Page 46 of The Duke’s Suspicion

“Is anyone there?”

Silence. Not even an echo.

With exaggerated care, as if he feared moving the book would set off an alarm or trigger a blast, he lifted it from the table, tucked it under his arm, and looked around once more.

“Erica?”

Still nothing. He spun on one foot, the rasp of boot leather against the stone floor loud in the stillness, and left the conservatory. He had to find her.

But this search was no more successful than the last. Armitage told him that Mr. Remington had retired early and he’d see no sign of Miss Burke all afternoon. Guin, too, had gone to bed. Outside the billiards room, he could hear the soft clack of ivory balls, some laughter, an oath. Male voices, all. All was quiet in the drawing room, the library, even the schoolroom. He certainly could not tap on her chamber door. Resigned, he descended the stairs to his suite.

The wrinkled pages of the journal whispered to him from the table where he laid it when he went to undress. After he’d crawled into bed, he leaned over the table to snuff the candles. The journal stared up at him, inscrutable. What if she’d wanted him to find it, to read it? What if she were counting on him to discover the truth?

With a muttered curse, he snatched it up.

He studied its binding first, the quality of the leather, the strength of the stitching. When he ran his thumb over the edge of the pages, the contents fluttered to life. Fragments of words and pictures appeared and were gone before he could make sense of them. Before he could rightly be called guilty of reading the thing.

At last, though, there was nothing for it but to open it and find out whether he had been right about Erica Burke. Or dreadfully, dangerously wrong.

For a moment, he weighed the choice of starting at the beginning or opening to a random point. As it was Erica’s handiwork, he suspected that a randomly chosen page was as likely to be significant as any. But his mind balked at such a haphazard approach. With a degree of trepidation he tried to dismiss as unreasonable, he peeled back the front cover and saw at the very top of the first page, in a surprisingly ornate hand,

Property of E. Burke

The tails of letters had been turned to branches and leaves, the E a fantastical bloom. Beneath her name, in a plainer, masculine hand, were the words

To Erica, from Henry

Christmas, 1797

Dublin

A less lover-like inscription he could hardly imagine. But evidently the journal—and at least some of what it represented to its owner?—had in fact been a gift from the man she had intended to marry. As initial discoveries went, it was almost enough to make him lay the book aside.

Almost.

The second and third pages, spread to the light, revealed what any agent would have recognized immediately as a key. A key to a code he did not know. The symbols were common enough: circles like phases of the moon, empty, half, and full; a leaf; a manicule. And something that looked like a tiny coiled spring. Each symbol correlated to an explanation, a word or phrase—in Latin, if he didn’t miss his guess. But not Latin as he’d learned it in school, or as he’d seen spies use the language since. The beginnings of a headache prickled behind his eyes. He had not expected to spend the night translating and code-breaking.

The spelling, the abbreviation, the grammar were all rather…esoteric, particularly when combined with a tendency to ornament the letters and margins with botanical flourishes. It might have been a masterful attempt at disguising her intentions. But somehow it felt more like the handiwork of one who’d been inattentive during lessons. Or perhaps had never really been taught? He thought of the conversation with Miss Chatham he’d overheard, about young ladies and ancient languages and Erica’s somewhat haphazard education. He’d heard people speak derisively of “lady’s Greek,” a simplified version, without the accents. Could there be a lady’s Latin, too?

More likely, she’d never been offered the opportunity to study the subject properly at all. Suddenly, his mental picture of a girl learning at her father’s knee morphed into a girl sneaking peeks at her brother’s textbooks, independent and determined and perhaps a little ashamed of her curiosity.

Understanding Erica’s journal was going to require him to set aside what he thought he knew. About cryptography. About languages. About her.

All right, then. The circles might indicate…memoranda, of a sort. Tasks to be done, tasks half done, tasks finished. The leaves seemed likely to pertain to botanical observations, ostensibly the primary subject of the journal. Manicules drew attention to something important. And the little spirals? They alone had no description in the key. He’d have to sort it out as he went along.

Slowly he ran his thumb across the edges of the pages again. This time, the symbols, dotting the corner of nearly every page, sometimes two or three to a page, stood out. With the pressure of his thumbnail, he stopped the movement at the drawing of Hawesdale, which looked much as it had when he’d seen it before. A manicule and a circle, filled half with pencil and half with ink, had been added in one corner. At the bottom of the page, a list of names: the upper servants, Guin’s maid, the family, the other guests. P—? had been crossed out and replaced with Pilkington. Viviane was misspelled.

Nothing more devious than a memory aid. He went on.

Next came nearly a dozen painstakingly detailed sketches of the passionflower, its parts carefully labeled, the corner of each page marked with a tiny leaf, confirming his guess about the symbol’s meaning. The handwriting here was neater, unembellished, the text a mix of English and passable Latin, the observations precise and scientific. Nothing that seemed out of the ordinary for a botanist.

Following that, a three-part list, the hand rather shaky: Important things, Insignificant things, Things that require further reflection. Dk of R— was included beneath each heading. In the upper left-hand corner, she’d drawn a circle and filled in half of it. Which of these items did she consider completed? Which were yet to be done?

He could tell by the smooth feel of the paper beneath his hands that most of the pages after that were empty, so he flipped again to the front to make a more methodical study. The artistry of the flower sketches could not be denied. Indeed, he could have passed a pleasant evening examining them and making more thorough translations of her notes about the plants’ attributes and uses. A few had been marked with a dagger, its handle shaped like a capital P. Poisonous, he presumed.

The pages of pictures and notes were interspersed with more lists. Guests at another dinner party, in order of precedence, the list marked with a half circle. The steps to a dance, with tiny pictures of footprints to accompany them. The variety of things she had hoped—and in many cases, as indicated by heavy Xs, had failed—to remember brought a wry smile to his lips. Had he really ever believed she might be a spy?

That smile faded when he came to a map, the borders lavishly illustrated with exotic-looking plants, each connected by a dotted line to some tropical land. The places she had hoped to visit when her marriage gave her the freedom to do so? Quickly, he turned to the next pages—several left blank for no rhyme or reason he could discern. But after those came a section of close-written prose in the abbreviated quasi-Latin of the key, the page marked with a spiral—a labyrinth, he’d decided, the wandering path her thoughts took whenever she tried to make sense of herself. For though there were fewer of those mysterious marks than any other, all were appended to what appeared to be diary entries: a complaint about her sister, or some words of mourning for her betrothed.