The packet-boat cleaved the grey swells of the Channel, its paddles throwing spray across the railing where Coraline Ashworth stood with both gloved hands locked around the cold iron. Behind her the white cliffs of Calais fell away into mist, swallowed by the same haze that had softened her brother's face in the months before he rode north and never came back. The wool of his regimentals sat heavy across her shoulders, too broad in the chest, too long in the wrist, and the brass buttons at her throat caught the morning light each time the vessel pitched. She had pinned her hair flat beneath a forage cap, darkened her brows with soot from a parlour taper, and learned to swallow when she spoke so her voice would sit lower, rougher, closer to the baritone Marcus had carried into battle.
A gust struck the deck and lifted the tail of her borrowed coat. The salt on her lips was sharp, almost sweet, and beneath it the older taste of coal smoke and the varnish that still clung to the inside of Marcus's travelling case. She tasted the discipline of the last fortnight in that small, bitter cocktail: the seamstress in Liège who cut a woman's curves into a boy's straightness, the chaplain's widow who traded her silence for the deed to a strip of meadow, the forger in Brussels whose hand never trembled when he inked the signature of a dead officer onto leave papers.
She had committed the lie to muscle and bone.
Coraline fixed her gaze on the white seam where the water met the sky and refused to blink. Across that narrow stretch of grey, England waited with its mourning cloths, its closed ledgers, its inquiries into the matter of the second son of Lord Ashworth of Kent. Somewhere in Westminster a clerk had already stamped the file of Lieutenant Marcus Ashworth with the round red seal that meant presumed dead, estate to revert . Somewhere in the family vault in Canterbury, a marble slab had been carved in anticipation, the date of death left mercifully blank.
She had bribed a registrar in Ypres to fill that blank with the date of her brother's last letter home.
The packet rolled, and a gull screamed overhead, a ragged sound torn from the throat of the wind. Below her boots the deck planks were slick with brine, and the thrum of the engine travelled up through her calves and settled in her spine. The vibration was almost familiar; Marcus had always said the first thing a soldier learned was the rhythm of the thing that carried him toward the place where he might be killed.
She had not been able to sleep on the crossing. Every creak of timber had sounded to her like the groan of a horse taking a rifle ball. Every shout of the crew had reached her ears as the call of a sergeant in a language she did not speak. Somewhere in the packet's forward hold lay a tin strongbox strapped beneath a berth, and inside it the letters she had promised her mother never to open and the heirloom she had sworn to the dying colonel of her brother's regiment she would deliver with her own hands.
The colonel had begged her to let one of the men go instead. He had reasoned, shouted, wept, and finally pressed his forehead against her knuckles in the manner of an old soldier who had forgotten she was not, in fact, a boy of seventeen. She had withdrawn her hand gently and said only, It is a matter of family .
She had not told him that the letters were not the true cargo. The letters were the alibi, the polite fiction, the reason a respectable woman might cross a war. The heirloom was the reason she had cut off her hair.
The wind shifted, and the coast of England sharpened into focus: a low smudge of green at first, then the darker line of Dover's cliffs, then the pale geometry of the harbour works. A working boat tacked close, its sails brown with tar and age, and the men aboard regarded her with the incurious eyes of sailors who had seen every kind of passenger the Continent could vomit onto their decks. She did not nod to them. Marcus had taught her that a soldier's first duty on a foreign shore was to look as though he had business there.
She had business. She had the name of an inn near the harbour, the address of a solicitor in the city, and the date of a memorial service to which she had not been invited but to which she meant to walk unannounced, in her brother's name, and claim what was left of him.
The packet-boat rounded the breakwater, and the harbour opened before her: a forest of masts, a clutter of coal sheds, a customs house flying the cross of St George. The smell of the place rolled up to meet her: brine again, but thicker, laced with the fish-scale reek of the morning catch, the warm animal musk of the cart horses on the quay, and beneath it all the acrid tang of tobacco smoke drifting from the open door of a sailor's pub. A bell clanged somewhere amidships, the sound flat and final, and the crew began the slow choreography of mooring.
