Chapter 15 #2
“They will be back. They are not to be toyed with. They have already shown they are willing to kill for what they want. Nothing is worth your life, Elise.”
“Charles died for this.”
Edmund watched her and felt something twist within him. Not pity, precisely—he hated pity—but something akin to sympathy, perhaps. This was Charles’s hand lingering in her life; his voice, his legacy, and the last thing she possessed that had not been taken by sea or Crown.
He wanted to ask her if it was worth dying for, but he refrained. They stood in silence until a caller came knocking, which echoed through the house. They hurried to the front of a house, finding a post-boy at the door.
In the hall, the boy handed him a packet marked with the word urgent. Edmund returned to the saloon, broke the seal and quickly read the contents. Renforth’s hand, like his mind was brisk, precise and merciless.
Edmund returned to the boy. “Wait for a reply,” he told him curtly.
Wide-eyed, the boy obeyed at once.
It confirmed Holt to be a former Revenue officer, disgraced, suspected and dangerous.
It confirmed arms to be missing from London Docks and the old pattern revived.
It confirmed what Edmund had feared since stepping into Plymouth: the past had not stayed dead merely because he wished it buried with his brother.
Elise stood beside him, very still. “What is it?” she asked.
Edmund had a choice, then. He could conceal and deflect, to keep her ignorant for her own ‘safety.’ He had seen what ignorance cost. It cost preparedness. It cost life. On the other hand, he could trust her as she had trusted him with the cipher.
“It is from my Commander,” he said quietly.
He watched her go pale.
“What does it say?”
“It confirms Holt is nefarious,” Edmund replied, and kept his voice low so as not to be overheard. “He is a former Revenue officer and a traitor. He was connected to Singleton’s circle. It says arms have gone missing from the London Docks—as before.”
Elise said nothing.
Edmund wrote a reply quickly—carefully and sparingly.
He told Renforth Holt was hiding in caves nearby.
He told him the widow’s house had been searched.
He told him it was likely a concealed passage was being used.
After a moment of grim consideration, though, he decided not to tell him about the key’s present hiding-place—not yet.
His task had been to find the missing ledger, not a lost cipher or her knowledge of it.
If London decided ‘safekeeping’ was required, then they would take it from her with official smiles and iron hands. Neither was Edmund prepared—yet—to watch Elise Larkin be stripped of the last thing Charles had left her.
When he had sealed the note and sent the boy away, he returned to the saloon to find Elise’s gaze fixed upon him.
“So you are in the service of the Crown,” she said.
It was not a question. It was a judgement.
“I am in the service of necessity,” Edmund answered, because it was the closest truth he could offer without exposing her to the full weight of it.
Elise drew a careful breath, and Edmund waited. “You begged me to confide in you. I did. Now you will tell me what you are.”
He held her gaze and felt the desire to be understood by her, to be something other than a shadow with an alias.
“I am what I told the village I am,” he said at last, “a man who writes in a notebook.”
Her eyes flashed. “That is evasion.”
“Yes,” he said, because she deserved honesty where he could give it. “To tell you more would put you in greater danger.”
“You have already put me in danger by being here.”
“No,” Edmund replied, and felt the old soldier’s certainty rise. “Holt put you in danger. The cipher put you in danger. The men who entered your rooms put you in danger. I am merely the inconvenience that refuses to let you face it alone, and who is here to recover the ledger.”
A beat of silence. Elise’s expression was blank, and he could not tell whether she was furious or—worse.
“We must plan to recover it,” she said at last in a clipped tone.
“Yes,” Edmund agreed, “but first, I want to see if there is a tunnel beneath the house where they got in.”
“There used to be, but Charles closed them up after the war.”
“Show me… please.”
They went to the cellar, to the oldest part of the house. Elise carried the lantern, and he followed, alert to every shadow and change of direction. He felt the shift of air, the damp, the thick stone. Belair House had secrets in its bones.
They reached a wall, and she lifted the lantern, revealing a panel.
It was undeniable—a careful join in the mortar, the sort of workmanship intended to vanish into plain sight.
“It does not appear to be sealed any longer.” Edmund pushed, and the panel yielded with a groan of old hinges. Darkness yawned beyond.
