Read Chapter 4: The Emmendingen Letter

The night air was cold enough to bite, and the Strand lay quiet beneath a sky the colour of old pewter. Thomas huddled in the shadow of a vintner's porch across from Cecil's great house, watching the candlelight shift behind the upper windows. He had been there for two hours, long enough for his fingers to stiffen and his courage to falter a dozen times.

A servant emerged with a lantern, crossing the courtyard toward the stables. Then another, bearing a tray of covered dishes toward the side door. But it was the third figure that made Thomas's heart seize.

Robert.

He came out not by the main doors but by a small wicket gate at the side of the house, wrapped in a heavy cloak despite the mildness of the night. His head was down, his steps quick and purposeful. He carried a satchel pressed close to his side, the way a man carries something he does not wish to lose.

Thomas stepped out of the porch and followed.

Robert turned north, away from the river, toward the warren of streets that fed into Cheapside. He did not look back once. A man with no reason to fear pursuit walks with a different rhythm—this one moved like a hare who knew the hounds were out, even if he could not see them.

The ledger was still in Thomas's possession, wrapped in oilcloth beneath his shirt. He had taken it from the shop before the guards arrived, hidden in the false bottom of his tool chest. It had cost him his master's trust to leave it there, but the pages had called to him all day, their margins whispering of towers and debts and fathers.

He could not simply hand it to Cecil. Not yet. Not when Robert's ring bore the same tower emblem that had been burned into the hidden paper from his mother's necklace.

Robert turned down a narrow lane smelling of fish and tallow, and Thomas nearly lost him in the dark. He pressed himself against a wall as Robert paused at a doorway, knocked three times, and was admitted. The door closed. The street fell silent.

Thomas counted to fifty, then crept to the door. The building was a chandler's shop, its windows dark but for a sliver of light at the back. Through a crack in the shutters he could see Robert seated at a table, a candle burning low between him and a heavy-set man in foreign dress—a French cut to his doublet, a jaunty feather in his cap.

The man slid a purse across the table. Robert took it without counting, tucked it into his satchel.

They spoke in low voices. Thomas could catch only fragments, words that slipped through the warped glass like smoke.

"...the printer's boy..."

"...ledger... already in hand..."

Then the Frenchman leaned forward and said something that made Thomas's blood run cold. The words were in French, delivered with a Gallic shrug: "The White Tower will fall when the eagle flies."

Robert nodded. He rose, shook the man's hand, and moved toward the door.

Thomas did not wait. He slipped back into the shadows of an adjacent doorway, pressing himself thin as paper as Robert emerged and strode back the way they had come. The satchel was heavier now, bulging with the purse.

Thomas let him go.

He had a better destination in mind.

The print shop stood under a cold moon, its windows boarded like a dead man's eyes. Thomas knew the locks, every catch and joint of the place—it had been his second home for three years. He climbed through the coal chute in the rear, a tight squeeze that scraped his ribs raw, and dropped into the cellar where the damp smell of ink had soaked into the very stones.

The presses were still. The type cases sat aligned. Only the desk in the corner had been disturbed, its drawers pulled out and dumped, its contents scattered across the floor. The guards had searched thoroughly, but they had not found the hollow floorboard beneath the press where Old Master Pettifer kept his private stock—a bottle of French wine and, more importantly, the cipher key.

Thomas knelt and pried the board loose. The key was there, written on a thin sheet of vellum in his master's cramped hand: columns of letters and numbers, rearranged alphabet tables, and a note in the margins—"for the ledgers of Sir W.C., as requested."

His master had been more than a printer. He had been a courier.

Thomas set the ledger on the desk and lit a stub of candle, shielding its flame with his palm. The coded margin notes were everywhere, threaded through the columns of figures like veins of silver in rock. He had cracked one already, a simple substitution. But now, with the full key before him, he saw the truth.

The ledger was not a record of transactions.

It was a collection of letters, encoded line by line across the numerical columns. Each page held fragments of correspondence, the true message buried in the arithmetic. Thomas's fingers flew across the pages, matching digits to letters, numbers to words, piecing together a story that made his stomach turn.

He found the one marked *Emmendingen* in the margin, a date from two weeks past.

*To my honoured correspondent,*

*The arrangement proceeds. I have placed the eagle within the household of the falcon, as instructed. He sits at the right hand of the target, trusted, diligent, unnoticed. The White Tower shall not stand. When the debt falls due, we will be ready.*

*Your servant in all things,* *L.D.*

Thomas read it three times, then a fourth. The eagle within the household of the falcon. A spy in Cecil's household, placed there, trusted.

Robert.

The signet ring with the tower emblem. The way he had already known Thomas's name. His presence at the chandler's shop, exchanging money with a foreign agent.

And the debt. The message spoke of a debt falling due. The same word that had been carved into the paper hidden in his mother's necklace—five hundred pounds owed to the Crown. His father's debt.

Thomas stared at the page until the candle guttered and the flame danced close to his fingers.

His father had not vanished because of money. His father had vanished because he had learned this same truth, whatever it was, and someone had made him disappear for it.

The coded ledger was not state property, stolen by his master.

It was proof.

Thomas gathered the pages, tucked the cipher key into his boot, and blew out the candle. He sat in the dark for a long moment, listening to his own heart pound against his ribs.

He had meant to go to Cecil, to warn him of the traitor in his house.

But the traitor was Robert—and Robert had known Thomas's name before Thomas had spoken it. Robert had been waiting for him at Cecil's office. Robert had asked about the ledger with the careful hunger of a man who needed to know whether he had been exposed.

If Thomas walked into Cecil's house alone and unnamed, he might be walking into a trap of Robert's making. Whoever Robert truly served, he was not the simple clerk he pretended to be—and he had the ear of a man who could destroy Thomas with a word.

Thomas rose, brushed the dust from his knees, and climbed back through the coal chute into the night.

He needed to know where Robert went when he was not being watched. He needed to see the man's true masters.

And there was only one way to find out.

He would follow the clerk to the edge of hell if he had to. And if hell was where the path led, then so be it.