Chapter Three
“Get behind the shelf. Now, and without a sound.”
Royce had her by the wrist before she could put breath behind the question shaping on her mouth.
“Which shelf? There is nothing in this corner but wall and unread sermons.”
“That one. Press the third sermon in the bottom row, and do not argue architecture with a bleeding man.” He set her hand to the spine himself, the catch gave under their joined thumbs, and the case swung in on a black slot barely deep enough to hold a man sideways.
“In. All the way to the wall.”
“And you intend to stand where, precisely?”
“Wherever there is room left, which I warn you is not a great deal. In, Giselle.”
She slid into the dark of the slot, and he came in after her and drew the case shut by the iron ring set into its back. The dark folded over them, close and total, thick with the cold of old stone.
There was no room in it to be a gentleman.
The slot took them only because she stood with her spine flat to the wall and he stood square against her, chest to chest, his bandaged side burning where her shoulder pressed it.
He braced his free hand on the stone above her head and bent his mouth to where he judged her ear to be.
“They will come in through the gallery. They will look, but they will not look here, because no living soul knows this place but me.”
“You said that of the box this afternoon, and you were wrong by one archivist.”
“You are not amusing.”
“I am a little amusing, even now, which is the only thing keeping me from screaming.” Her breath shook against his throat. “Tell me what to do.”
“You do nothing. When they speak, you will not answer, whatever they say, whatever name they say. Can you give me that?”
Her chin moved against his collarbone, the smallest yes that a body could make.
“Good,” he breathed. “Then we are very dull for a quarter hour, and we both walk out at the end of it.”
“You are bleeding on me again.”
“I am aware of it. Be dull about that too.”
The gallery door opened without haste, which told him a great deal, since honest or frightened men hurried, and only a man who held a house his for the hour came in slowly.
Two sets of boots crossed the threshold, and a third behind them, lighter, a man who walked on the outsides of his feet to keep the boards quiet.
“Empty,” said the first voice, bored. “He has been traced. Bled all over his own carpet and crawled off to die somewhere private and inconvenient.”
“He didn’t crawl far on what he left.” A boot nudged something that scraped. “That’s a deal of blood for a graze, and a graze is all you managed. You’re getting old, or careless, and his Lordship pays for neither.”
“His Lordship can climb the wall himself next time and see how careless I am.”
“Mind your mouth,” said the third, the quiet one, unhurried as his feet.
“We weren’t sent for the man, and we weren’t sent to hear your complaints. We were sent for the Linfield packet. Find it, and we shall be gone before the candles burn down.”
The name went into her like a thrown blade.
Her whole body locked against his, one hard flinch caught the instant it began, and her breath stopped in her chest where his own could measure it stopping.
He brought his palm up to the side of her face before the choice reached him, his fingers along her jaw, the heel of his hand at the corner of her mouth.
She had made no sound for him to smother.
He gave her his hand to set herself against instead, and she turned her cheek a fraction into it and held.
“What does this packet look like?” the bored one said. “There are ten thousand bits of paper in here. I’ve stood in courtrooms with less.”
“Old. A marriage line. A settlement. Anything carrying the Westmere arms, which is a chevron under three stars, and anything written in a woman’s hand.
” A shelf dragged, books spilling softly to the floor.
“His Lordship wants it in his own fist before the week is out, and done so quietly that the duke wakes thinking he dreamt the lot of us.”
“And the one who let us in? Will he keep his mouth shut?”
“His Lordship never uses the same hand twice. Forget him.”
“And if the packet’s not in the house at all?”
“Then we have a longer week. It is here, or near here, because the woman who hid it died within a mile of these walls, and dead women do not travel far with their secrets.”
“Twenty years she’s been under the ground. Why does his Lordship want her dug up now?”
“Because someone went looking. A scholar, the word is, asking after old parish marriages in three counties, the kind of question you only ask when you mean to prove a thing. Find the paper before the scholar does. That is the whole of the order, and the reason we are not in our beds.”
“One dead woman’s leavings,” the bored voice grumbled.
“All this creeping about for a settlement on a girl no one’s set eyes on in twenty years.”