Coraline breathed in through her nose and let the air out through the set line of her mouth.
The harbour master would demand her papers. The customs officer would ask the purpose of her visit. She had rehearsed the answers in five languages and four dialects, and she had committed to memory the limp, slightly bored tone of a young officer returning from leave to settle the affairs of a dead father. The accent she had practiced with a tutor in Brussels, an émigré who had once taught elocution to the daughters of the late king and who had wept when he understood why she needed the lessons.
She could feel the weight of the strongbox beneath her ribs even now, the tin pressing against the old bruise where the lid of Marcus's campaign chest had caught her the night she packed his things.
The gangway banged down onto the quay with a hollow clang, and the first of the passengers moved forward: a clerk in a stained coat, a pair of nuns with baskets, a soldier with his arm in a sling who walked past her without seeing her. The soldier's boots were black with mud, and the mud was the colour of the fields around Ypres, and she had to look away.
She looked away, and the wind chose that moment to lift the collar of her brother's coat and press the wool against the back of her neck, warm and smelling faintly of him.
He had worn lavender at the wrists, where the cuffs had frayed. He had eaten apples with the peel still on. He had written to her every Sunday in a hand so neat she could almost read it without spectacles.
She swallowed.
The harbour master was a square man with a red beard and the small, suspicious mouth of a man who had stopped believing in paper some years before. He stepped forward into the press of disembarking passengers and raised his voice above the noise.
"Papers, if you please. Line forms to the left."
The clerk and the nuns moved to the left. The wounded soldier moved to the left, his empty sleeve pinned flat across his chest.
Coraline moved to the left.
The tin strongbox pressed against her ribs. The collar of Marcus's coat pressed against the back of her neck. The English wind, saltier than the French, colder than the French, pressed against her face.
She had crossed the Channel. She had not yet set foot on English soil. The customs officer's table waited, and on it a ledger in which her brother's name would appear, in a careful clerk's hand, as having returned from leave to settle the affairs of the late Lieutenant Marcus Ashworth, presumed dead in the service of the Crown.
She had written the date of his death on the papers herself. She had signed them in his hand. She had practised the signature so often she could almost forget which of the two of them had first learned to make the capital M .
"Next."
The harbour master's voice, flat and bored.
Coraline stepped up to the table.
The papers lay in her breast pocket, folded twice, the creases sharp as the edge of a sword. The letters lay in the tin strongbox in the hold, lashed beneath a berth, guarded by a sailor she had paid in advance. The heirloom lay in the same box, wrapped in a square of black silk.
She placed her hand over her breast pocket.
She placed her other hand on the edge of the customs table.
She breathed in.
The wind off the harbour tasted of iron and brine and the distant, acrid smoke of the foundries in Dover. The bells of the rigging overhead clanged a slow, irregular rhythm. The wounded soldier at the end of the line coughed once, a wet, tearing sound, and then was silent.
The harbour master's eyes, small and grey and very tired, rose to her face.
"Your papers, sir."
The harbour master's eyes held hers for one long breath.
"Your papers, sir."
Coraline set the documents on the scarred wood. The harbour master did not look at them immediately. He looked at her hands. They were, she knew, a problem. The nails were clean. The fingers were uncalloused. There was no coal-dust in the whorls of her thumbs, no rope-roughened palms, no scar across the webbing where a week of hauling nets would have left a thin white line.
She had thought of gloves. She had decided against them. A labourer wore gloves. A lady wore gloves. A smuggler who could afford them wore gloves too, but only the clever ones, and the clever ones did not come through the customs she'd on a Tuesday morning with the Calais packet leaking through the soles of their boots.
The harbour master looked at her boots. He looked back at her hands.
"Your hands, sir."
"A little sand from the quay." She kept her voice level, a little bored. "You will find I have been unwell. I have not been able to work of late."
He turned a page. He did not turn it.
"As you will see, sir. Lieutenant Ashworth. Late of the Fifth. Returned from leave to settle his brother's estate. My brother was lost at sea, sir. I am the only one left to see to the house."
