Chapter Three Evangeline’s Letter #5
Mrs Alderley, who had taken a chair without invitation, lifted her trumpet. “Has he confessed?”
“Not yet,” Marianne said.
She stepped forward before the clerk could retreat entirely into terror.
He was young, perhaps no older than twenty, with ink on his cuff, one patched elbow, and a collar frayed beneath an attempt at starch.
Not a villain, she thought. Not yet. But frightened men became useful to villains every day.
“Mr—?”
“Pryce, miss. Thomas Pryce.”
“Mr Pryce, we do not wish to trouble you beyond necessity. But the file we seek concerns a dead lady whose name may have been used falsely. If the papers were removed, someone must have entered that removal in a daybook.”
His gaze flickered.
There.
Sebastian saw it too, but fortunately did not speak.
Marianne lowered her voice. “You keep one, do you not? For archived boxes? Otherwise Mr Bell would not know what fees to charge.”
The clerk looked at Sebastian, then at her, then at Sebastian again, as though uncertain which danger had the sharper teeth.
“I am not authorised.”
“No,” Marianne said. “I expect you are authorised to dust shelves, sharpen pens, copy receipts, and be blamed when gentlemen ask questions whose answers your employer has sold elsewhere.”
His mouth parted.
Sebastian looked at her with something like surprise.
Marianne continued gently, “Who came before us?”
“I do not—”
“Mr Pryce.”
The clerk looked down at his worn cuff.
“Two days ago,” he whispered. “A gentleman. Or not a gentleman. Dressed like one.”
Sebastian moved. “Name.”
The clerk flinched.
Marianne sent the Duke a look.
He stopped, but not graciously.
“What did he ask?” Marianne said.
“The Rookwood-Ashmont file. Any copies. Any old account books. Anything marked Mordaunt private.”
“Did he find them?”
“No. Mr Bell had taken some away.”
“Some?”
The clerk nodded toward the shelves behind him.
Marianne followed the movement of his eyes.
The shelves were dusty, but not evenly. A gap, about the height and width of a ledger, marked the second row.
Its outline was cleaner than the surrounding wood.
In the grate, beneath grey ash, lay the curled black remains of burned paper.
Beside the inkstand sat a blotter marked by fresh ink.
Someone had searched here recently.
Someone had burned something.
Sebastian saw where she was looking. His face changed.
“The man,” Marianne asked, “what did he look like?”
“I did not see well. Dark coat. Gloves. He wore a pin.”
“A pin?”
“Black. Shaped like a rook, I think. A chess piece. On his waistcoat.”
The room seemed to grow narrower.
Sebastian went absolutely still.
Marianne turned her head slowly toward him. “You recognise it.”
He did not answer at once.
Mrs Alderley leaned forward. “What has he recognised?”
“A rook,” Marianne said.
“Oh. Nasty birds. Clever.”
Sebastian’s voice, when it came, was controlled to the point of strain. “My father belonged, years ago, to a private dining society. Old families. Political men. Financiers who wished to be thought gentlemen. They used chess pieces as tokens for private rooms and wagers.”
“What was it called?” Marianne asked.
He looked at her.
“I knew it only as the Blackwood circle.”
The name moved through the dusty office like a draught from a door opened underground.
Marianne turned back to the clerk. “Did the man say anything else?”
“He said if Mr Bell found the Rookwood papers, he was to send word before Halgrave did. That was all. I swear it.”
Sebastian took one step toward the desk. “Where is Bell now?”
The clerk looked ready to faint. “I do not know, Your Grace. Truly. He comes and goes. He has rooms in Holborn, but he has not slept there this week. I think he is afraid.”
“Of whom?”
Pryce’s eyes went to the grate.
“Of everyone,” he said.
They left with very little in hand: a copied address for Bell’s Holborn rooms, the name of a storage warehouse where some older boxes might have been sent, and the certainty that the Rookwood-Ashmont file had been sought by someone else before them.
