Read Chapter 9: The Midnight Cipher

The broken shutter gave way with a groan that sounded like a scream in the midnight quiet. I froze, listening. Somewhere down the lane a dog barked, but no shout followed. Beside me, Robert Blackwood—alive, smirking, and smelling of river water and cheap wine—pressed his shoulder against the wood and forced the window wider.

“You’re certain this is wise?” I whispered.

“Wise?” Robert’s grin flashed pale in the starlight. “Thomas, I was dead this morning. Wise and I are barely acquainted.”

He was not dead. That was the part that still made my hands shake. When I had slipped from Cecil’s custody—given leave to prove Robert was the traitor but not to leave London—I had found Robert waiting in the alley behind the printer’s shop, wet and shivering and very much alive.

“Marcus put a knife in my ribs,” he’d said, gripping my arm hard enough to bruise. “Or thought he did. I went into the Thames to escape the guards he brought, and I floated further than I intended. When I crawled out, I heard you were being hanged for my murder. I thought I’d best un-die.”

I had not asked why he had been in the shop in the first place, or why he had burned my ledger. I had asked what he wanted now.

“To prove I’m no traitor,” he’d said. “And to catch the man who tried to kill me. Same as you want. Only difference is I’ve got a key to the shop you don’t.”

He’d pulled it from inside his boot. The same brass key that had once hung on my master’s belt.

Now we stood in the dark print-shop yard, the window groaning beneath our weight. Robert swung a leg over the sill and dropped inside. I followed, landing soft on a pile of rags that smelled of oil and burnt linen.

The shop was wrong. Everything was wrong. The presses stood in their usual places, but the type cases had been rearranged, sorted by size rather than by letter. The master’s desk had been cleared of his personal effects—no snuff box, no worn Bible, no stack of half-finished proofs. In their place sat clean sheets of foolscap and a silver inkwell shaped like a hunting dog.

“He’s made it his own already,” I murmured.

“Marcus moves fast when he wants something.” Robert’s voice was tight. “Question is whether he wanted the shop for the paper, the press, or the silence.”

The eagle. I thought of the emblem on the order slip, the same emblem carved into Robert’s ring—which Marcus now wore on his own finger, if the glimpse I’d caught this afternoon had been true. Whatever patron Marcus served, that patron had money. And money bought silence.

“The ledger,” I said. “Where did he keep it?”

Robert pointed to the corner where my master had once stored his accounts, behind a false panel cleverly disguised as a support beam. “I saw him put something there this morning, before he noticed me.”

“You were watching him?”

“I was curious.” Robert shrugged. “A man takes over a shop the day its master disappears—you’d be curious too.”

I crossed to the panel and ran my fingers along its edge until I found the catch. The wood swung open on silent hinges. Inside, a stack of letters bound with red twine sat atop a leather folder.

I pulled the letters free and carried them to the moonlit window. The cipher was familiar—the same honey-gum ink, the same numbers and letters dancing in patterns I had begun to know like a second language. My fingers itched. My mind raced ahead of my eyes, parsing, decoding.

“Can you read it?” Robert leaned over my shoulder.

“Give me a moment.” The first letter was mundane—a request for payment, a mention of ships and cargo. The second, longer, contained a list of names. I recognized none. The third—

I stopped. Read it again. My breath caught.

“What?” Robert’s hand closed on my arm. “What does it say?”

“It names someone.” I turned the page toward the moonlight. “C.G. It says there is a leak in Cecil’s household, and the source is C.G. It says C.G. has been paid for information on the Queen’s movements, and that C.G. expects command of a small fleet once the succession is settled.”

“C.G.” Robert’s face went pale. “You don’t think—Cecil’s own cousin is Sir Geoffrey. Geoffrey Cecil. He sits on the Privy Council. He’s one of the most powerful men in England.”

“I know who he is.” I folded the letter and tucked it into my shirt. “Does it say where the payment was delivered?”

Robert shook his head. “Marcus keeps his secrets closer than that.”

“Then we need more.” I turned back to the false panel, reaching for the leather folder. Inside lay a single sheet, heavier than the others, embossed with a crest I had seen before—an eagle, wings spread, clutching a key in its talons.

Below the crest, three words in a hand I knew as well as my own:

*The debt is due.*

My stomach turned. That handwriting. I had seen it on notes my father burned when I was a child, notes he thought I had not glanced at. The same three-stroke quill marks, the same extravagant flourish on the final letter.

Marcus Rye had written the note. But the hand that had ordered the letters—the hand that had signed his correspondence with my father—that hand was older. More careful. And I had seen it every day for seventeen years.

“Robert.” My voice came out strange. “What do you know about my father?”

Robert blinked. “Your father? He’s been gone for years. Everyone knows that.”

“Everyone knows he disappeared. No one knows why.” I held up the sheet. “But this—this is his mark. Not Marcus’s. My father’s.”

Robert stared. “That’s impossible. Your father was a printer. Marcus is—Marcus. They’re different men.”

“They share a patron.” The words tasted bitter in my mouth. “They share a cipher. And now they share a shop.” I looked at Robert, and for the first time since this nightmare began, I saw real fear in his eyes. “What if my father didn’t disappear? What if he was taken—because he knew what Marcus knows?”

A sound outside. Boots on cobblestones, coming fast.

Robert grabbed my arm. “Marcus. We have to go.”

I shoved the sheet into my shirt alongside the letter. We scrambled for the window, Robert’s shoulder slamming against the frame to force it wider. Shouts erupted behind us—the shop’s front door rattling as someone worked a key.

We dropped into the yard and ran, boots skidding on wet stones, the echo of guards’ voices chasing us into the narrow lanes.

I did not look back. But I felt the weight of the paper against my chest—the letter naming C.G., and the sheet that proved my father’s hand had touched this conspiracy.

The dead had risen once tonight. I feared he had risen again, somewhere in the dark, still writing in code.