Chapter Seven The Woman at the Blue Hart #6
It would have been easy, safer, to say something cutting. To remind him that dukes could afford philosophy, while women like Marianne required positions. To put distance where he had created dangerous closeness.
She did not.
Instead she said, “What do you want?”
He looked almost startled.
Then the answer came, low and rougher than usual. “To know whether my sister died believing I had chosen silence over her.”
Marianne had no defence against that.
“I hope,” she said softly, “we find that she knew you tried.”
“And if we do not?”
“Then we find what truth remains and make it speak for her.”
He looked at her across the small table, and in his eyes was something neither of them named because naming it would make return impossible.
A sound in the passage broke it: a footstep, then another, hurried and quickly checked.
Sebastian rose at once.
Marianne bent and touched the sewing basket beneath her chair.
Still there.
The sound faded.
“Servant,” he said after a moment, though he did not sit until another minute had passed.
They retired not long after. Mrs Alderley was woken, denied a demand for pudding, and escorted upstairs.
The basket, after much discussion, was placed in Marianne’s chamber beneath the bed, then moved because that was too obvious, then finally hidden inside a travelling trunk containing Mrs Alderley’s spare shawls and an alarming number of handkerchiefs.
Tom saw the trunk locked. Sebastian saw the key handed to Marianne.
Mrs Alderley said if anyone wished to steal her shawls, she pitied them.
Marianne slept, despite herself, almost as soon as she lay down.
She woke to the smell of smoke.
For one confused instant, she thought she was in Lady Theodosia’s study and the fire had backed into the room. Then she heard a muffled crackle, a cough from the passage, and someone shouting below.
She was out of bed before full understanding reached her.
The room was dim, the air grey. Smoke curled beneath the door.
Marianne seized her shawl, wrapped it around herself, and went first not to the door but to Mrs Alderley’s trunk. The key shook once in the lock before turning. She lifted the lid, thrust aside shawls, and found the basket.
Still there.
Then the door opened.
Sebastian stood there in shirtsleeves, hair disordered, face hard with alarm.
“Marianne.”
Her name. No Miss Vale. No title. No armour.
For one second, smoke and danger vanished beneath the shock of it.
Then he was across the room.
“Are you hurt?”
“No. Mrs Alderley—”
“Safe. Tom has her. The fire is in the little storage room below.”
“The papers—”
“I came for you, not the papers.”
She looked at him.
The words had been spoken without calculation.
Perhaps that was why they frightened her more than the smoke.
Then a shout rose below, and practical sense returned.
Sebastian took the basket from her because this time she let him, and together they moved into the passage, where servants ran with pails and the landlady cried that a candle must have been left too near old sacking.
Tom appeared at the stair, soot on his cheek and Mrs Alderley’s shawl over one arm.
“Fire’s small, miss. Caught it early.”
Sebastian passed the basket to Tom. “Hold this and do not let it leave your hand.”
Tom clutched it as though it contained the Crown Jewels and his own mother.
They descended into chaos contained by luck.
The storage room had burned along one wall: old straw, a crate, a hanging cloth, enough to smoke heavily but not enough to take the whole inn before discovery.
Men threw water. The landlady wept. A maid swore she had seen no candle there.
The innkeeper insisted no one could have entered unseen.
Marianne stood in the narrow passage and looked at the blackened doorway.
The storage room stood directly beneath the chamber where Mrs Alderley’s trunk had first been placed before they moved it.
Not beneath Marianne’s bed.
Not beneath Sebastian’s room.
Beneath the first hiding place.
Cold moved through her more deeply than smoke.
Sebastian saw her expression. “What?”
“They knew.”
His face hardened. “Who?”
Marianne turned toward the stairs, toward the rooms above, toward the servants, travellers, ostlers, guards, and all the respectable arrangements of propriety that had surrounded them and still not kept danger out.
“They knew where the papers were first hidden,” she said. “Before we moved them.”
Sebastian’s gaze followed hers.
The same understanding settled over him.
The attacker had not guessed.
The attacker had not merely followed them from the Blue Hart.
Someone had known the placement of the statement in the inn.
Someone close enough to hear. Close enough to watch. Close enough to carry word.
Marianne looked at the sewing basket in Tom’s arms and felt the net around them tighten.
“Someone,” she said quietly, “is telling Blackwood where we put the truth.”
Sebastian did not answer.
But in the smoky passage, with the fire hissing itself to death behind them and Mrs Pike’s testimony safe only because suspicion had made them move it twice, Marianne saw in his face that the investigation had changed again.
Their enemy was not merely ahead of them.
Their enemy was near.