Sebastian was silent as they stepped into the street.
Marianne was silent too, but hers was the silence of arrangement. Pieces had begun to move.
Rain had stopped, but the street was slick and busy.
Tom stood near the carriage speaking to the driver.
A dray had halted farther down, blocking part of the lane.
A pair of hackneys waited impatiently behind it.
Men shouted. Hooves struck stone. Somewhere, a vendor cried hot chestnuts in a voice too cheerful for Chancery Lane.
Marianne had one foot on the carriage step when a shout rose behind her.
She turned.
A carriage came too fast around the corner.
For one absurd instant, she noticed not danger but detail: the dark body of it, the splash of mud, the driver’s hat pulled low, the horses’ eyes rolling white as they were urged onward through a space too narrow for speed.
She heard Tom curse. Mrs Alderley said something sharp. Someone shouted, “Stand clear!”
Marianne moved, but the hem of her gown caught beneath her shoe.
Then a hand seized her arm and pulled.
She struck something solid, warm, and unyielding.
Sebastian’s arm came hard around her back as he turned them both away from the wheel.
The carriage thundered past close enough that muddy water struck the side of her gown.
For one suspended breath, Marianne was held against the Duke of Halgrave with no space for distrust between them.
His coat was damp beneath her hand. His heart beat hard and fast against her cheek, though his grip did not tremble.
One of his hands held her shoulder. The other had closed over her wrist, firm but not painful.
The carriage vanished into the noise of the street.
Tom reached them first. “Miss Vale!”
Mrs Alderley had abandoned her deafness entirely. “Scoundrel! I saw that!”
Marianne tried to step back.
Sebastian did not release her at once.
She looked up.
His face was pale beneath its control, and his eyes were fixed not on the carriage’s disappearing path, but on her.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
“No.”
“Are you certain?”
“Yes.”
His hand remained at her wrist. The pressure of his gloved fingers was careful now, as though he had realised too late how fragile bones were beneath skin.
“Your Grace,” she said quietly.
He released her immediately and stepped back.
The loss of warmth should have been a relief.
It was not entirely.
“That was no accident,” he said.
Marianne smoothed her sleeve because her hand needed occupation. “Carriages are often badly driven in London.”
“Not directly at women leaving offices searched by men with black rook pins.”
“Perhaps not.”
“Miss Vale.”
She looked at him then. There was anger in his face, but not the old kind. This anger was bright, frightened, outward-turned. It unsettled her more than his arrogance had done.
“I am unhurt,” she said.
“That was not my only concern.”
The words hung between them for half a second too long.
Then Mrs Alderley said loudly, “If we are quite finished being murdered, I should like to sit down.”
The spell broke.
Sebastian handed her into the carriage with more care than haste. Marianne followed, her legs only slightly less steady than she preferred. As she settled herself opposite him, something brushed against her shoe. She looked down.
A torn scrap of paper lay on the carriage floor near the hem of her gown.
For a moment she thought it had fallen from her own notes, but the paper was coarse, folded once, and marked with mud along one edge.
It must have been knocked in during the chaos, perhaps from the street, perhaps dropped by whoever had arranged the near accident.
Marianne bent and picked it up before Sebastian could object.
There were only three words written upon it.
Blackwood meets Thursday.
She read them once.
Then she handed the scrap across the carriage.
Sebastian took it.
His expression closed, but not before she saw recognition.
Mrs Alderley leaned over. “What does it say?”
Marianne looked out through the rain-specked glass at the narrow street behind them, at the office of Mordaunt and Bell receding as the carriage began to move, at the places where men kept records and other men paid to have them disappear.
“It says,” she answered softly, “that Lady Evangeline’s letter was only the beginning.”
Sebastian’s hand closed around the scrap.
Neither of them spoke again for several streets.
But between them, on the carriage seat, the name Blackwood seemed to sit like a fourth passenger, dark, patient, and very much alive.