Read Chapter 13: The Road to Brussels

The road to Brussels was a graveyard of summer.

Élise had walked it twice before—once with the supply wagons, once with her parents, as a girl small enough to ride on her father's shoulders while he pointed out the spires of the churches. Now she walked it alone, her boots wrapped in strips of torn petticoat to keep the blisters from opening, the dawn light pale as bone behind her. She had left Waterloo before the bells. Before Margaret could change her mind. Before Matron Voss could find some excuse to hold her.

The letter from Théo was tucked against her breast, the scrap with *Marie Laurent* written on it folded smaller, sewn into the hem of her skirt with a needle she'd borrowed from the surgical kit. She could feel both as she walked, two weights, one warm, one sharp. The map she carried in her head, the way Ashworth's chateau route burned behind her eyes each time she blinked.

She did not think of him. She did not allow herself to think of him—of the way he had risen from his cot with a pistol in his hand, blood still seeping through his bandages, and put himself between her and the Prussians. Of the way he had lied for her, broken his own life for her, and what that might mean or might not mean. She thought instead of the road. The heat. The sound of her own breathing.

By midday, she understood why the wagons had been delayed.

The road thickened with soldiers—British red, mostly, but Hanoverians in green and a scattering of Dutch and Belgian militia. They moved in companies, sometimes in columns, always with a purpose that spooked the horses tied at inn posts and sent dust into the air like a plague. Brussels had become an army town. What had been a city of merchants and lace-makers now bristled with bayonets and bivouacs, and every second face she saw belonged to a man who had learned to kill.

Élise pulled her shawl tighter, tried to make herself smaller. A woman alone drew eyes. A woman alone with no baggage, no escort, no explanation drew questions. She kept her head down and her pace even, and she passed through the city gates just after two when the guard was too busy searching a wagon of ammunition to notice another refugee arriving.

She had no plan beyond reaching Brussels. No name, no address, no notion of where a man named Whitmore might have taken rooms or where a Captain could have hidden a dispatch. Théo's letter had been sent from a forwarding address—a stationer's shop in the Rue du Marché aux Poulets. She would start there. She would ask for letters, claim she was his sister, and pray the shopkeeper remembered a boy with a laugh that filled rooms.

The streets were crowded in a way that made her feel seasick. Every shopfront seemed to fly the Union Jack. Every tavern spilled officers onto the cobbles, laughing too loud at jokes she could not understand. She kept to the edges, watching the gaps between people, reading the flow of the crowd the way she had learned to read the flow of blood from a wound.

She felt the hand on her locket before she saw the face.

A boy—twelve, perhaps, small and quick as a ferret—shouldered past her hard enough to stagger her, and in the same motion his fingers hooked the chain at her throat and snapped it clean.

"No!" The cry tore out of her before she could stop it. The locket was her mother's. Her mother's face inside it, painted when she was young and smiling, before the fever. Before everything.

The boy ran.

Élise ran after him.

The crowd parted for her the way it had not for normal walking—people shouting, someone cursing in Flemish, but she did not stop. The boy was fast, but he was small and the streets were unfamiliar to him too. He darted left toward the canal, then right through an alley that smelled of rotting fish, and Élise kept her eyes on the flash of bare ankles and her breath in her chest and she did not think about the soldiers or the stares or the fact that she had just made herself visible to every pair of eyes in Brussels.

The boy stumbled at a dead end—a wall of wet brick and a stack of crates—and he turned, wild-eyed, the locket swinging from his fist.

"Stay back," he said in French. "I'll cut you."

"Put it down." She advanced, hands up, palms open. She had seen this look before. On boys in the hospital. Men, really, who had learned hunger young and never unlearned it. "That's my mother's face in there. It has no value to anyone but me."

"Then you'll pay to get it back."

"I have nothing. You can see that." She gestured at her plain dress, the scuffed boots, the empty pockets. "I'm a nurse. I have no money. That locket is the only thing I own."

The boy's eyes flicked over her—measuring, calculating—and for a moment she thought he might throw it and run anyway. But his fingers loosened, and the chain dangled, and then something else caught his attention. A new sound from the street behind them: boots on stone, voices calling in English.

The boy swore and shoved the locket at her, slapping it into her palm like a hot coal, and then he was scrambling over the crates and gone.

Élise stood in the dead end, breathing hard, her mother's locket warm in her hand. The clasp was broken. The gold had bent where he'd gripped it. But it was whole, and the face inside would still be smiling, and that was what mattered.

She turned to go back the way she came.

And stopped.

The boy had cut the chain and pulled it free. But he had also picked her pocket in that first violent shove—she felt the empty space where the unused corner of her shawl had been, where she'd kept nothing. Yet there, lying against the wet brick where he'd dropped it in his panic, was something she had never seen before.

A scrap of paper. Torn ragged at one edge. Folded twice, creased soft as cloth, as if it had spent months in someone's pocket.

She bent and picked it up.

The ink had faded, but the hand was careful, precise. A cartographer's hand. And the words she read made her heart go still and silent in her chest.

*Château Laurent. Twenty leagues south of Reims, along the river road. Entrance through the eastern gate; servants' bell hung right of the arch. The cellars are accessible from the wine press—my father never knew I'd found them.*

It was not the same handwriting as Ashworth's map. But it was the same place. The same chateau. The same name.

Laurent.

Whoever had carried this scrap had been to the château. Whoever had carried it knew its secrets, knew its cellars, knew its ways in and out. And whoever had carried it had come to Brussels.

Élise looked up, back toward the street full of soldiers and spies and secrets, and she pressed the scrap against her chest beside the locket and the letter and the map that burned in her memory.

The boy had not chosen her at random. Someone in this city was looking for her. Or for whoever carried the same secrets she carried.

She stepped out of the dead end, back into the noise and the uniforms and the summer heat, and she made herself breathe normally, walk evenly, look like a woman with nothing to hide.

The sun was falling toward the rooftops now. The stationer's shop was still four streets away. And somewhere between her and that shop, someone else was carrying a piece of the puzzle.

She had been walking blind.

Now, at least, she knew someone else in Brussels could see her.