Chapter 1 #2
“In the morning,” Renforth said. “Pack lightly. You will go under the guise of a writer, to give yourself an excuse to be there for several weeks.”
Baines brightened. “You, a writer! We must see if you can pen something without stabbing it.”
Fielding grinned. “Do at least pretend to enjoy it, Chum. Plymouth is said to be charming.”
“Yes,” Manners added. “Full of widows.”
“Manners,” Renforth said warningly.
Edmund rose. “I shall leave at dawn.”
Renforth stood as well, placing a steady hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Edmund,” he said, low enough that only Edmund could hear, “this is not punishment. Nor is it mercy. It is necessity—and I trust you implicitly.”
Edmund bowed his head slightly, unable to speak.
The men resumed their banter as he crossed the room—Baines lamenting the lack of gun battles these days; Fielding and Stuart commending their new-found domesticity; Manners and Renforth praising the vintage of their brandy.
But Edmund heard little of it.
At the doorway he paused, his breath catching at his thoughts.
A widow.
A house that had once hosted a Council of War.
A cipher that could ruin England.
He left the room without looking back. Tomorrow, he would ride for Plymouth.
The sea had no right to look so calm.
Edmund pulled up the chestnut gelding that had carried him as far as the cliff road would allow.
Below, the bay stretched away like a folded ribbon of pewter, neat and indifferent.
It gleamed faintly under a sky that threatened rain but could not be troubled to deliver it.
The wind smelled of salt, heather, and pressed the unending melancholy that seemed, of late, to have taken up residence in his chest.
Colonel Renforth, the clever devil, had known as much. He had thought to help Edmund escape it by pushing him into motion.
“A change of air,” the Colonel had said that morning in London. “The coast will do you good. Fetch the ledger, or the trail of it, and try not to brood.”
Edmund had saluted, though the action had felt absurdly formal between two men who had lived and served together through unspeakable war and tragedy. “And if the ledger is nowhere to be fetched?”
Renforth’s grey eyes had not softened. “We will also be searching here. Bring yourself back whole. That will suffice.”
He stood a moment longer, watching the sea claw faintly at the shingle far below.
His brother’s voice rose, uninvited, from some pit of memory—soft, persuasive, the very tone that had deceived so many.
The Crown will not protect you, brother. One must act for oneself.
He clenched his hands until the ache silenced the ghost. Oneself indeed.
It had ended in a violent death and his name struck from the family Bible.
It was due only to the rest of the family’s faithful service to the Crown that their titles and lands had not been stripped, and the scandal covered up.
Edmund rode on into Plymouth with the pale light of afternoon breaking over the downs and the sea spread out below like tarnished glass.
His coat was of an unassuming cut—worn serge instead of uniform—and he bore the air of a gentleman travelling for reasons too dull to invite questions.
The innkeeper, perceiving a quiet man of means, offered a room without ceremony, and Edmund accepted it with a nod.
He needed a place to watch, and The Prince George, Stonehouse, gave him both a window overlooking the town and harbour, and an alehouse full of talk.
Renforth’s words echoed through his mind: Observe. Confirm. Do not engage. Larkin’s place—Belair House—is situated upon the headland above the harbour.
How the devil was a war widow who ran a boarding school involved in espionage? He supposed there had been stranger occurrences, but it seemed far-fetched when her husband had died a hero.
It was not the sort of posting any man would envy: weeks of winter weather, provincial chatter, and the endless patience required of one who hunts not an enemy in uniform but the faint traces of a message gone astray.
Still, for Edmund, whose life had been mostly melancholy since his brother’s death, the monotony had its comfort.
So here he was, deposited upon a remote headland where the War Office had mislaid its secrets and he his peace of mind.
The town crouched below—a scatter of white cottages, a squat church with a high steeple, and beyond them the hint of a small harbour where masts nodded against the horizon.
Above the town, a building of more austere aspect stood apart with long windows, pale stone, and a garden enclosed by weathered walls.
The driver had identified it as Belair House, Captain Elphinstone’s neat country residence, famed for its “Council of War” in the summer when Admiral Lord Keith had received Bonaparte’s fate within its walls.
Now it was also the location of Widow Larkin’s Seminary, a respectable institution for the daughters of officers.
That evening, as the inn’s hearth drew the fishermen in from the quay, he nursed a tankard and listened. The talk ran easily to the widow and her girls when Edmund, in the mildest tone of inquiry, mentioned the place after a few pints of ale.
“She keeps a proper hand on ’em,” said one. “No nonsense, no runnin’ wild.”
“Aye, and sends half her earnings to the Foundling Hospital,” added another. “That’s a lady, if you ask me.”
A third snorted. “Lady or no, there’s summat odd about ’er. Twice a week, she walks to the harbour. Never trusts the coach, never the errand-boy.”
Edmund’s fingers tightened imperceptibly round the pewter. He let his eyes rest upon the fire as though the matter interested him no more than the weather.
The talk drifted to fishing yields, to the quality of the ale, and finally to the merits of the local parson’s sermons, which seemed, by consensus, to improve in direct proportion to his proximity to the cider barrel.
Edmund smiled faintly, the first such motion to touch his mouth in weeks, though it passed as quickly as it came.
He was good at listening without appearing to do so; war had taught him that men betray the truth most easily when they think no one notices.
It was not only the widow who piqued his curiosity.
