Nell acquiesced with a bow that would’ve done any young buck at Almack’s proud. “Allow me to make enquiries.”
“Discreet enquiries,” Shrike added.
“I am capable of subterfuge,” replied Nell. “Though I may not oft choose to employ it.”
And with that, she turned on her heel and strode out of Blackthorn, the briars parting before her as she went and twining together again in her wake.
“Will you return to London?” Shrike asked, jerking Wren’s attention back to him.
The temptation to remain within Blackthorn—with Shrike—proved even stronger now than it ever had before. And yet, “I must.”
~
Returning to the mortal realm felt no less surreal than it had yesterday. Mr Grigsby appeared to notice nothing amiss when he came down to find Wren mechanically slicing open the morning offerings of the penny post. Wren managed to echo his employer’s greeting. Further conversation proved beyond him—not that Mr Grigsby seemed to mind.
“Oh, Lofthouse!” Mr Grigsby piped up mere minutes after Wren handed over the mail. “You may find this an amusing diversion.”
Wren glanced over from his ledger to Mr Grigsby’s desk. Mr Grigsby held one letter in particular before him.
“It seems,” Mr Grigsby continued the moment he had Wren’s attention, “Miss Fairfield is doing charitable works for the Society of Friends of Needful Seamen, and requires our aid. She asks if we have any gentlemen’s clothing—something out of fashion or in need of mending—which we might like to pass along to sailors who find themselves down on their luck. Not that I suggest anything you own is out of fashion or in need of mending, of course! But I myself have some raiments of which I’ve outstripped the seams and the canvas of which would better outfit a young seaman’s rigging than a swollen hulk like myself. Would you be so kind as to fetch them down and bundle them off to Miss Fairfield? They ought to be in my cedar chest, if I recall correctly.”
Far be it from Wren to decline a distraction. He accepted his employer’s charge and retreated upstairs.
Mr Grigsby had allowed Wren into his chambers on scattered occasions throughout their years together in Staple Inn—most notably, during a fortnight some five years back when Mr Grigsby had come down with a devilish cold and required Wren to nurse him through it. Thus the sight of the bed, desk, chest of drawers, and cedar trunk proved more familiar than otherwise to Wren’s eyes.
Yet never before had every nook and cranny of the warm and cheerful chamber appeared a perfect hiding place for his missing manuscripts.
Finding the articles of clothing Mr Grigsby had hinted at took mere moments. Just as he’d said, the cedar chest at the foot of his bed contained trousers which had begun in the fashionably slender cut of some quarter-century past and had their seams let out again and again throughout the intervening years until no fabric remained to contain Mr Grigsby’s growing girth, at which point he’d tucked them away. Three pairs altogether—one brown, one blue, and one black. Good enough yet for a gentleman who’d fit them, and certainly good enough for a sailor, Wren thought as he set them aside, along with several shirts whose buttons could never again hope to close around Mr Grigsby’s considerable middle.
His assigned task complete, Wren set about turning over the rest of the room. Not quite so swift and silent as Shrike, yet quicker and quieter than Mr Grigsby might ever notice, Wren emptied out the entire cedar trunk, as well as the chest of drawers; then stripped the bed-clothes, shook out the pillows, and flipped the mattress; then crawled beneath the bed-frame itself and all over the floorboards besides in search of any particular plank that might resound as hollow as the one under his own garret.
He found nothing but a sense of shame—both for invading Mr Grigsby’s privacy and for ever suspecting him of the theft in the first place.
The shame drove Wren up to his own garret. He had no intention to return to England after Midsummer and thus thought some of his wardrobe might be put to better use in clothing Miss Flora’s indigent sailors. At length he found two waistcoats—one black wool duplicate of the one he wore, the other flannel—which he couldn’t imagine missing over-much.
Yet despite returning downstairs to the office with garments laid over both arms, he felt empty-handed. His stolen manuscripts remained missing.
And his hollow head remained empty of plans to survive the Summer Solstice.
~
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The remainder of the week passed without word from Nell. Wren had high hopes for Friday evening, which he had the liberty to spend in Blackthorn, but while he and Shrike wandered through the briar retrieving conies from snares, they neither saw nor heard any sign of her.
By Saturday morning, Wren felt ready to give the matter up. He had precious little to do in Staple Inn and thus not nearly enough to distract himself from his growing despair as the hours dragged on. Some small relief found him when the mantle-clock struck noon, and after polite refusal of Mr Grigsby’s invitation to tea, he could escape from the dreary grey noise of London to the quiet greenery of the fae realms.
Wren breathed easier as he wandered the woodland and came to the familiar sight of the wall of briars marking the boundary of Blackthorn.
Yet as the brambles withdrew, a few vines remained tangled together in the midst of the path.
And something hung suspended within them.
Wren slowed his step. The thing in the vines appeared about the size of the cats he’d sometimes glimpsed scrambling through the alleys of Staple Inn. But not the same shape. Thinner, and with its lanky body as much twisted around the vines as the vines twisted around it, as if it had writhed itself into a knot. Its already-dark fur matted darker still with a crusting stain that had dripped into a pool beneath it. Wren halted altogether a yard or so away to bend and squint at the thing which looked more and more disturbing the longer he stared. Its maw had frozen in a fanged snarl, and its beady eyes had clouded over in death.
“Weasel.”
Wren bolted upright and staggered back at the voice, though he knew it well.
