Read Chapter 33: The Watch Returns

The boat rode low in the water, her hull painted the color of wet slate, and the English coast had dissolved behind them an hour past. Élodie sat near the bow with her shawl pulled tight, watching the French shoreline take shape out of the gray dawn—a smudge of cliffs, then the pale ribbon of beach near Calais. The blue enamel watch hung warm against her sternum, beneath her bodice, ticking its small mechanical heart.

Ashworth sat opposite her, one hand braced on the gunwale, his face drawn but alert. The surgeon had redressed his wound before they left Dover, and he had refused the laudanum. His jaw was set in that particular way she had come to recognize—the way he held pain at arm's length until it had no choice but to leave.

"You should sleep," she said.

"I've slept enough on English soil to last me." He smiled thinly. "Besides, I want to watch the coast come in. It looks different from this side."

"Does it?"

"From London, France is a threat. From Dover, it's a rumor." He nodded toward the shore. "From here, it's just land. The same dirt they plow in Kent, the same rain. Only the flags are different."

The boat's master called something in Breton, and the three crewmen adjusted the sail. They were fishing vessels by day, smugglers by night, men whose loyalties were measured in coin rather than country. Ashworth had arranged the crossing through channels Élodie did not ask about.

She watched the coastline sharpen and said, "You promised me the full story. About Mathieu."

Ashworth was quiet for a long moment. The boat crested a swell, and spray misted her cheek. He looked at the French coast, not at her, when he finally spoke.

"He saved my life in Egypt. That part you know, or guessed." He paused. "But what I never told you—what I couldn't tell you in Paris—was that I tried to save his first."

Élodie's hand went to the watch. "What do you mean?"

"We were on patrol outside Alexandria. Rumor was that a French column had been spotted moving east, and our commander sent a scouting party to verify. I led it. Mathieu was a lieutenant then, fresh from Italy, hungry for glory." Ashworth's voice was low, careful, as if he were walking across a field of buried mines. "We found the column. Ten times our number. They found us just as we were pulling back."

He lifted his canteen, drank, and wiped his mouth.

"In the retreat, Mathieu's horse took a musket ball. He went down hard, and I saw him try to rise. The column was closing. I had a choice—stay and fight for him, or rally my men and get them out. I chose my men."

"And Mathieu?" Her voice was barely a whisper.

"He was taken prisoner. The French held him for six weeks before he escaped. By the time he made it back to the British lines, half of Cairo knew the name of the officer who had left him behind." Ashworth's knuckles went white against the gunwale. "I expected a duel when he returned. He had every right to demand one. My God, I would have demanded one."

"What did he do?"

Ashworth shook his head slowly. "He found me in my tent. I remember it exactly. Sunset, the heat finally breaking. He came through the flap and stood there in his torn uniform with his arm in a sling from the escape, and he said…" Ashworth's voice cracked, just slightly, and he steadied it. "He said, 'You made the right call. I would have made the same one.'"

Élodie felt a strange pressure behind her ribs. "He forgave you."

"He did more than forgive me. He vouched for me in front of the regiment. If not for his testimony, I would have been court-martialed for abandoning a man in the field. He told them I had no choice, that the lives of the whole party were worth more than one man's pride. That last word—*pride*—he said it with a smile. He was mocking me, but gently, the way only a friend can."

The boat pitched, and a crew member cursed softly in Breton. Ashworth steadied himself against a coil of rope.

And then he looked at her directly. "He felt no ill will toward me, Élodie. Not for the fall, not for the capture, not for the pain of it. The only thing he regretted was the debt he felt he owed me for speaking up. And so he gave me the scalpel, with the instruction to pass it on to the next person who needed salvation more than he did. He called it the only art he had mastered—mending what was broken, then letting it go."

Élodie's vision blurred. She blinked hard and looked away, at the water, at the shore, anywhere but at him.

"The surgeon told you he used it on you."