The harbour master read. She watched his eyes move. He was a slow reader, or a careful one. Outside, a gull screamed. The harbour fog pressed at the open side of the she'd, grey and heavy.
"Lieutenant Ashworth." He set down the page. "I see no Lieutenant Ashworth on the crossing list. Only a Major Beauchamp and his lady, a merchant, a priest, and a quantity of freight."
"I came by the packet, sir. The small boat. I was unwell. I paid the boatman separately."
He looked up. He waited.
She waited.
Outside, the customs she'd door banged open against its stopper. A man came in, or half came in. He leaned heavily on the frame, one hand pressed to his side, his breath coming in short, audible hitches. He wore the dark blue of a captain in one of the line regiments, the braid gone, the insignia missing. His face was very young, and very white, and there was a dark, half-dried stain down the left side of his coat that was not rain.
The harbour master sighed.
"Captain. You know you are not to enter the she'd."
"I know." The young captain pushed off the frame and came forward with the careful, deliberate steps of a man who suspected his legs might not be entirely his. "I am escorting a lady. A relative of my father's house. She is travelling under my protection, and I would thank you to see her through without the usual bother."
"And your name, Captain?"
"Devereaux. Captain Lucien Devereaux, late of the Twentieth. I have papers. Somewhere." He put his hand to his side and winced. "I was set upon last night on the Folkestone road. By whom I cannot say, as I had the great misfortune to be insensible for the relevant portion. I have a letter here from my father, the Count, which I am happy to present for the perusal of any officer of His Majesty's Customs who would care to know my father's views on the matter."
He produced a letter from his breast pocket. He did not hand it over. He held it between two fingers as a man holds a card he is not entirely sure he wishes to play.
The harbour master looked at the letter. He looked at the captain's coat. He looked at the stain on the captain's coat, which was, in the grey harbour light, very clearly blood.
"Captain Devereaux." He said the name without inflection. "Your father is the Count of whom?"
"Of whom there is, sir, only one with that style in the present generation. The former ambassador. The present exile." The captain's voice was very level. "My father is a man who has taken some small interest in the proceedings of His Majesty's government of late. I am sure his interest would survive the news that his son had been detained at Dover while wearing half a highwayman's blood on his coat."
The harbour master looked at the letter again. He reached for it. The captain let him take it. The harbour master read. He turned the page. He turned it back. He set it down on the table with the air of a man setting down something he would rather not have touched.
"Your lady's name, Captain?"
"A relative of my father's house. A connection by marriage. A connection in some difficulty, which is why I am here, and not at my post." The captain put his hand to his side again, more firmly this time. "Her papers are in order. I have seen them."
"You have seen them, sir."
"I have seen them. I have no objection to them."
The harbour master looked at Coraline. He looked at the captain. He looked at the captain's coat.
He stamped her papers.
"Next," he said.
---
Outside, the fog closed over them at once. The captain walked several paces before he stopped and put one hand against the wall of a customs warehouse and stood there, breathing.
"You should not lean against the wall, sir." Coraline kept her voice low. The harbour she'd door was still open behind them. A sailor was watching them from the quay edge with an expression that was, she thought, professionally incurious. "It will not help the wound."
"The wound is not my concern at present, miss." He did not look at her. He was watching the fog. "The wound is a minor matter, and will keep. Your hands are my concern at present."
"My hands."
"Your hands, yes. They are the hands of a lady who has never held a broom in earnest, and the harbour master is not a fool, although he plays one in the afternoon. I observed him observing them. I observed him not observing them when I produced my father's letter. You owe my father a debt, miss. He is a man who collects them, with interest."
"I beg your pardon."
"You do not beg my pardon." He pushed off the wall and walked on. His gait was not quite steady. "You owe my father a debt, and I will be the one to call it in. You will walk with me to the inn at the top of the hill. You will take a room. You will remain in that room until I send for you. You will, in particular, not walk down to the quay alone, where a great number of interested persons are at this moment waiting to see who steps off the Calais packet, and where a still greater number of interested persons will be very glad to know that a Lieutenant Ashworth has returned to Dover, alive, on a Tuesday, in the fog."
