“No, I’m just focused on cracking Reggie’s code,” Sinclair half lied as they arrived at the library. He hadn’t been in the two-story room for over a decade. Even when he’d lived in the house, he’d been forbidden from entering it except to deliver coal or to sweep the fireplace. But Reggie had never listened to his father’s rules, and he would often meet Sinclair there in secret.
But Sinclair saw neither his grinning half brother nor the preening earl but an empty space. The ancient glass windows overlooking the sea might have been freshly polished, but the musty smell of old books remained the same. Rose had not gotten around to replacing the furniture, but he noticed that pillows and lace doilies had been strategically placed over old cigar holes and port stains. Yet it still felt like a museum piece—a horrible diorama of a battle Sinclair had never stopped fighting.
“Do you wish to go to my office?” Rose asked, her head cocked as she worriedly watched him.
Sinclair sucked in his breath, forcing his thoughts away from the past. “I assume there is a reason you chose here.”
“There is. The codebook may be hidden somewhere in the library. It certainly would be easy to overlook. There are plenty of dusty old tomes that probably haven’t been touched in a hundred years. I thought you might be able to recognize which volume it might be.”
Sinclair drew his thumb against his puckered scar. “I told you that we didn’t have any code as boys. Reggie spoke of making one, but other adventures always stole his attention away.”
“I believe he created one later when he was on Hamarray before he returned to France. It would make sense that he’d select a book to write it down in that would stand out to you but to no one else,” Rose said quietly. “Unfortunately, before we even get to the code, we need to figure out what your brother used as a cipher.”
Sinclair indicated for Rose to sit. If staying in this bloody room would help them find answers more quickly, he could endure it. Every minute the spies remained free meant more immediate danger to Rose and long-term peril for them all.
“Aren’t a code and a cipher the very same thing?” Sinclair asked.
“That’s what I thought, too, before my research at the Central Library.” Rose chose a settee, and she patted the plush seat next to her. As Sinclair sank down, he was glad she’d chosen a place that forcedthem to press together. Touching her, even innocently like this, helped to drive away the memories.
“Evidently,” Rose continued as she laced her fingers through his, “a cipher is a key of sorts to a pattern involving the switching around of letters or numbers or something of that ilk. A code is a compilation of words that mean something else.”
“It is not completely clear to me, lass, but I think I understand the gist of it,” Sinclair said. “How are we to go about figuring out that key?”
Rose turned in her seat and pulled open a drawer in the end table next to them. She extracted a journal and a fountain pen. Then she reached inside her ever-present reticule and retrieved Reggie’s coded letter.
“One of the easier common ciphers uses a date. Are there any that were important to your brother? We’ll start with his birthday and then yours.”
Sinclair provided the numerals, and Rose slowly applied them to the first few words. Unfortunately, she produced only more nonsense.
“I suppose that would have been too easy,” Sinclair said, trying to ease both of their disappointment. The knowledge of the spy ring had been bearing down on him for days, sometimes pressing down so harshly he swore it was hard to breathe. He could only imagine the urgency that Rose felt. After all, she’d been searching so much longer than him, and she’d been ambushed twice. He could not bring himself to think of what would happen if the villains were successful on their next try. The pain of it was searing.
Rose put her pen and the papers on the end table and then reached for his hand. Her touch was light but steadying. “What was your brother like? I realize that it might be hard to talk about him, but if we focus on who he was, perhaps it will become apparent what he would have chosen as a cipher.”
Sinclair shifted on the soft cushion as he stopped himself from reflexively increasing his grip on Rose’s hand. “Passionate. Dramatic. Iremember Reggie used to stand on the edge of the cliff as a young adolescent and practice the grand speeches that he was going to give when he finally took his seat at the House of Lords. They were all exceedingly progressive—about righting past wrongs, giving more assistance to the poor, improving justice. Of course, he never finished one of them. He’d always get bored somewhere around the middle and announce that we should go fishing or have a footrace.”
Rose shifted as she studied him intently. “You keep mentioning how Lord Barbury never completed what he started. It is very different from the impression I received from him. He seemed so ... so determined, so focused. I talked to him before the ambulance ride in the poste de secours. It was light out, and we were under heavy fire, so we couldn’t leave. He told me he had a mission beyond No Man’s Land but didn’t mention the spies until ... later ...”
Rose trailed off, and Sinclair knew she meant the conversation she’d had with Reggie as he’d breathed his last. Rose and Sinclair were silent now, both united and separated by their pain: she lost in the memories of a dying man she had only just begun to know, and he in those of a living man who had become a stranger in the end.
“Reggie was always looking for something that would make him the hero—an atonement of sorts.”
“An atonement for what?” Rose asked softly. Her eyes sought his undamaged one, but he could not meet her searching gaze.
For never asking how my face came to be bloodied ... not even when the earl blinded me. For staying in his room at night with the gramophone playing so loud it drowned out the sounds of the dogfights and the matches between the servants. For never confronting his father, even when I almost died under his blows for defending my mother.
But those weren’t the truths Sinclair wanted to voice ... perhaps because he was a bit like his older sibling, hiding the pain and the shame he did not wish to accept. The old hurts mixed with the newer,rawer pain of losing Reggie. Sinclair missed every damn bit of his older brother, even the flaws.
“I suppose he was trying to compensate for possessing all the trappings of nobility without really having earned the label of beingnoble,” Sinclair said.
“Like Mar?” Rose asked, once again showing her surprising insight despite not knowing the details of the earl’s horrible reign on the island. “He certainly seems like anoblein name only—a pretty shell of a man with nothing inside.”
Oh, Mar had something inside him all right—a festering, rotten, moldering mess. But Sinclair only said, “Aye. Reggie was afraid of becoming his father.” And his older brother had also felt a need to pay for the man’s sins.
A new bolt of pain sizzled through Sinclair as he realized that both Reggie and he had suffered from Mar’s depravity while Mar himself lived in impunity. Receiving the earl’s affection had not saved Reggie from the same fate as Sinclair. The earl had irrevocably damaged both of them—leaving them feeling ... broken, unsuitable for any place in society.
“My word, the viscount was just likeme. He was just as empty and lost.” Rose’s self-reproach sliced through Sinclair’s own horror.
He turned toward her, rubbing his hands across his face, as if he could scrub away the haze in his soul. How could Rose—bright, wonderful, caring Rose—regardherselfas hollow?