The old postmaster, it appeared, had grown rich on very little custom.
The magistrate had retired mysteriously to Bath.
A naval sloop had docked in the harbour three days prior and sailed again without loading a cargo.
All were small matters, perhaps—but it was from such threads that an invisible web of intelligence was woven.
“Storm blowin’ in tomorrow,” said the landlord cheerfully as he filled another glass. “You’ll be wanting to keep inside, sir. Sea air’s bracing till it isn’t.”
Edmund thanked him and carried his tankard to a quiet table near the window.
The wind outside pressed salt against the panes, and beyond them the masts creaked faintly in the dark.
He felt that odd blend of watchfulness and weariness that comes from long habit—like a hound that sleeps but never ceases to listen.
He drew from his pocket the small notebook he always carried and, with deliberate idleness, made a few sketches: the outline of the cliff path, the position of Belair House/the Seminary upon its rise with the cottages clustered beneath.
He marked the inn’s vantage and the post-road’s turning.
To anyone glancing over his shoulder, it was the work of a tourist recording the picturesque. To him it was intelligence.
When he looked up, a young serving girl had stopped beside him, twisting her apron. “Beggin’ your pardon, sir—Cook says if you’ve a fancy for supper, there’s stew or pie, and pie’s best while it’s hot.”
“Then pie it shall be,” he said with a faint smile.
She bobbed and hurried away, leaving him again to the wind’s low moan and the intermittent crash of waves against the harbour wall. It might have been peace if he had known how to receive it.
The pie arrived—a hearty affair of undetermined contents, untroubled by refinement—and Edmund ate without appetite, his mind occupied by the sea’s steady pulse and the faint gleam of lamps along the headland.
There were lights in the upper windows of the Seminary; regular, ordered, like a line of sentries.
He wondered if the widow knew what it was to count hours by discipline and loss, as many did.
By the time he went up to his room, the air was damp with mist that no windows could seal against. The sea breathed below like something immense and half-asleep. From his window he could see, even through the drifting fog, the faint outline of the school’s chimneys against the clouds.
He undressed mechanically, extinguished the lamp, and lay staring into the dark.
Sleep was long in coming. When at last it did, it brought no rest, only dreams: his brother’s eyes bright with conviction, saying again, We are not enemies, Ed—we are patriots of different kinds.
Would he ever reconcile himself to his brother’s betrayal?
He woke before dawn and donned his mask as Mr. Leigh, writer for a London publisher, come to consider a few local tales for a collection of the picturesque.
It was a convenient fiction; no one ever suspected a man intent on books.
He set out towards the cliffs with a notebook and the air of mild curiosity that attends the literary sort.
The road wound upward through furze and grass, past stone walls half-swallowed by ivy.
From the rise above the harbour he caught sight of the seminary—a clean, square building of weathered stone, its windows bright and orderly, its garden enclosed by hedges.
Girls in grey cloaks walked two by two beneath the wind-bent trees, and upon the steps stood a woman with a basket upon her arm, her face turned seawards.
Even at a distance he marked the poise of her—not fashionable, but with graceful composure, as though she stood firm against the gusts that would have troubled a lesser spirit.
He was meant to observe, nothing more. Yet he found his gaze lingering.
He walked on down the path and came upon a fisherman mending nets. “Good day to you,” Edmund began with studied friendliness. “Would you happen to know if the cliff path remains open to visitors? I hear the views are worth the exertion.”
The man eyed him with the suspicion due to any stranger. “Aye, the path’s there. Not for them as dislikes heights, though. Steep as sin, and the sea’ll take ye quick if ye slip.”
“Much obliged for the warning,” Edmund replied, refusing to be cowed by the man’s gruffness.
“What ye ’ere fer?” He eyed the notebook in Edmund’s hands.
“Observing and taking notes.”
The man’s gaze narrowed in disapproval. “You writing one o’ them books, then?”
Edmund smiled slightly. “Nothing so grand. Merely trying to document some of the nature hereabouts.”
With a dismissive grunt, he was at least helpful.
“Then you’ll want Mrs. Larkin’s permission, sir.
All that land up there’s hers now, since the late master died.
Seminary, they call it. Fine place. Admirals and the like once shut themselves up there, talking o’ Bonaparte.
She’s fair enough if asked proper. Don’t like trespassers, though. ”
“Quite right of her,” Edmund murmured. “I shall call upon her then—if she will receive me.”
The fisherman chuckled. “Since her husband went to glory, she mostly keeps to herself and them girls.”
That, Edmund thought, was precisely what he had come to test.
He thanked the man, returned to the inn for luncheon, and spent the afternoon walking the upper lanes under pretence of sketching. Children stared; women nodded; a pair of sailors offered him a pipe. It was honest work of its sort—the quiet, tedious vigilance that makes the world turn.
Afterwards, he sat in the garden pondering his next steps. Edmund unfolded his journal and wrote:
Mrs. Larkin respected by locals.
Keeps to herself.
Twice-weekly errands to the harbour alone.
Fisherman offered information the House once used by Lord Keith during Bonaparte affair.
Nature of current dispatch unknown.
Nothing much—yet he could not shake the instinctive feeling that Mrs. Larkin’s calm facade concealed a depth of purpose equal to his own.
And as he laid down his pen, the wind rose outside, carrying the cries of gulls and the boom of the sea against the cliffs—a sound half like a summons, half like a warning.