She did not move.
He stopped. He turned. He looked at her for the first time, properly, his eyes dark and very tired and quite, quite sharp.
"Miss."
"Captain."
"You have a letter. You have, I am informed, a letter. A letter which my father would very much like to see, and which he is, in fact, expecting to see, since I was set upon last night by persons whose interest in my letter case was rather more marked than their interest in my purse. I was not robbed, miss. I was read."
"I have no letter, sir."
"You have a letter. You have a great many letters, by all accounts. You have letters which were not in my father's possession when I left Paris, and which my father very particularly wished me to place in his possession before I was to be set upon, as I was, on the road from Folkestone. I was not set upon by accident, miss. I was set upon by appointment. Someone knew I was coming. Someone knew what I was carrying. Someone did not get what I was carrying, because what I was carrying was, in fact, in my breast pocket when I was coshed, and in someone else's breast pocket when I woke up in a ditch. The ditch was not mine. The ditch belonged to a man who had been dead for some time. The ditch was a public ditch. I had no claim to it. The person who put me in it had no claim to what was in my breast pocket, and yet they have it, and I do not."
He stopped. He put his hand to his side. He took a breath.
"I am, miss, in the position of a man who has lost a letter of considerable importance to a man of considerable ill-temper. I am in the further position of a man who has been coshed, and whose wound is, in fact, beginning to be of some concern to me. I am in the still further position of a man who has just lied to a harbour master on behalf of a lady whose hands are a lady's hands, and whose boots are not a lady's boots, but whose papers are, in fact, a lieutenant's papers, and whose name is not, in fact, Lieutenant Ashworth, although it is the name on the papers, and which papers I have, in fact, not seen, since the harbour master saw them before I did."
He took another breath. The fog pressed at his mouth when he exhaled.
"Miss. I am asking you, with the greatest possible politeness, and in consideration of the fact that I have just placed my family's name, in my father's hand, between you and a harbour master's curiosity, whether you will do me the very great honour of telling me whether you have, in fact, any letters in your possession which my father would consider to be his, by right of purchase, by right of service, or by right of a quite unreasonable expense incurred in Calais on the eleventh of last month."
The fog had closed in further. She could see the quay edge from here. She could see, very faintly, the shape of a man standing at it who was not a sailor. He was wearing a coat that was too good for the quay. He was watching the customs she'd door with the patient, incurious air of a man who was not, in fact, a sailor.
"My name is Coraline Ashworth." She kept her voice low. "I am the sister of Lieutenant Marcus Ashworth. My brother is dead. He died, sir, in the service of a cause which your father, in his great expense in Calais on the eleventh of last month, did not, I think, consider to be his own."
"Your brother."
"My brother. Yes."
"Your brother is dead."
"My brother is dead. He died in Paris, sir, on the night of the eleventh of last month, in a house which your father, in his great expense in Calais on the eleventh of last month, did not consider to be his own, and which house I am given to understand contained, at the time of his death, a letter which your father did consider to be his own, and which letter my brother, in his last moments, placed upon his person, and which letter I, in the exercise of a last good office, have removed from his person, and which letter is, at this present moment, sir, in a strongbox in the hold of the Calais packet, lashed beneath a berth, guarded by a sailor I have paid in advance, and which sailor is, at this present moment, sir, waiting, with a great show of patience, for me to walk down to the quay and claim the box, and which box I will not, in fact, claim, sir, until you have told me what you intend to do with the letter when you have it, which you will not have until I have decided to give it to you, which I have not, sir, decided to give to you."
The captain put his hand to his side. He took a breath. The breath caught. He coughed. The cough was not a good one.
"In the first instance," he said, when he could speak, "I should like to sit down."
---
The inn at the top of the hill was called the Ship. The name had been painted on the lintel in a hand that had given up halfway through the S . The landlord was a man of about fifty with a face like a week-old pudding and an expression that suggested he had been asked, before, to mind his own business, and had complied. He showed them to a small parlour at the back. He brought a basin of water. He brought a bowl. He brought a candle. He did not bring questions.
