The church bells finished up the count of eleven. Her flock of birds flew away to do bird errands now that she had no more bread for them. Probably their lives were full of whatever troubles birds fell heir to and all that cheery chirping and hopping about was a deception. She was something of an expert in deception.
When she paid the boy tuppence to deliver the letter, she’d pressed a shilling into his hand on top of it. “If they ask who gave you the letter, describe someone else. If they ask where I went, point the other way.”
Her family—the Baldoni—used to say, “Prepare for many evil eventualities. Some of them will arrive.”
The air settled around her, still and heavy. The sky over London was white, opaque and dull as cheap crockery, full of bright sun. Her boy turned at Number Seven, tripped up the stair, and stood waiting for an answer to his knock. She waited also. She’d stay to see this letter delivered. There was too much at stake to take that for granted. Inside the shell of calm she’d closed around her was a chaos so loud she couldn’t think. It was fortunate she’d made her plans beforehand and needed only to follow the path she’d laid out.
From the corner of her eye she saw the shift of light. A man walked toward her across Braddy Square. For a sharp instant, she was afraid.
But no. She wasn’t in danger yet. She had an hour before she walked into the trap laid for her.
She turned away, not sharing her face with this man passing by, being careful. In the long, soft years since Paris, she hadn’t forgotten the rules.
She collected only a glimpse of him as he walked past her and continued down Meeks Street . . . a tall, long-limbed man, dressed in dark traveling clothes, somewhat dusty. He wore well-scuffed riding boots, riding gloves, and a soft, broad-brimmed felt hat that shaded his face. He carried a valise and moved fast, with the clean grace of an athlete. Something about him made her think of a man trudging uphill with no end in sight. If she hadn’t been supplied with a sufficiency of troubles of her own, she would have been curious.
Far down Meeks Street, her messenger boy delivered the letter, gave a cheeky salute to the house, and was down the stair before the door closed behind him.
That was done. Whatever happened to her in the Moravian church on Fetter Lane, that message was safe. There should be no repercussions. She’d timed its delivery so the men of Meeks Street would decode it only after she’d completed her business with the blackmailer.
She crossed Braddy Square in the direction of a godly church where an ungodly meeting would take place. She looked back once. She wasn’t really surprised to see the man with the valise climb the stairs of Number Seven Meeks Street.
Three
Many buckets of quarrel are filled from the well of ignorance.
Pax put one foot in front of the other for the last thousand steps, not letting himself slow down.
Meeks Street hadn’t changed. Ugly prosperous houses lined both sides of the street, the doorknobs polished and the steps well scrubbed. Some houses were shut up tight, keeping the air out, but most had the window sashes up. Muslin curtains rippled, lipping in and out over the sills. The linden trees were turning yellow. Gray smoke from the kitchen fires slanted off the chimneys and spread out to disappear.
Number Thirty-one was still ruled by the sleek black tomcat that played sentry on the garden wall. Number Twenty-three had added five stone urns along the front, carrying five yew trees shaved and clipped within an inch of their lives. At Nineteen, a dog stuck a yapping muzzle through a gap in the iron gate.
All familiar. He didn’t belong at Meeks Street anymore, but it felt like coming home.
Down the street, Sam had delivered that woman’s message to Number Seven.
He glanced back over his shoulder. The woman in the dark cloak was gone. She’d waited just long enough to see her letter delivered. Gone . . . and she left the air behind her shimmering with intention and planning.
I don’t like this.
Young Sam swung away from Number Seven, errand completed, and headed back to the square, running his fingers along the iron palings, whistling, pleased with himself.
Why didn’t she want to come to Number Seven? He took the steps fast. For the first time in two weeks, he had a reason to be in a hurry.
He pounded the knocker and left his hand spread flat on the door, willing it to open. The door was painted Prussian green with a little black in the base. The knocker was brass, in the shape of a rose. Forty years ago they’d picked the rose knocker out of the ruins of the old headquarters after it burned. The plate to the right of the door read, The Penumbral Walking Club.
He didn’t have a key. Nobody got past the front door of Number Seven unless somebody let him in.
He pounded again. Where was Giles?
The lock disengaged. Giles, a sturdy, open-faced sixteen-year-old, opened the door, letter in hand. He said, “Pax.” Nothing but surprise and pleasure in his voice. “You’re back. Hawker said you’d be here in a day or two. Grey’s landed in Dover—”
“Give me that.” He took the letter from Giles, dropped it on the table, and brushed his fingers on his coat.
“It just came,” Giles said. “Sam brought it. It’s addressed to Galba.”
The door on the other side of the ugly front parlor opened. Hawker, compact, dark haired, deadly as a snake, dressed like a gentleman, strolled in. “I didn’t think you’d be fool enough to show up. There’s still time to turn around and run.”
“No, there isn’t. Hawk, look at this. Don’t touch it.”
“I wasn’t going to.” Hawker approached, feline and inquisitive. “Communication from the greater world.”
The folded paper was addressed to Anson Jones. That was Galba’s real name, not the name he used when he was Head of Service. Mr. Anson Jones, Number Seven, Meeks Street.
“What’s wrong with it?” Hawker took his knife out, twitched the blade under the note, flipped it over.
“It’s from a woman.”
“Not, in itself, a bad thing.”
In fifty words he told Hawk how the note had been sent. “And . . . I know the handwriting. This e with the sharp corner, tilted up. The bar on the t slanted down. I’ve seen that.”
“Where?”
“Not recently. It’s . . .” He shook his head. “A long time ago. Somewhere.”
“Part of life’s eventful journey.”
“It’ll come to me.” He pulled his knife and helped himself to Hawker’s. He steadied the note and slit the seal without touching the paper at all. “Don’t breathe.” That was for Giles. Hawker had already stepped back.
Hawker murmured, “You do realize we’re prying into the private correspondence of the Head of Service.”
“I know.” He laid the page flat, using the knife point to push the edges back. On the paper, line after line of numbers and letters. “And we have code.”
“Do we?” Hawker bent forward. “How dramatic.”
“A Service code.”
“A Leyland code.” Hawk’s finger hovered over the inkblot that marked it as Leyland code. “I don’t recognize the identifier.”
“One of the old ones. Before you came to the Service.” Code. Something about code . . . and that handwriting.
Then he remembered. He’d been thirteen or fourteen, sitting at a long table in the cold, bare schoolroom of the Coach House, painstakingly disassembling a code. The dark-haired girl beside him leaned over her slate, scribbling down the sharp little e and the slanted t, deciphering as fast as she could write. None of them could touch her when it came to code breaking.
Vérité. Vérité’s handwriting. Ten years ago, when he’d had a different name and Vérité had been his best friend. “I know who she is. I knew her when she was a child.” A particularly deadly child.