Read Chapter 16: A Suspended Trust

The summons came at half past eight the next morning, before Evelyn had even finished her tea. A messenger boy in a dripping oilskin handed her a sealed envelope stamped with the Admiralty crest. Inside, one line: *Report to Commander Hollis at once. Do not pass through the main gate.*

That last instruction turned her blood cold.

She walked through the drizzle to the side entrance off Horse Guards Parade, the one used for couriers and censored mail. The guard recognised her, nodded, and let her through without a word. The corridors of Room 40, normally a hive of murmured cipher-talk and typing clatter, felt hollow. Doors were shut. Eyes she caught through glass partitions slid away.

Commander Hollis sat behind his desk with his hands folded, the morning light catching the silver in his moustache. He did not invite her to sit.

“Miss Hartley,” he began, “you were observed last evening at a public house in Shadwell.”

Evelyn’s stomach dropped, but she kept her face quiet. “I went for a walk, sir. I lost my bearings.”

“In Shadwell? From Westminster? That is a considerable detour.” He picked up a fold of paper. “You were seen speaking with a charwoman employed at your boarding house. A woman known to frequent establishments also patronised by persons of interest to this office.”

“She returned a brooch I‘d misplaced. I thanked her. That was all.”

Hollis set the paper down. His jaw worked once, slowly. “I want to believe you, Miss Hartley. You’ve shown real aptitude. But the rules of this section exist for a reason, and one of them is that personnel do not socialise with—or accept gifts from—domestic staff who keep company with German sympathisers.”

“It was a brooch, sir. Not a secret.”

“That’s what a clever agent would say.” He looked at her for a long moment. “I’m placing you on temporary suspension. Administrative review. Your security clearance is revoked pending inquiry.”

The word *suspension* hung in the air like a dropped cypher key.

“Sir, I have work—translations in progress.”

“They will be reassigned.” He stood, collecting a folder from his desk. “Turn in your badge and your codebook to the duty clerk on the way out. You’re not to enter the building again until you hear from me directly.”

There was no appeal. Not through him, at least. Evelyn removed the thin brass badge from her lapel and set the worn codebook on the corner of his desk. She did not let her hand shake.

She was halfway down the corridor when a door opened to her left. Ashworth’s face, pale and tight, met hers. He glanced both ways and stepped close enough that his voice would not carry.

“What happened?”

“Hollis. Suspension. The pub.”

His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. “I argued for you.”

“Then you shouldn’t have. It makes you look compromised.”

“I am compromised.” He said it without irony, his eyes fixed on hers. “But I know who you are, Evelyn. And I know what you’re doing. The question is whether you can still do it from the outside.”

Evelyn blinked. “You want me to continue the investigation. Unauthorised.”

“I want you to continue the investigation,” he corrected, “so that I can claim plausible deniability if it collapses. If you’re caught, I will have no choice but to disavow you. Do you understand what that means?”

“It means you’re asking me to risk my neck without anyone officially knowing I’m doing it.”

“It means,” he said quietly, “that I’m trusting you more than I’ve trusted anyone in years. And that if this goes badly, I will lose my position—possibly worse. So yes. I’m risking myself for you. That is the bargain.”

Evelyn studied him. The discipline in his posture, the slight strain at the corner of his mouth. He was not a man who gave confidences lightly. That he was offering one now, in a corridor where anyone could see them, told her more than any memorandum could.

“The bookshop,” she said. “Thursday. Same time.”

He gave a short nod. “If you’re being watched, lose them first. Do not come if you have any doubt. The trap will proceed regardless.”

“And if it doesn’t work?”

“Then we will know that Parfitt is not our channel, and we will have burned my only real asset without learning anything.” His voice was flat, practical. “I’d rather not dwell on that possibility.”

She had one more question, the one that had been gnawing at her since the night before. “Why do you believe me? About the pub? I could have been passing information. You’ve no proof otherwise.”

Ashworth’s expression shifted—just a fraction, but she caught it. Something almost like warmth, quickly suppressed.

“Because if you were the leak,” he said, “you’d be far too clever to meet a contact in a pub where you’d be recognised. And because” — he paused, the discipline cracking just slightly — “I’ve read your cyphers. You know what you’re doing. Whatever you were doing in Shadwell, it wasn’t treason.”

He stepped back, straightening his tunic. “Take the next three days to unravel this, Miss Hartley. Outside. Quietly. If you find something, meet me Thursday at the bookshop and we’ll adjust the trap. If you find nothing, we run it as planned, and we pray.”

He turned and walked back toward his office without another word.

---

The rain had stopped by the time Evelyn reached her boarding house, but the damp clung to her coat like suspicion. Susannah, the youngest of Mrs Aldgate’s girls, met her in the hall with a letter on a silver tray.

“Came for you this morning, miss. Postmark’s Charing Cross.”

Evelyn did not open it until she was in her room with the door locked. Inside, a single slip of paper, the kind used for telegrams. No signature. A short message in a hand she did not recognise:

*The old lady sends regards. She says the sparrow sings best when the nest is empty. Thursday. Green table. Ask about the orchids.*

She read it three times, the tingle of familiarity working its way up her spine. The sparrow—a nickname Thomas had used for her in letters, full of affection and private jokes. And orchids. He had once bought her an orchid from Covent Garden, a small, delicate thing, insisting it reminded him of her: elegant, rare, worth the trouble.

Someone knew about the orchid. Someone knew about the sparrow.

Only one person could have known both.

Evelyn set the note down and stared at her reflection in the window glass. Thomas’s brother was listed with the wounded. His letters had stopped six months before he disappeared. And yet here was a coded invitation to a tea shop in Charing Cross, phrased with an intimacy that only family could possess.

She turned the note over. The obverse bore a printed advertisement for a florist on Fleet Street—*Fenmore’s Greenhouse: Orchids and Rarities, by appointment only.*

Lady Fenmore. The refuge. The trap.

Evelyn’s chest tightened. Either the old woman was reaching out to her independently, or the network had intercepted something private and was using it to lure her. The difference was the difference between an ally and a noose.

She had three days before Ashworth’s trap would spring. She had one afternoon to decide whether to walk into a tea shop and trust a woman who may have been using her all along.

Outside, a grey-haired man in a long coat lit a cigarette below her window, staring up at the first-floor rooms with idle patience.

Evelyn tucked the note into her sleeve. The orchids, she decided, were worth the risk.

For Thomas’s sake. For Ashworth’s.

And for the answers she had been denied long enough.