Chapter 10 #2
In daylight it wore its respectability like a well-mended coat: cottages whitewashed, curtains drawn and people tending their business.
At night, the seam of it loosened as the men came inland from the harbour.
Shadows pooled in doorways. Men’s voices grew louder.
Laughter rose too easily and fell too sharply.
The sea made its own constant, disinterested music beneath all the human noise.
The George sat near the harbour, its windows bright, its door opening and shutting with the steady rhythm of appetite. Light spilled onto the muddy lane in a warm, inviting square, and within that square were boot prints, dropped crumbs, and the faint scent of ale and smoke.
Elise paused for a moment across the road, watching.
It was a tavern like most coastal taverns: timbered, low-ceilinged, built to endure weather and men.
The sign creaked above the door—a painted anchor, chipped by time.
The air around it was thick with competing smells: salt and fish, damp wool, pipe smoke, and the unmistakable odour of spilled beer gone stale.
She had been here before a few times—years ago. In those days she had come in a cloak and bonnet, slipping within through the back door. The landlord had never asked questions. He had accepted her help as though he expected it, and perhaps he had. Men like him saw more than they admitted.
Elise crossed the road and entered.
The noise struck her at once—voices layered upon voices, laughter, argument, the scrape of chairs, the thump of a tankard upon wood.
The fire was bright and too hot, mingled with the stench of male bodies after a day’s labour.
In one corner, a fiddler sawed at a tune with more enthusiasm than skill.
Men crowded the tables—fishermen, rough seamen, a few sailors in half-pay coats, and tradesmen.
Behind the bar stood the landlord, Mr. Grey, as broad as an ox and with a face that could be genial or forbidding depending on his mood. He looked up as Elise stepped in, and for a moment his gaze passed over her without recognition.
Then, something flickered—not surprise, not alarm, only… acknowledgement. It had been years since she had donned her disguise, and thankfully he went along as they had when she had done surveillance in this guise for Charles.
He jerked his chin toward the back. “You,” he said curtly, as if she were any girl who had been late for her shift. “Busy night.”
Elise dipped her head. “I will nay be late again.”
“See you don’t,” he grunted, and shoved a cloth into her hand. “Wipe that table—and don’t stand about.”
She moved at once, grateful for the cover of labour. A woman who worked and did not look at anyone too closely lest she be construed as open for more.
She wiped tables, collected empty tankards, and delivered fresh ones.
Men shouted orders without looking at her face.
Coins clinked into Mr. Grey’s palm. Someone slapped her elbow as she passed, and she shifted away without reacting, as any barmaid would.
Her mind remained alert, eyes moving constantly, taking in every corner.
Then she saw Blake.
He sat near the shadowed edge of the room, half-hidden behind a post. His cap was low, his shoulders hunched. He looked, to any casual glance, like any worn sailor keeping to himself, but Elise knew the set of him, the tension beneath the stillness.
He was waiting.
She did not approach him. She could not; not yet.
Instead she moved around the room, watching men’s faces, listening for a name. Holt.
There were men she did not recognize—new faces among familiar ones. A duo at the far table, sitting close together, heads bent, were unknown to her. One man laughed too loudly, as if practising being harmless. Another watched the door more than his drink, as if expecting someone to enter—or leave.
Elise’s hands remained steady as she poured ale, but her pulse had begun to beat in her throat.
Then the tavern door opened again. A gust of cold air swept in, and with it came Mr. Leigh.
Elise nearly spilled the tankard.
He stepped inside with that composed ease she had come to associate with him—neither swaggering nor timid, as if he were perfectly entitled to take up space but had no wish to make a spectacle of it.
He wore a plain coat and at once removed his hat.
His gaze swept the room, quick and controlled, taking stock in a way no true idler ever did.
She bristled as intensely as if she had been touched.
“Why is he here?” she muttered.
For a moment, a spiteful thought flashed through her mind: Perhaps he came every night. Perhaps he was no better than other men—seeking warmth, seeking company, seeking women.
Then, with the same speed, she reprimanded herself. “Why do you care?”
It was no matter what he did. He owed her nothing. He was not her husband, not her friend, not even—she told herself firmly—particularly significant.
Yet… he mattered. Not because she wished him to, but he had somehow insinuated himself into her world and she had not yet resolved where he fit. Now he was here, on the same night she had chosen for secrecy.
He did not greet anyone or go to the bar with cheerful familiarity. He moved instead toward a corner—near enough to see the room, far enough to be overlooked—and sat down as if he meant to remain there for hours. He had placed himself in much the same way as Blake had done.
