Read Chapter 11: The Prisoner's Riddle

The guard’s voice was a low rumble through the iron grate. “You’ve got ten minutes, boy, and if the warden asks, you were never here. I was never here. This conversation never happened.”

Thomas nodded, pressing the last of Robert’s coins into the man’s grimy palm. The guard grunted, slid a heavy key into the lock of the inner cell door, and pushed it open just wide enough for Thomas to slip through.

The stench hit him first—straw gone sour, sweat, and something older and meaner. The cell was narrow, barely wider than his outstretched arms. A single slit of a window let in a column of pale winter light that fell across a figure huddled on a straw pallet.

The man was thin, his beard a tangle of grey and grime. When he lifted his head, his eyes were watery but sharp.

“You’re not the gaoler,” he said, his voice cracked with disuse.

Thomas stepped forward, heart hammering. “I’m looking for a man named Aldous Crane. He served a printer named Finch.”

The prisoner’s gaze flickered. “Who’s asking?”

“Thomas Finch. His son.”

The man—Aldous, if he was Aldous—went very still. Then he laughed, a dry, broken sound. “God’s teeth. You’ve got his eyes. And his stubborn chin, I’d wager.”

Thomas crouched, so his face was level with the prisoner’s. “You knew my father.”

“Knew him?” Aldous shifted, wincing as his chains clinked. “I was his man for eleven years. Carried his ledgers, sharpened his quills, stood guard outside his door while he worked his magic. I was with him the night he vanished.”

Thomas’s breath caught. He had spent three years chasing that night, and here it was, crouching in the straw before him.

“Tell me,” he said.

Aldous studied him for a long moment. “You’re young. But you’re here, aren’t you? Which means you’ve already stirred the hornet’s nest. Good. Your father would have wanted that.”

He cleared his throat, his voice dropping low.

“Your father was not just a printer, boy. He was the Royal Cryptographer—the Queen’s own cipher master. He didn’t print pamphlets and Bibles to earn his bread. He printed secrets. Letters between the crown and its agents, encoded so that if they fell into the wrong hands, they’d read as nothing but harmless trade accounts.”

Thomas felt the floor tilt beneath him. His father—quiet, methodical Simon Finch, who hummed while he set type and taught Thomas to spot pattern in ink—had been in the service of the Queen herself.

“But he was more than that,” Aldous continued. “He was a man of conscience. And that’s what killed him.”

“What do you mean?”

Aldous’s eyes grew distant. “In the spring before he disappeared, he was given a document to encode. A warrant, we later heard—one that would have sent an innocent man to the block. The Secretary of State wanted it made official, sealed with the invisible cipher only your father knew. But your father refused. He said the cipher was for truth, not for murder.”

Thomas’s throat tightened. “Sir William Cecil?”

“I can’t say his name for certain,” Aldous said quickly. “But it was someone high. Someone who could order a man’s death with a stroke of the pen. When your father refused, they took him.”

“Took him where?”

Aldous’s jaw tightened. “I don’t know. But I know who came for him. A man with an eagle on his ring—gold, with a ruby for an eye.”

Thomas’s hand flew to his chest, where the pendant hung beneath his shirt. The ruby. The eagle. His father had given him the pendant the morning he disappeared, pressed it into his palm with a fierce urgency and told him never to take it off.

“The eagle,” Thomas whispered.

“You know it,” Aldous said. “Then you know more than most. That emblem—it belongs to a society of men who answer to no crown. They call themselves the Order of the Gilded Quill. They control the flow of secrets across England—who learns what, when, and how. Your father was one of them, once. But when they asked him to falsify a document, to use his gift to condemn another, he broke with them. And they made him disappear.”

Thomas’s mind raced. The eagle crest on Marcus’s ink order. The eagle on Robert’s ring. The sheet in his father’s hand, hidden in Marcus’s shop.

His father wasn’t a victim of Cecil’s intrigue. He was a victim of his own conscience.

“What happened to him?” Thomas asked, his voice rough. “Is he alive?”

Aldous shook his head slowly. “I was taken the same night. They threw me in here to rot, so I couldn’t talk. I’ve been here three years, waiting for someone to come. I didn’t think it would be you.”

“But my father—“

“I don’t know if he lives,” Aldous said. “But before they took me, he pressed something into my hand. A piece of paper, folded so small I could hide it in the seam of my boot. He told me if anything happened to him, I was to find you and give you this message.”

He reached down, fumbling at the heel of his worn boot. With a grunt of effort, he worked loose a small, folded scrap of paper, yellowed with age and sweat.

Thomas took it with trembling fingers. He unfolded it. The handwriting was unmistakable—his father’s neat, precise hand, the same hand that had taught him to shape every letter.

It was not a message. It was a riddle:

*The key is in the heart of the White Tower.*

Thomas stared at the words. “The White Tower. That’s the Tower of London.”

“Aye,” Aldous said. “But not the fortress as men know it. Your father meant the true heart of it—the room where the crown keeps its oldest prisoners. The one that’s been sealed for a generation. The cell where they keep those who know too much.”

Thomas’s pulse pounded in his ears. The ruby pendant at his throat seemed to grow heavier. He thought of the empty socket in Sir Geoffrey’s jewelled case. The riddle spoke of a key.

“What does the key open?” he asked.

Aldous’s eyes met his, grim. “I don’t know, boy. But I know this: whatever secrets your father died to protect are locked behind that door. And everyone who wants you dead wants that key for themselves.”

A heavy clank echoed from the corridor—the guard’s signal.

“Time’s up,” the guard called through the grate.

Thomas shoved the paper into his boot, stood, and gripped Aldous’s hand through the chains. “I’ll find a way to get you out of here.”

Aldous shook his head. “Don’t waste your strength on an old man. Find the key. Finish what your father started. And boy—“

Thomas paused at the door.

“Trust no one. Not even those who wear the eagle. The Order is everywhere. They may already know you’re coming.”

Thomas slipped through the door as the guard pulled it shut behind him. The iron slammed with a sound like a sentence.

As he hurried out of the prison, the cold London air hit his face, and the riddle burned in his boot.

*The key is in the heart of the White Tower.*

His father had left him a trail. And now, with Sir Geoffrey hunting him and Cecil’s patience wearing thin, that trail led to the one place in London where secrets went to die.

The Tower of London.

Thomas pulled his collar up and started walking, the ruby at his throat glowing warm against his skin.