Chapter Nineteen
Monday morning broke under grey skies, the morning light pressing coolly against the curtains as Mary-Ann awoke uneasy and unrested.
The Seaton house was still. Mary-Ann paused at her door, listening for the creak of floorboards or the distant echo of servants’ steps.
Nothing. Silence wrapped around her like a shawl she’d worn too many nights, waiting for the world to make sense again.
She crossed to the desk beneath her bedroom window, her bare feet whispering against the rug.
The latch on the wainscoting gave a familiar click, and she reached into the narrow cavity behind it.
Her fingers brushed cloth and paper. The booklet was just where she’d left it.
She carried it to the desk and lit a small lamp, shielding the flame with her hand until it caught.
Shadows stretched long across the floor, pooling near the corners of the room.
She opened the booklet slowly, reverently, as if it were something sacred or cursed.
The pages gave a dry rustle, the ink still sharp where it hadn’t faded.
Her fingertips traced the familiar marks, Hamish’s handwriting, she still believed, or perhaps someone just as practiced. Triangles, dots, slashes. She remembered seeing those in the margins weeks ago and thinking they were some kind of shorthand. But now her gaze moved with purpose.
She turned page after page until she found it, the raven, wings outstretched over a diamond, inked in fine black lines. It was smaller here than on the manifest Barrington had shown her and almost hidden among the other markings. But it was unmistakable.
She turned another page. There it was again.
And again. Not next to every entry, but beside certain names and certain routes.
Some repeated. Some she recognized from her father’s logs.
One she remembered because she’d questioned the cargo manifest at the time, a crate marked textiles that had felt too heavy when it was lifted.
Her stomach dropped, a slow unraveling of certainty replaced by something colder.
She pressed her palm to the page as if touch could make sense of it.
The symbol wasn’t just a mark. It was a warning.
Or a signature. And it was threaded through these pages like a warning no one was meant to follow.
What had felt like patterns now looked like purpose.
Deliberate. Repeated. Dangerous. Her breath quickened as she leaned closer, heart knocking against her ribs.
What if someone knew she was reading this?
What if they’d left the booklet to be found? Or worse, to trap whoever did?
This wasn’t just a ledger. It was a trail.
She worked in silence, marking the entries with a strip of ribbon as she searched for patterns. The ships weren’t all the same, but the destinations were close. Northbound. Rural. One bound for Berwick. Another for a place she’d only seen in letters.
A knock sounded faintly downstairs. She stilled. But after a moment, the silence returned. Only the wind scratched softly at the windowpanes.
She exhaled and leaned back, staring at the booklet.
If this symbol meant what she feared, then Barrington’s answer wasn’t just inadequate. It was wrong. Or worse. It was deliberate.
And if it was deliberate, then someone had decided she didn’t need the truth.
She thought, briefly, of Quinton’s voice beside her, the way he used to read figures aloud in a murmur only she could hear. She missed the ease between them. Not just the warmth, but the precision. The way they fit. It wasn’t just her heart she trusted him with. It was her mind.
She copied the entries down, exact and careful, onto a fresh sheet of paper, tucking the page into her bodice.
She thought, briefly, of taking it straight to Quinton.
He would know what to do. He would look at her not as someone fragile or foolish but as a partner.
But then she thought of his eyes, shadowed at the edges even when he smiled.
In the quiet way he carried his pain, tucked beneath steady words and silence.
He had survived something terrible, and she had already lost him once.
If there was danger ahead, she could not bear to be the one who led it to his door.
Not yet. Not until she was certain it mattered. Not until she knew he was ready.
Before she put the booklet away, she opened the drawer beneath her desk and drew out her private ledger, the one where she’d recorded the weight discrepancies.
Leafing through it to the marked pages, she glanced over her notes, one column at a time.
Her breath caught. Three of the ships with the raven symbol matched entries she’d flagged weeks ago.
The weight differences had seemed small at the time, barely enough to raise concern.
But now they weren’t anomalies. They were signs.
Whoever had kept the booklet had noticed the same things she had and marked them for a reason.
When she was finished, she closed the booklet and returned it to the hidden space behind the wainscoting, checking the latch twice.
Only then did she sit back, hands folded over the fabric covering her ribs, and whisper to herself, “You trusted me to find the truth. I hope you still will when I bring it to you.”
*
Elsewhere in Sommer Chase, Kenworth lingered just outside the study door, holding a silver tray in his hand and wearing a perfectly unimpressed expression on his face. The tray held a single letter, sealed in cream wax, and a small wedge of lemon cake, uneaten, but not unappreciated.
He cleared his throat once. Loudly. Then twice, in case the first had been missed. When no one answered, he shifted the tray to one hand and tapped lightly at the doorframe. “I realize I’m not the foreign secretary,” he murmured, “but I do outrank urgency in matters of refreshment.”
The door opened a crack. Barrington’s voice came, low and taut. “Kenworth, not now.”
“You say that every time,” Kenworth replied, stepping in without waiting. “But I recall a certain bullet wound in Salamanca, and I don’t remember you turning down lemon cake then.”
