Read Chapter 17: A Secret Meeting

The bookshop smelled of dust and old paper, a comfort Evelyn had learned to associate with Ashworth’s safe houses. She arrived early, as he had taught her—never keep a dead drop waiting—and took a position by the window in the travel section, a heavy atlas open before her like a shield.

He came in at half past the hour, wearing a different coat than the one he’d worn in the churchyard, a grey wool affair with the collar turned up. He did not look at her. He moved to the counter and asked the clerk, in a voice pitched for the shop’s quiet, whether they carried any charts of the North Sea.

Evelyn closed her atlas and set it back on the shelf. She browsed the shelf beside her until the clerk nodded toward a back room, and Ashworth disappeared through a door marked *PRIVATE — STAFF ONLY*. She gave him forty seconds, then followed.

The back room was cramped, stacked with unsorted boxes and a single wooden chair. Ashworth stood with his back to the wall, arms crossed, watching the door as she slipped through. He relaxed almost imperceptibly when he saw her.

“You made it,” he said. “Good.”

“The grey-haired man was outside my boarding house this morning,” she said. “Standing across the street, pretending to read a newspaper. He was gone by the time I left, but he was there.”

Ashworth’s jaw tightened. “He’s persistent. We’ll need to vary your routes to the meetings.”

“I have something else.” She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out the folded copy of the *Morning Post* she had collected from her doorstep. She opened it to page five, where a notice in the personal columns read: *To E—tell the baker the scones are cooling, and the orchid in the window has lost its color. Wednesday at tea.*

“It was on the step this morning,” she said. “No envelope. Just folded into the paper like an advertisement.”

Ashworth took the page, scanning the lines. “The orchid. That’s the same flower as the note you received before the suspension.”

“Either the same person wrote it, or someone is imitating them to draw me out. But whoever left it knew my route well enough to watch my habits.” She paused. “And they addressed it to E. Not Evelyn. Not Miss Hartley. E.”

“Terms of endearment,” Ashworth said slowly. “That matches the earlier note as well. The pet names.”

“Thomas’s private names for me.” She heard her own voice harden. “Someone is using them. I need to know whether the baker refers to Lady Fenmore or whether someone else has been listening to my conversations with Thomas—or reading his letters.”

Ashworth’s eyes darkened at the mention of the letters. “If his correspondence has been compromised, then the whole network knew about you before you ever walked into Room 40.”

“I considered that.” Evelyn took the page back from him. “I also considered that I don’t have a choice. I’m suspended. I have no access to the intercepts. If I don’t go to this tea shop, the source may not offer another invitation—and may assume I’ve been turned or arrested.”

“And if it’s a trap?”

“Then I take my chances walking into it with my eyes open, which is better than being led blind.” She folded the paper and tucked it back into her coat. “The shop is on Frith Street. Tea at three. I’ll be there.”

“I’ll position myself across the street.”

“If you’re spotted with me, the suspension turns into something worse.”

“I’m already compromised,” he said quietly. “One more thread pulled doesn’t change the unraveling.”

The tea shop on Frith Street was small and unassuming, its windows steamed from the afternoon rush. Evelyn arrived at a quarter to three and took a table near the back, the kind of table with sight lines to both the front door and the kitchen entrance. She ordered a pot of Darjeeling and waited.

At three minutes past the hour, the door opened. Evelyn had prepared herself for a stranger, or for the charwoman, or even for Voss. She had not prepared herself for Lady Fenmore.

The older woman moved with the same measured elegance Evelyn remembered from the Pimlico sitting room, her dark wool coat cut neat and her hat pinned at a precise angle. She carried a small leather handbag and a folded umbrella, and she smiled as she crossed toward Evelyn’s table, as though they were old friends meeting for a routine chat.

“Miss Hartley,” she said, taking the seat across from Evelyn without waiting for an invitation. “I apologize for the theatricality of the note. I found it necessary.”

Evelyn kept her hands steady around her teacup. “You sent the orchid.”

“The first one, yes. I hoped it might reach you before your suspension. The second—” She paused, her dark eyes sharp. “The second was not mine.”

Evelyn’s pulse flickered. “Someone else used the same phrasing?”

“Or read my original correspondence. Either way, I believe I am not the only one reaching out to you. Which is precisely why I insisted we meet in person, and precisely why someone is watching both our movements.” Lady Fenmore drew a folded paper from her handbag and slid it across the table beneath the rim of the saucer, her gloved fingers brushing the porcelain as if rearranging the sugar. “I don’t have much time. They watch me more closely now—I’ve noticed it these past weeks, ever since the incident at the refuge.”

Evelyn slid the paper into her own coat pocket without looking at it. “Why are you helping me?”

Lady Fenmore’s smile thinned. “Because I buried a husband who spent his last years in the service of the crown, and I will not watch that service rot from within while everyone looks in the wrong direction.” She toyed with her spoon. “I suspect the head of Room 40 himself.”

The words landed like a blow to the chest. Evelyn forced herself to breathe. “Commander Griffiths?”

“I have no direct proof—he is careful, and he has surrounded himself with loyal men. But I have seen patterns in the last year. Intercepts failing at critical moments. German counter-operations succeeding with suspicious precision. And a tendency among his subordinates to be transferred or discredited whenever they grow too close to a particular branch of naval intelligence.” Lady Fenmore leaned forward. “Your Mr. Ashworth—I understand he has been marginalized recently.”

Evelyn said nothing. The silence was the only answer she could safely give.

“This is not an accusation I make lightly,” Lady Fenmore continued. “But I have known Commander Griffiths for twenty years. He has changed—perhaps under pressure, perhaps under something else. I can only tell you what I see.”

“Who else?” Evelyn asked quietly. “On the list?”

Lady Fenmore’s gaze flicked to the coat pocket where the paper had disappeared. “You’ll see the names there. I ask only that you consider each carefully before you act. One of them may surprise you.”

The words hung in the air with a weight Evelyn didn’t like. “Why contact me now, after the suspension? Why not approach Ashworth?”

“Because Mr. Ashworth is known to them. You are not—not yet. You are the variable they haven’t accounted for, and so you are the one who can still move where they cannot see.” Lady Fenmore rose, adjusting her gloves with a delicate motion. “Be careful, Miss Hartley. The moment they realize you are no longer merely stumbling, they will stop watching and begin hunting.”

She was gone before Evelyn could ask another question, the door chime rattling in her wake.

Evelyn waited five minutes, then paid her bill and left by the kitchen exit. In the back alley she unfolded the paper.

A list of six names, written in small, precise handwriting. She recognized several—members of the Admiralty, a liaison she had seen once in Griffiths’s office. She read through them once, then twice.

The name at the bottom stopped her cold.

*Edward Hartley.*

Thomas’s brother. Alive. Listed as a possible contact point for the German network—a name no one in Room 40 had ever mentioned to her.

Evelyn folded the paper carefully and slipped it back into her coat. She stepped out of the alley and walked west toward the river, her mind churning. Lady Fenmore had planted doubt in the highest ranks of the service—and a brother Evelyn had been told had died in France three years ago.

One of those names was a straw man. The other was a knife.