The captain sat down on the edge of a chair that had been intended for an older man. He took off his coat. The wound was in his left side, below the ribs, and it was not, as he had said, a minor matter. It was a puncture, an inch across, the edges ragged, the bleeding slowed but not stopped. He had packed it with a piece of his shirt, and the packing was soaked through.
"May I?" Coraline took the candle. She knelt. She unwrapped the packing. The captain looked at the ceiling. He did not flinch.
"It will need stitching."
"It will, in fact, need stitching. I am aware of that." He kept his eyes on the ceiling. "I am also aware that I am asking a lady whose hands are a lady's hands to do something which her hands have not done before, and which her hands may, in fact, not do well."
"My hands have done this before."
"Your hands."
"My hands, sir. My mother taught me. My mother was a woman of some resource, in the country, and we had, for a time, a man who did this work, but my mother was of a disposition that did not consider him a comfort, and she sent him away, and I learned, in his place, what he had known, and which I have not, in fact, forgotten."
She set the candle on the table. She looked at him.
"I will need a needle. I will need thread. I will need a clean cloth. I will need, sir, for you to sit very still, and to bite, if you must, on this."
She held out a leather strap from her bag, the strap of a small strongbox she had carried across the Channel, the strongbox which had held the heirloom.
He looked at the strap. He looked at her.
"Your brother," he said. "He was the man in Paris."
"My brother."
"The man my father paid to carry a letter from Prince Adrian to certain persons in England who were interested in the prince's restoration to a throne from which he was deposed, in his infancy, by a current king, and to which throne the prince has, in his maturity, an inconvenient claim, and which claim the prince wishes, by means of this letter, to urge upon the attention of those persons in England who might, by means of a small conspiracy and a moderate amount of treason, restore him to it."
"My brother."
"Your brother was a brave man, miss. I am told he carried the letter for some weeks, through some danger, and that he died, in the end, in a house in Paris which my father did not, in fact, own, but in which my father had, at that time, an interest, and which house was visited, on the night of the eleventh, by persons who were not, in fact, my father's persons, and who had, at that time, a contrary interest, and which persons did, in fact, kill your brother, and did not, in fact, find the letter, and which letter is, at this present moment, sir, in a strongbox in the hold of the Calais packet, lashed beneath a berth."
He put his hand to his side. He winced.
"I will, miss, sit still. I will bite on the strap. I will, in fact, do whatever you require. And when you have done with the needle, miss, I will ask you, with the greatest possible politeness, and in consideration of the fact that you have just saved my life at some cost to my comfort, whether you will, in fact, give me the letter. And you will say no, miss, because you have not, in fact, decided. And I will say that is very well. And we will go from there."
She threaded the needle. She held the candle closer.
"Captain."
"Miss."
"You set the watch. I will stitch."
He set his teeth. She set the needle.
---
Later, after the stitching, after the brandy the landlord brought without being asked, after the captain had fallen asleep in the chair with the careful, exhausted air of a man who had not slept in two nights, Coraline sat by the candle and looked at the door of the small parlour and considered the strongbox in the hold and the sailor she had paid and the quay and the man in the too-good coat who was not, in fact, a sailor.
She had crossed the Channel. She had not yet set foot on English soil. She was, in fact, sitting in a parlour at the Ship, at the top of the hill, in Dover, in the fog, with a wounded captain asleep in a chair and a strongbox lashed beneath a berth in the hold of the Calais packet.
She stood. She crossed to the captain. He was asleep, but lightly. His hand was on his breast. His breast pocket was empty. The letter was not there.
She put her hand into his breast pocket. She felt the lining. She found, sewn into the lining, a second pocket, and in the second pocket, a letter.
She drew it out. She held it to the candle.
It was not addressed to the captain. It was addressed to her brother. The hand was not the captain's. The hand was, she thought, a hand she had not seen before, a fine, slanted hand, the hand of a man who had been taught to write by a man who had been taught to write by a man who had been taught to write.