Elise whispered, “Good heavens.”
“A passage,” Edmund looked through. “Someone has opened it,” he replied, and watched her face pale at the thought.
They stepped only a short way into the tunnel. Edmund listened more than he looked. He had learned, long ago, that danger announces itself first as absence—an absence of ordinary sound, a hush where there should be life.
The air smelled of salt. The floor sloped. After a few yards, the lantern light caught something on the ground—fresh mud.
Elise’s breath caught. “Someone has been here.”
“Recently,” Edmund said. He looked at her. “We do not go any further now.”
“But—”
He kept his voice low and firm. “No, not without preparation. Not while Blake lies broken in a hidden room. Not while men like Holt could be inside, waiting. We know the passage has been used.”
He watched her swallow her frustration; watched her accept his judgement, if reluctantly. It should have been satisfying. It was not, because he did not want her forced into obedience by fear. They retreated and closed the panel again.
“Are there any others?”
“Possibly, but none for which I have ever determined an entrance.”
“We must set an indicator,” she said as they walked back upstairs.
“Yes,” Edmund agreed. “A thread or powder—something subtle.”
“Flour,” she said promptly.
He almost smiled. “It will do.”
And there it was again—that strange, inconvenient spark of admiration. Elise was not merely brave, she was quick and practical. She possessed a mind honed by necessity, not ornament.
They returned to the kitchen for flour. When the arrangements were made, when the cipher was hidden in the cupboard and the flour prepared to betray any movement, Elise turned to Edmund again.
“You told your Commander I am endangered,” she said quietly. “Did you also suspect me of stealing the ledger?”
“At first, I was uncertain, but I quickly decided against your culpability.”
There was a long pause. Then Elise said, very softly, “And if you are mistaken?”
“Then I will face that when it comes.” He could not promise outcomes. He could only promise his own conduct.
Elise’s gaze held his as if she heard, beneath the bluntness, a deeper truth. He had placed himself on the side of her protection, at least for now.
When she turned away, he found himself watching her again—not with the searching gaze of an investigator, though that remained, but with a deeper awareness he disliked and could not wholly dismiss.
It was not merely that she was handsome, though she was, in a restrained way that made her beauty feel like an accident rather than a display. It was her composure… her competence… the way she refused to collapse, even when she had every right to do so.
He had known many kinds of courage on the Continent. Elise’s courage was domestic and therefore, to his mind, more astonishing. It was the courage of continuing daily life and caring for children while men in the shadows sharpened blades.
It made him furious on her behalf. It made him want to be near her. It made him want to take care of her.
When they returned to the corridor outside the hidden room, Elise paused briefly, as if something within her resisted moving farther forward.
Edmund, without thinking, touched her arm—lightly, just above the elbow; a gesture meant to steady and to guide.
The contact was so slight it should have meant nothing.
He felt, with a shock of unwelcome clarity, the warmth of her through cloth and the tension under his fingers—muscle held still by sheer will.
He felt the way she stilled at his touch, not because she feared him, but because she felt it too.
Elise looked up at him—a quick, shocked glance.
For a heartbeat, her eyes softened, as if the mask had slipped—as if she might have allowed herself to lean into the assurance of another human being.
Then she stepped away, and the moment vanished like breath on glass.
Edmund let his hand drop at once and inwardly cursed himself. It was unprofessional. It was foolish and it was dangerous. He had not come to Plymouth to be undone by a woman’s steadiness and a brief touch in a corridor.
Yet the sensation lingered, like the memory of a brand on skin. It was not lust, precisely—he would not cheapen it by calling it that—but awareness… the acute, distressing knowledge that Elise Larkin was real to him now, not merely a name on paper.
Things that were real were harder to sacrifice.
He forced his mind back to practical considerations. Holt was here and the tunnel was known. Blake was wounded, and the cipher was alive and being hunted. Elise—whether accomplice, guardian, or prey—stood at the centre of it.
If Edmund Cholmely could keep his wits, he might yet save the Crown’s secrets and keep his own conscience intact. If he could not… he glanced toward the kitchen door through which Elise’s footsteps had just faded and felt the ache of concern settle again, heavy and unwelcome.
If he could not achieve those objects, then Holt would not be the only danger in Plymouth.