Read Chapter 11: The Penny Post

The note arrived with the morning post, folded into a square of cream-colored paper so fine it might have come from a stationer’s shop in Mayfair. Eleanor slit the seal with her breakfast knife, expecting an invitation or perhaps a bill she could not pay.

The words inside were written in a cramped, deliberate hand:

*Stop writing, or write for me. The choice is yours, but make it before Thursday. You will not like the alternative.*

No salutation. No signature. Only the faint impression of a signet ring pressed into the wax — a crest she could not quite make out, blurred as if the sender had pressed too hard.

Eleanor set the note down beside her teacup, willing her fingers not to tremble. Her gaze drifted to the window, where London’s gray morning light fell across the square. She read the note twice more, committing every curve and slant of the letters to memory.

Then she turned it over.

The postmark was smudged, but legible enough: *Wapping.*

Her stomach dropped.

Wapping. The district where Mr. Grimsby, the moneylender, kept his cramped and odious offices above a chandler’s shop. The man who had been pressing her for payment on her mother’s debts since the day she arrived in England.

But Grimsby did not know she was Mr. Ellery.

Did he?

She forced herself to breathe. The threat was not specific — *stop writing, or write for me.* Whoever sent this knew she was the columnist. Knew her schedule. Knew her publisher’s deadline.

Jarvis knew. She had bought his silence, or thought she had. But Jarvis had been bribed before. What was to stop him from taking a second payment from a second master?

The butler appeared at the door as if summoned by her suspicion, carrying a fresh pot of tea. She watched him set it down with his usual precision, his face a mask of servile composure.

“Will there be anything else, miss?”

“No, Jarvis. That will be all.”

He bowed and withdrew. Eleanor stared at the door, hating that she could not read the man behind it. She had promised him wages she did not have by noon — a promise she had intended to break with threats of her own. But if Jarvis had already sold her secret elsewhere, her counter-threat was worthless.

She looked again at the handwriting.

There was something familiar about it. The way the *t*’s were crossed — high and sharp, almost impatient. The way the *e*’s looped back on themselves.

She had seen this hand before. On a desk. A rosewood desk in a vast library, littered with papers and ledgers and a catalogue of suspected anonymous authors.

Ashworth’s desk.

Her tea went cold as she turned the possibility over. The Duke of Ashworth had told her, in so many words, that he intended to unmask Mr. Ellery. He had catalogued her name in his ledger. He suspected her — she had seen it in the way he studied her at the archery contest, in the careful precision of his questions.

But this note was not a request for a confession. It was a demand. *Write for me.* A threat.

That did not sound like Ashworth. He was arrogant, yes — infuriatingly so — but he was not a blackmailer. He had spoken of exposing the columnist with the righteousness of a man who believed he was protecting the markets, not plundering them.

Yet she could not shake the familiarity of the hand.

She retrieved her writing desk and pulled out a folded draft of her last column, comparing the letters. No. The penmanship was different — Ellery’s hand was bold and sweeping, deliberately masculine. But the *t*’s…

She pushed the papers aside and pressed her fingers to her temples.

Lord Wexham. He had been hovering at the edges of her life for weeks now, always polite, always present, always watching her with those pale, calculating eyes. He had asked her about Ellery at Lady Markham’s salon, his tone light but probing. He had been in the City the morning she had opened her abandoned account, though he had pretended not to see her.

Wexham had money in the railroad bonds. She knew it from the gossip she collected in the drawing rooms — he had invested heavily in the Great Northern line. If Finch had been manipulating the market, Wexham stood to lose a fortune.

Unless he was not the victim.

Unless he was the puppet master.

She thought of Finch’s disappearance, of the bonds that had become worthless overnight, of her own undelivered column that would have warned investors away. Someone had intercepted that column. Someone had wanted the collapse to happen silently, without warning.

Jarvis had been paid. But who had paid him?

A footman entered to clear the breakfast things. Eleanor folded the note and slid it into her pocket, her mind racing.

“Miss Wentworth?”

She looked up. The footman held a silver tray with a second letter, this one bearing the Ashworth crest.

Her heart seized.

She took it, but did not open it in front of the servant. Only when the door clicked shut did she break the seal and unfold the page.

*My dear Miss Wentworth,*

*I find myself in need of your particular wisdom regarding a matter of some delicacy. Might you spare an hour this afternoon? I shall be at my club, but I can meet you in the park at three.*

*Yours etc.,* *Ashworth*

The handwriting was elegant, measured, nothing at all like the cramped scrawl of the threat. But her eye caught on the *t* in *particular* — crossed high and sharp.

She looked from the letter in her hand to the note in her pocket. High and sharp on both.

No. It could not be. Ashworth had no reason to threaten her — or if he did, he would do it to her face, with that infuriating calm, not through cowardly anonymous letters.

And yet.

The clock on the mantel struck nine. She had three hours until noon, when Jarvis would come to claim his bribe. Five days until Thursday, when her column was due. And now an appointment in the park with a man who might be her blackmailer — or might be the only person in London who could help her unmask the true villain.

She did not know which possibility frightened her more.