Barrington sighed, shoulders relaxing ever so slightly. He didn’t look up. “That was different.”
“You were bleeding then,” Kenworth said mildly. “Now you’re just brooding.”
He placed the tray gently on the side table. “Don’t let the boy storm out without a biscuit. It’s hard to fight empires on an empty stomach.”
Barrington didn’t answer, but the tension in the room eased by a thread. Kenworth turned to go, his footsteps soft. “Back in a quarter hour. Try not to start a war before the tea.”
*
Quinton didn’t knock. He let himself into Barrington’s study and closed the door behind him with deliberate finality.
Barrington looked up from the map spread across his desk, one brow arching. “You’re late.”
He stopped just short of the desk, eyes steady but too still. “You lied.”
The words came softly, but they carried finality, like something dropped from a great height.
The air in the room contracted. Barrington’s brows lifted higher. “Is that how we’re going to begin?”
Quinton stepped forward, his jaw tight. He hadn’t come to argue, not truly, but the moment the words left Barrington’s mouth, something in him snapped taut, like a canvas yanked by a storm wind. “You told her it was a customs seal.”
Barrington straightened slightly in his chair, a flicker of caution passing behind his eyes. “I didn’t lie. I simplified.”
“You downplayed the mark of the Order of Shadows.”
He’d seen that symbol once before, etched into a crate in a shadowed storeroom back when the world still thought him missing. At the time, he hadn’t known its meaning. Now he did.
Barrington’s expression faltered. A shudder of tension passed through his shoulders before he masked it. “She doesn’t know what the Order is.”
“She will. And she’ll know you didn’t trust her with the truth.”
“I trusted her with what she needed to hear,” Barrington said, pushing back from the desk with the practiced calm of a man used to control. “You saw her face, Quinton. She’s brave, but she isn’t invulnerable.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Quinton’s voice dropped, low and sharp.
He took another step forward, hands fisted at his sides.
He’d seen the tension in Mary-Ann’s hands when she thought no one was looking.
The way she stood straighter when someone questioned her work, as though her spine alone could hold back a rising tide.
She was brave. But brave didn’t mean unbreakable.
“You think I haven’t watched what all of this has already cost her? ”
Barrington leaned back slowly, one hand curling around the arm of his chair. “She’s only just stepping into this. If we overwhelm her—”
“She’s already in it,” Quinton cut in. “And she deserves to know what she’s walking toward, not what we’ve decided she can handle.”
The silence that followed stretched tight. Barrington’s gaze dropped for a moment, then lifted. It was steady, heavy with calculation.
He still didn’t know who had ordered his silence. But this… this narrowed the list.
“If she puts that symbol to paper,” he said quietly, “if she speaks it aloud in the wrong company, she won’t just be a daughter or a bookkeeper. She’ll be a target.”
Quinton didn’t answer. The words rose. How much longer do we keep her in the dark? But the words caught in his throat before he could speak. His loyalty to Barrington warred with something deeper, older, and more visceral.
He had seen what shadows could do to a man. He would not let them close around her.
Barrington met his gaze evenly. “I want her protected. That hasn’t changed.” He hesitated, his voice dropping, “And until we know more, you will not speak to her of the Order. That’s not a suggestion.”
Quinton’s jaw flexed. He didn’t agree, but he nodded once, sharply.
It was the closest thing to rebellion Barrington would tolerate and the closest thing to obedience Quinton would allow himself.
Quinton’s fists slowly unclenched. “Then let me do it properly.”
Barrington stood. Walked to a drawer and pulled out the copied manifest Mary-Ann had seen, and held it out. “Then start here.”
Quinton took it and studied the familiar notations. If this was the trail Mary-Ann had followed, he needed to know exactly where it led and who had walked it before her. He folded the page and tucked it into his coat. He didn’t speak the vow aloud. He didn’t have to.
He thought briefly of the wind on the cliffs, the feel of her hand in his, and the way her breath had caught just before she kissed him. That moment lived beneath everything now quiet but constant, like the tide.
A soft knock echoed faintly down the corridor. Then Kenworth’s voice: “And do try not to dismantle the government without your waistcoat, my lord.”
Barrington returned to his desk without a word.
The room became silent once again, but it wasn’t peaceful.
Quinton paused just outside the door, his hand brushing the inner pocket where the manifest now rested.
He should’ve felt more prepared. Instead, he felt the pressure of everything he hadn’t said to her, and everything she had already risked without knowing what lay ahead.
Down the corridor, the scent of bergamot and old paper hung in the air.
The house had always been quiet, but this silence carried something heavier.
Expectation. Fear. Hope. He thought of Mary-Ann, hunched over a ledger by candlelight, refusing to overlook a single figure.
She didn’t even know she was brave. She simply was.
He’d lost her once and nearly lost himself in the process. He would not lose her again, not to the Order, not to secrecy, and not to silence.
If she was already in the current, then he’d be the one to face the undertow.