“That girl is the whole of the business.” The quiet one spoke again, nearer now, a hand’s span of false shelving from where Royce stood breathing slowly.
“If that packet says what his Lordship fears it says, then there is a claimant alive to a matter that was meant to die with the mother. We burn the paper, or we carry it to Veyr, and either way the claim goes into the dark where it was always meant to lie.”
“You said the name.”
“There’s no one to hear it but rats and a dead duke.
Veyr. Lord Veyr. Say it till you’re hoarse; it’ll be on no living tongue by morning, and his coat will be as clean as it was the day he was born.
” A drawer slid and slammed. “Court discretion, they call it upstairs. Careful murder in better tailoring is the whole of what it is. Lift the panels along the south wall and stop talking.”
They worked the room a full quarter hour, and Royce counted every second in the warm, slow seep down his side where the bandage had given out at last. The blood ran where her hip met his, and he canted himself a degree to keep it off her gown, which cost his braced arm the last of what it held.
Her hand had found the front of his shirt somewhere in the dark, and he laid his own over it and held it shut, giving her the one thing the dark allowed: the knowledge that she was not alone inside it.
The boots went out as they had come, in no hurry at all. The gallery door closed softly, and the house took back its ordinary silence one careful degree at a time.
He did not move at once. He counted to two hundred, slowly, the way he had taught himself to count in a worse dark than this one.
Then he found the ring, let the case swing open on the grey wash of the library, and stepped out into the cold air of the room like a man breaking the surface of deep water.
She came out after him and turned on him before her feet were fairly under her.
“They came into your house with knives, in the dark, for the Linfield packet,” she said. “That is my name in their mouths, Your Grace. My name.”
“It is.”
“That is all the answer you have. It is?”
“What would you have me add? They said your name; I heard them say it, and no embroidery of mine will make it less true.” He drew a careful breath. “I find plain words are the only ones I can afford tonight.”
“My name, the Westmere arms, a marriage line, and a claimant who was supposed to die with her mother.” Her voice climbed, but she dragged it down again by force.
“And there is a man in your own household selling your doors for coin. You will tell me what is in that packet, and you will tell me while the blood you are losing still recommends honesty to you.”
“Sit down before you fall. You have had a worse fright than you are letting yourself have.”
“Do not manage me. I have been managed by experts, and you are not yet among their number.” She gripped the table rather than take the chair.
“Start with the simple question, then, since you flinch from the hard one. Who is the servant who let them in?”
“I do not know, and I am unlikely ever to. Veyr buys a hand for one night, and the hand is gone by morning, paid and at sea, which is precisely why I rang for no one tonight.” He let the table take his weight, because his legs had begun to lie to him about how long they meant to serve.
“I cannot guard against the man, only against the method. Until Veyr himself is finished, every door in this house stays watched, and every footman is a stranger to me.”
“Then you are alone in a house of forty people.”
“I have been alone in this house since the night I came home from the place I earned these scars. You are merely the first person to stand close enough to notice.” He pressed his hand flat to the wound.
“They will come back. They said it themselves. A man who sells one door sells the next.”
“They will come back, though not tonight, and not this week, if I make the house costly enough between now and then.” He breathed against the pain.
“Tonight you go nowhere. Tomorrow, you do not step past the threshold without me at your shoulder, and you tell no one, not the dearest friend you own, that the name Helena means a thing to you.”
“I have no dearest friend. I have qualifications and a pendant. That is the whole of my estate, and I have just heard three men plan to murder me for the second item.”
“Then guard the pendant. Stop wearing it where a lady’s maid might catch the shape of it through your bodice.”
“And if I do not take it off?”
“Then wear it against the skin, beneath your stays, where only a husband would have cause to look.” The word was out of him before he had weighed it, but he did not call it back. “Ask the next question. You are working towards one, and I would rather you arrived than circled it all night.”
“What is in the packet?”
“I do not have it. Whatever those three came for is not in my keeping. If it were, I would have burned it years ago, and neither of us would be wearing my blood tonight.”
“That is not what I asked, and you are aware that it is not.”