She broke the seal. She read.
It was from Prince Adrian of Aldenwyck. It was addressed to her brother. It was, in substance, a letter of a kind she had not expected, and of a kind she had, in some part of her, always known she would one day read.
It was a personal letter. It was the letter of a man who had been a prince, and who was now an exile, and who had been, for twenty years, in receipt of letters from a young officer of the English line who had served, in his youth, in the campaign that had deposed him, and who had, in his conscience, not been able to forget the prince he had helped to put down. The prince wrote to her brother as to a friend. The prince wrote to her brother as to a brother. The prince wrote to her brother as to the one man in England who had, in his conscience, the courage to do what the prince could not, in his exile, do for himself.
The prince wrote to beg her brother to come home. The prince wrote to beg her brother to come home and to raise, in the north, in the country of the prince's birth, the standard of a house that had been put down by a house that had no right to it. The prince wrote to beg her brother to come home, and to bring with him the heirloom, and to give the heirloom to the prince's friends, in the name of the prince's cause, in the name of the prince's house, in the name of the prince's mother, who had been, before her marriage, a woman of the north, and whose blood was, in the prince, not yet dry.
The prince wrote that the heirloom was the key. The prince wrote that the heirloom had been, for twenty years, in the keeping of the Ashworths. The prince wrote that the Ashworths had been, for twenty years, the friends of his house. The prince wrote that the heirloom was, in fact, a signet, a ring, a seal, a token, by which the prince's friends in the north would know the prince's man when he came among them, and would follow him, and would, by means of this following, restore the prince to the throne that had been taken from him, in his infancy, by a king who had no right to it, and which throne the prince would, by means of this ring, by means of this seal, by means of this token, reclaim.
The prince wrote that the heirloom was in the keeping of the Ashworths. The prince wrote that the heirloom was, in fact, in the keeping of the last of the Ashworths.
The prince wrote that the last of the Ashworths was, in fact, her brother.
She read the letter twice. She read it a third time. She folded it. She put it back into the captain's pocket. She sewed the pocket shut.
She sat down by the candle. She put her hands in her lap. She looked at them. They were the hands of a lady. They were the hands of a woman who had, that night, stitched a wound. They were the hands of a woman who had, that day, signed her brother's name on a harbour master's papers. They were the hands of a woman who had, in the strongbox in the hold of the Calais packet, the heirloom of a prince, and the letter of a prince, and the last office of a brother who had died, in Paris, in the service of a cause which had not, in his lifetime, been his own.
She had crossed the Channel. She had set foot on English soil. She had, in the fog, in the parlour, in the small hours of a Tuesday morning in Dover, inherited a treasonous errand.
She had not yet decided what to do with it.
The captain stirred in the chair. His hand went to his side. He did not wake.
She stood. She crossed to the window. She looked out. The fog was thinner. She could see, faintly, the shape of the quay. The shape of the man in the too-good coat was still there. He was still watching the customs she'd door.
She drew the curtain. She sat down by the candle. She took out the letter she had written to herself, in the train, on the crossing, the letter she had not yet sent, the letter she had not yet addressed.
She addressed it. She sealed it. She set it on the table, beside the candle, in the small parlour of the Ship, in Dover, in the fog, on the morning of the day on which she would, in fact, claim the strongbox from the hold, and in the claiming of which she would, in fact, begin.
The candle guttered. The captain stirred. The letter lay on the table.
She did not yet know what she would do with the heirloom. She did not yet know what she would do with the letter. She did not yet know what she would do with the errand.
She knew only that the errand was hers, and that the heirloom was hers, and that the letter was her brother's, and that her brother was dead, and that the errand would, in the morning, require her to walk down to the quay, in the fog, and to claim the box from the sailor, and to walk back up the hill, past the man in the too-good coat, and to sit down again in the parlour of the Ship, and to consider, with the captain, what was to be done with the heirloom, and the letter, and the errand.
She put her hands in her lap. She looked at them. They were very steady.
The candle burned. The captain slept. The letter lay on the table.
In the morning, she would begin.