Chapter 11 - Stephen
Stephen
Stephen couldn’t feel his fingers.
He’d walked four miles in wet boots, his shirt plastered to his skin, and somehow none of it mattered. Not the cold working its way through his coat, not the exhaustion pulling at his legs, not the risk he’d taken tonight.
Instead he kept thinking about Charlotte.
How her head was tucked just beneath his chin, fitting there as though the space had been made for it.
The weight of her against him, real in a way that made everything else feel distant.
He had felt the tremor in her shoulders, felt it slow by degrees and then stop altogether as she leaned into him—as though his presence had been enough to quiet whatever fear had taken hold.
People usually came to him because he could do things, fix things, make things easier, but he had never been this. The person someone turned to when they were afraid. The one who steadied them just by being there.
The realization settled deep in his bones and he wanted to stay in that study forever, wanted to not let go.
She’d been the one to step away, and the loss of her was immediate. The cold air rushed in where her warmth had been, and reality with it. She was a gentleman’s daughter. He was a footman. The space between those two things wasn’t something that closed, no matter how much he wanted it to.
But that didn’t stopped him from wishing it could. The thought followed him home, through streets that thinned to open road, beneath a sky that shifted from black to gray. The estate gates materialized ahead before he’d had any sense of approaching them.
He slipped through the servants’ entrance and caught the corridor clock as he passed.
Three in the morning. Two hours before he needed to be up, and his mind was far too loud for sleep.
There was no point in trying. He turned away from the stairs and made for the library instead, easing the door open and closing himself in with the familiar scent of leather and old paper.
They hadn’t found the documents. That was what he needed to focus on now.
From the gossip that passed through the servants’ corridors, and the fragments Charlotte had shared with him, one thing was evident — they didn’t have the luxury of time.
Penrose held something over her family that made courtship little more than a formality.
He had no need to charm her, no need to win her over.
He would simply wait until it suited him, and when that moment came, Charlotte would have no choice left but to accept him.
He hated the thought of her married to Penrose with a force that surprised him, and he pushed it aside before he could examine why.
It wouldn’t come to that. He was going to find those documents, and she would never have to marry him.
But a third attempt at the study was unlikely.
The second would have to mean something, which meant going in with more than the rough suspicions that hadn’t gotten them anywhere the first time.
He settled into one of the reading chairs, letting the quiet of the library gather around him.
Where would a man like Penrose hide something he didn’t want found, in a house that large?
They had searched the study thoroughly and found nothing, which meant one of two things. Either the documents were kept elsewhere, or they were hidden in a way they hadn’t thought to look for.
The first possibility he dismissed almost immediately.
Penrose was meticulous — the study had shown that clearly enough, the ledgers aligned, the correspondence bundled, everything in its designated place.
A man who kept his working life that ordered kept his important documents close at hand, not dispersed through the house where servants might stumble across them.
He wouldn’t trust a bedchamber or a morning room with something this valuable. He would want it within reach.
Which left the second possibility.
Stephen’s fingers drummed against the chair’s arm as he considered.
A safe seemed most likely. Men of Penrose’s wealth certainly had them, heavy iron boxes built into walls or floors, requiring keys or combinations that never left their owner’s person.
The question was where such a thing would be placed.
He rose and moved to the architecture section, his eyes scanning the spines in the dim light. Lord Rutland’s collection on estate management was thorough, if disorganized, with volumes on everything from drainage systems to decorative plasterwork crammed together without apparent logic.
His fingers found a promising title: The Modern Country House: Security and Convenience.
He slid the volume free and carried it to the reading chair, opening it with anticipation.
But three pages in, his hope withered. The text was maddeningly vague: safes should be “installed in locations suited to the gentleman’s needs” and “concealed according to the discretion of the household.” Nothing he didn’t already know, and nothing that would help him find possible places where a safe was already hidden.
Stephen set it aside and returned to the shelves. Estate Planning for the Gentleman proved equally unhelpful, dedicating a single paragraph to the importance of secure document storage without explaining how such storage should be implemented.
He kept searching. Pulled down volume after volume, skimming through chapters on everything from tenant relations to household management.
One book mentioned that wall safes were commonly built into chimney breasts or thick interior walls, requiring a depth of at least ten inches, but from what he remembered of Penrose’s study, the chimney breast had seemed too shallow for that.
Another book recommended consulting with reputable London locksmiths and listed several firms. All of it useless.
The stack of discarded books beside his chair had grown to an impressive height, each one representing another dead end in his search for useful information.
Stephen couldn’t remember when his eyes had started refusing to focus properly, only that the cramped text now blurred together no matter how many times he blinked.
His shoulders had developed a persistent burn from hunching, and when he finally straightened, his spine protested with a series of small cracks that echoed in the quiet library.
The gray outside the windows had warmed to pale gold while he’d been reading, the morning arriving faster than he’d have liked.
Somewhere in the house the kitchen was already waking, the distant sounds of it drifting up through the walls.
Stephen set the last volume aside and pressed his fingers against his eyes.
An hour and a half of searching, and he had learned nothing.
Nothing that would help Charlotte. Nothing that would make the next attempt at Penrose Hall any more successful than the last.
He leaned back and let his gaze drift upward to where ornate plasterwork decorated the library’s ceiling, roses and vines winding through geometric patterns with the kind of detail that must have taken months to complete.
The sort of craftsmanship where artisans hid their marks in corners nobody ever thought to examine.
Hidden in plain sight.
The thought pulled his focus in a different direction.
What if he’d been thinking about this wrong from the start? What if there was no safe because Penrose didn’t need one. Because he had something better?
Stephen turned the possibilities over in his mind.
A wall safe would require construction, would leave evidence that someone might notice.
A floor safe would need foundation work, would create irregularities in the flooring that someone could feel when walking across the study.
Both would be obvious to anyone who knew what to look for.
But furniture? Furniture was different. He knew enough about furniture design to know that hidden compartments weren’t modern innovations.
They’d been standard features in fine pieces for centuries—drawers within drawers, panels that slid aside, mechanisms concealed in decorative carving.
Hidden compartments weren’t unusual in expensive furniture, they were expected. A mark of superior workmanship.
The study had built-in bookcases and some chairs, but the desk was the only substantial piece of furniture. And it would be within Penrose’s constant reach. The perfect place to keep something hidden.
Stephen rose stiffly and began collecting the scattered books, carrying them back to the shelves, not bothering with precise placement.
Lord Rutland’s collection was chaotic enough that a few misplaced volumes would go unnoticed.
What mattered was leaving no obvious evidence of his research session.
The last book returned, Stephen paused before crossing to the shelves on craftsmanship, scanning for anything that might cover furniture construction. His gaze snagged on a brown leather spine tucked between larger volumes: The Gentleman’s Guide to Fine Cabinetry and Joinery.
Stephen pulled it free and flipped to the table of contents, his exhaustion momentarily forgotten when he saw chapters dedicated to concealed storage and hidden compartments, and to the spring mechanisms built into furniture.
This was what he’d been searching for, what he should have looked for from the beginning instead of wasting time on safes and wall construction.
There wasn’t time to read it now— dawn had already broken and he needed to be washed and dressed before someone came looking for him—but tonight after service ended he could study it properly, could learn enough to know what to search for when they went back.
He tucked the book under his arm, knowing it was risky to borrow another volume when The Italian was already hidden in his room. But set against everything else he had done tonight, it seemed rather beside the point to worry about it.
He left the library and climbed the narrow servants’ stairs with the book pressed against his ribs, thinking that seven days suddenly felt both too long and not nearly enough time to prepare for seeing her again.