Page 43 of Trouble

She found herself in the kitchen, and when Joe saw her with her hands and head clearly empty, he gave her a very large turnip as if he were handing over a baton.

‘Peel and cut,’ he said. ‘Thin. Even.’

‘I am .?.?. busy.’

‘No you aren’t. Where are the girls?’

Emily wrinkled her brow. ‘Resting.’

‘Thin and even,’ he said again, as if that settled matters.

It was absolutely not Emily’s job to cut turnips into any sort of shape and thickness, but he did have that knife, so she sat down and did it anyway. Joe didn’t try to talk to her further; he just went back to his own station to continue with whatever dark magic produced the delicious dinners they ate every evening. When Emily had finished her turnip, quite proud of her work, she showed it to Joe. He nodded once, then handed her an entire basket of turnips.

Emily rather thought that such excellent turnip-cutting should have warranted reward rather than punishment, but she supposed she had proved herself too talented in the arena of vegetable dissection to be allowed to walk free without repeating the trick.

‘She’s a good girl,’ Joe said ten minutes later, apropos of absolutely nothing.

‘Who?’ said Emily.

‘Grace,’ said Joe. ‘Aster’s not the kind of good most people see, but she deserves a fair shot anyway.’

‘Right,’ said Emily. ‘Yes. Of course.’

Joe turned around to look at her, his ruddy face concertinaed into a frown that seemed to involve every single one of his facial muscles.

‘You just be careful not to break their hearts,’ said Joe.

Emily let out an odd bark of laughter. ‘Me? Why on earth would—?’

‘Be careful,’ Joe said slowly, and then he turned and went back to his cooking.

It was so unnerving that Emily was still feeling out of sorts when she finished the last of the turnips, and slipped from the kitchen before Joe could hand her a cauliflower and tell her to start pruning.

That evening, after a late dinner and a good while spent sitting around nursing their drinks, Emily offered to deal with the fires. There were three lit on the ground floor alone – a monstrous extravagance of fuel for August, even if the weather was unseasonably dire. Meera gave her a startled, unconvinced look before agreeing, and then made sure she knew exactly how to do it without filling the room with smoke or coating the carpet in ashes.

It was irritating, repetitive work, but it meant that Emily had an excuse to enter every room under the cover of darkness without witnesses, and that made it worth every second. The hour was already very late, but she did not hurry.

Captain Edwards’s study was her real target, but she didn’t rush there first. Instead, she made sure that she had completed every room in proper order so as to be convincing if questioned. When she did eventually reach the study, she closed the door behind her and felt a little thrill course through her as she turned to face his inner sanctum. The room was truly empty, the house silent; she had made sure of that this time, so as not to risk another run-in with the captain, hiding in the corner with a book like a dull and cantankerous ghoul. There was always the chance that he might spring out of bed and come rushing downstairs to attend to some business, but she thought it unlikely enough that she only kept an ear out for urgent creaking in the corridor.

She did at least start by attending to the fire, leaving the job half-done, so that if she were discovered she could claim to have been momentarily distracted from the legitimate work that had brought her here in the first place.

The captain had obviously tidied up before leaving, and it made Emily’s job easier; there was no need to rifle through endless piles of paper, only to open each drawer and decipher from context clues which carefully regimented section she had discovered. There was a drawer for papers relating to the house, one that seemed to be entirely filled with invitations to social occasions, some of which didn’t even have the seal broken. Emily’s heart sped up when she came across what appeared to be official correspondence from the Royal Navy. She picked up the pile and carefully spread it out across the desk, so that she could inspect each in turn and then put them back where she had found them. Captain Edwards seemed the sort to know exactly where he’d put his letters, and in what order. He also probably catalogued his stockings and his stocks, and, when struck down with a cold, allowed himself exactly three sneezes per fit. Any more would be indulgent and perverse.

From what Emily could see, these letters contained nothing of interest. Most of them just seemed to be conveying orders, using military terms she didn’t understand. Two of them were about past promotions, and were written in such stilted and formal language that Emily was surprised they were trying to express good news rather than instructions for replacing a pipe valve.

She carefully stacked the letters and replaced them, and then tried to open the bottom drawer in the desk, only to find that it had been locked. Alocksuggested that there might be something within worth having.

Emily gave it a good rattle, hoping it might be old enough that it gave in and admitted her without the formality of a key, but had no such luck. The keyhole was tiny – a silly size, really – and searching for a key that would have been more suited to a doll’s house was not likely to be fruitful.

She tried anyway, sweeping her hands over the desk, going to the narrow table by the wall and inspecting the base of the globe, the space behind the books of nautical maps: all empty.

Her hand went to her hair, and she felt about for a pin. One of the tricks she’d picked up at the mill, from a boy of about ten, was that some locks could be persuaded to open with the application of anything that vaguely resembled a key.

Even her narrow pin was too cumbersome to open this lock.

It was frustrating, but still .?.?. she had a lead. It seemed extremely likely that Captain Edwards was storing his most sensitive papers in that drawer, and if she could get her hands on even a single incriminating letter or document, it would change everything. Charles had given her two gold sovereigns just for proving herself trustworthy – she couldn’t imagine how much he might hand over if she came into possession of something real.

She still had no earthly idea what Captain Edwardscould have done that would be so damning, because she couldn’t imagine him doing much of interest at all. Perhaps it was one of those crimes that one heard about without ever really understanding what it was – something to do with taxes, or a particularly dull flavour of embezzlement.