"Yes." Ashworth's voice was almost inaudible against the wind. "Mathieu's last gift was a surgeon's blade on a ship bound for England, in the hands of a man who had promised him that if he ever crossed paths with an English officer bleeding out his life, he would use the instrument to give him another chance."

"He planned it," Élodie said slowly, testing the idea. "He gave away what he needed because he wanted someone else to have it."

"He was giving it away all along. The confession, the scalpel, the record in London. Every piece of himself he parceled out so that when he fell, something of him would go on—not for his own glory, but to protect the people he loved." Ashworth paused. "That included you. It always included you, Élodie. He knew, long before he left you in Paris, that he would not survive. And he made his arrangements accordingly."

She felt the watch against her chest like a stone. For months she had carried it as proof of his love. Then she had come to see it as a lie, a beautiful enamel cage, a command to grieve forever. Now she understood it was neither.

It was a key.

She thought of the grave in Egypt, described in the records she had read in Dover—the marker near a palm grove, the soldiers who had buried him with honors. She had never imagined she would go there. The cost had seemed too great, the journey too impossible.

But the boat beneath her was proof that impossible was a matter of timing.

She turned to Ashworth. "When the mission is over. If I survive it. There is something I need to do."

"What is it?"

"I need to go to Egypt." She unclasped the chain and held the watch in her open palm. It caught the pale morning light, blue and luminous. "I need to put this on his grave myself. Not because he asked me to keep it—but because he gave it to me to release, and I have been holding it wrong. I've been keeping it like a wound. He meant it as a turn toward the next thing, not a wall against it."

Ashworth studied her face for a long moment. Then he reached out and closed her fingers around the watch.

"When this is done, I'll get you passage. Egypt is not so far from England that a determined woman can't find her way."

She slipped the watch back over her head and tucked it away. The French coast was closer now, individual rooftops resolving along the shoreline. A fishing village, smoke rising from chimneys at dawn.

"It's a long way to Calais in an open boat," she said. "And the French will be watching the harbors."

"They'll be watching the harbors for a man." Ashworth's mouth twitched. "Not for a fisherman's wife come to buy herring."

She raised an eyebrow. "Your English is good, but your Breton is terrible. If I have to pass as your wife, you'll have to let me do the talking."

"Gladly." He almost smiled. "There is one more thing. Mathieu's confession. In London, before we left, I had my solicitor read it in full."

Something shifted in her chest. "I thought you said you would not read it until we could do so together."

"I kept that promise." His face grew serious. "The solicitor did not read it to me. He read it to a clerk, who made a sealed copy, and I have not opened it. But my solicitor wrote to me afterward, a single line, to say that the document references a name we have both heard recently."

A flicker of cold ran through her. "What name?"

"Lefèvre."

The word hung in the salt air. The man who had burned her inn. The man whose allies might even now be tracking her across the channel.

"Mathieu knew of Lefèvre," Ashworth continued. "He wrote of him in the confession, though my solicitor would not say in what context. Only that the name appears twice, and that Mathieu's feelings on the matter were—his words—'insufficiently charitable.'"

Élodie looked back at the French coast, at the quiet village, at the smoke rising from chimneys of people who had no idea that a dead man's letter might hold the key to why her world had collapsed.

"It seems," she said slowly, "that my husband is still reaching across his grave to guide me."

The boat master called out, pointing toward a cove hidden by a limestone spur. Ashworth rose, steadying himself against the mast, and for the first time since Dover she saw him wince openly.

"Can you carry your part?" she asked quietly.

"I can carry my part if you can carry ours." He nodded toward the shore. "Calais is six miles from that cove. We'll need to walk inland, find a farm, and make our way from there. Can you walk six miles in the boots you've got?"

She looked down at her boots—English leather, sturdy, meant for exactly this kind of work. "I can walk six miles."

"And the rest of the way?"

She had been a wife, a widow, an innkeeper, a spy. She thought of Mathieu's confession and the name Lefèvre written in his hand. She thought of the watch against her chest and the grave in the desert waiting for it to come home.

"I'll walk as far as the road goes," she said.