt under siege by dread.
Graham paced until he wore a groove into the carpet, passing too close to Eleanor’s chair by the window as if he could not help orbiting her. Eleanor remained still, eyes on the street beyond the glass, though she saw none of it. What she heard was the tick of the clock and the quieter, more dangerous silence between their words.
“We do not need both of us in the open,” Graham said, for the third time. “You can run observation from here. If the conduit is a relay, the message can be intercepted at either end.”
Eleanor’s gaze did not shift. “If you walk in alone, you are already halfway to being one of the names you refuse to speak aloud.”
Graham stopped at the hearth, fingers gripping the mantel until his knuckles turned white.
“You are not trained for field work,” he said. “If something goes wrong?—”