Elise’s breath fluttered. Was he on the same hunt?
She forced herself to continue moving, to continue wiping and pouring, as if she were no more than a tired girl earning coin.
But her attention caught repeatedly on Mr. Leigh—on the way he kept his hands still, on the way he listened without appearing to do so, on the way his gaze occasionally lifted to the door. He was not here for women.
He was here to watch. Her skin prickled with unease—and, beneath it, something she refused to name.
It was perhaps half an hour later when the door opened again and the atmosphere in the room shifted.
Some entrances meant nothing. Men came and went constantly, carrying the smell of sea and mud, stamping their boots, laughing, swearing, ordering ale.
This man’s entrance altered the air in a way Elise felt at once.
He was tall, broad through the shoulders and wearing a coat that pretended to be common but sat upon him too well.
His long hair was dark, his jaw heavy, his mouth set in a line that did not soften even when he smiled.
And there was, as Blake had said, a scar along his cheek—pale against weathered skin, cutting from the edge of his mouth toward his ear as if someone had once tried to silence him and failed.
He looked dangerous. He scanned the room, and Elise’s stomach fell.
Then he smiled at someone—a quick, false curve of his lips—and crossed toward the far table where the others sat waiting.
They greeted him with the ease of men who knew each other, yet kept their voices low. One clapped him on the shoulder. Another slid a tankard toward him without asking.
It had to be Holt.
Elise’s fingers gripped her cloth so hard her knuckles whitened. She forced herself to move nearer, not directly, but in the slow drift of service—collecting tankards from a table two feet away, wiping a spill that did not require wiping, leaning just close enough to catch fragments of speech.
“… took the bait,” Holt was saying, his voice rough and amused.
One of the others—a thin-faced individual with eyes too quick—laughed softly. “Ain’t no bait like London bait. Men smell money and forget their scruples.”
“Not London,” Holt corrected. “Here. ’Tis easier here. Men talk when the sea’s too rough and the ale’s cheap.”
The third man—older, with a careful manner—spoke in a lower tone Elise could barely hear.
“We have no need of talk. We need the pattern.”
Holt’s mouth twisted. “Aye. We have enough of it.”
Elise felt a chill spread through her.
The older man’s voice lowered. “Careful, Holt. If you scare—”
“Nonsense,” Holt said dismissively.
Elise’s vision narrowed for an instant. She forced herself to breathe.
The thin-faced man leaned closer to his fellows. “Revenue men have been sniffing about again.”
Holt snorted. “Let ’em sniff. With enough coins they will sniff elsewhere.”
“And if they don’t?” the older man demanded.
Holt’s scar pulled as he smiled. “Then we give ’em a reason to look at the wrong boat.”
Elise’s heart thudded.
It was not merely smuggling. It was organized, confident and planned.
She edged away, pulse hammering and mind racing.
Then she felt—rather than saw—Mr. Leigh’s gaze shift. Not toward her face, but toward Holt.
Mr. Leigh had noticed.
Elise moved back toward the bar, her hands trembling only slightly as she set down a tray. She needed to think. She needed to decide whether to approach Blake, whether to leave or whether to—
A movement near her elbow made her freeze.
Mr. Grey, the landlord, loomed beside her, his voice pitched low. “You be getting pale, lass,” he muttered without looking at her. “Either you be ill or you ’ave seen something you ’ave no business seeing. Go and wash your face in the back.”
Elise swallowed. “Yes.”
Heart pounding, she slipped toward the back passage. As she reached the doorway, she glanced once over her shoulder.
Holt leaned back in his chair, laughing at something. Blake sat rigid in his corner, watching like a man who expected a blow. Mr. Leigh remained still, his face unreadable, but his attention fixed.
For a moment—only a moment—Elise’s gaze met his. Not as barmaid to customer but as one watcher to another.
In that instant she knew with an abrupt, unsettling certainty that Mr. Leigh had followed her—and he knew she was not what she pretended to be.
She slipped into the store room, pressed her hands to a rough wooden table, and forced herself to breathe. Outside, laughter rose again, the fiddle struck up a new tune, and life in the tavern carried on. Elise lifted her chin, smoothed her apron, and prepared to go back to the tap-room.
Tonight, she had come to discover Holt. Yet it appeared she must needs fear Mr. Leigh as well. She did not yet know which discovery was the more dangerous. However, it appeared they were indeed looking for the cipher, and she would never let them find it.