Page 6 of The Cutthroat Countess

Tap, tap, tap. Quork, quork.

Jo smiled at the familiar morning sound, already pushing back the covers and swinging her legs to the floor. “I’m coming, Angus.”

Quork, quork.

“I know, I know,” she muttered, shoving her feet into her slippers before heading toward the window, where she’d set up his perch. It looked over the square, which her cousin Edi hated because people could see the raven come and go, but Angus enjoyed watching the activity.

Jo gave him a quick pet and a kiss on the head and then lifted the sash. She watched him for a moment, and smiled when she saw that he was headed in the direction of Hyde Park. She shut the window most of the way, leaving it open enough that he could come inside if he returned while she wasn’t in the room.

Jo yawned and considered her options. She could get dressed and try to sneak in an early morning walk without a servant, or she could go back to bed and sleep for a few more hours.

The bed beckoned.

She took a step and then almost turned her ankle on something that made a loud crunch beneath her slipper. Jo squinted down at what she’d crushed.

“Oh, no,” she murmured, dropping to her haunches to pick up Angus’s bone, which now had a long crack down the length of it.

Jo carried the bone to the window and held it up to the light to inspect the damage. That’s when she saw the carving was hollow. She peeled back a long splinter of wood and exposed something that looked like parchment.

Heart suddenly pounding, Jo fetched one of her smaller knives from the reticule she’d been carrying last night and used it to carefully spread the cracked wood and remove the parchment.

What came out were seven sheets of almost translucent paper filled with row after row of numbers, separated by commas.

Jo swallowed, her hands shaking as she spread the delicate pages out on the secretaire. She was no code expert, but it didn’t take a lot of knowledge to guess what these sheets were: here was the key to the poetry books Mungo had toted about with him for decades.

She released the breath she’d not been aware she was holding and stared at the pages, some of which looked older than others, more yellowed. If this was what Mungo had been about to take to the Home Office, then why had he waited so long? He’d carved this bone while they were still in France—perhaps as much as a year before they’d returned to England. He would have sealed the papers inside it then, wouldn’t he?

He must have learned something that day when he’d spoken to Elliot’s former boss—or, more likely, he’d learned something before their meeting, which had convinced him to seek the man out.

That had been the most surprising discovery: that Mungo would have voluntarily approached any government official when he’d spent so much of his life avoiding such contact.

Jo picked up the bone and examined it more closely. That’s when she saw the wood hadn’t been glued together lengthwise, as she’d originally believed; the joint was in the middle. Despite the damage, it took only a little fiddling to open the carving as it was meant to open. Mungo had carved a set of grooves into each side that formed a lock when they were pushed together and turned in opposite directions. It hadn’t been sealed at all; he could have opened it at any time and inserted the papers. Or made changes or added new papers.

She sat back in her chair, her mind racing. What in the world had he discovered to make him approach Elliot’s old boss, Wardlow?

Her lips curved into a smile when she imagined Elliot’s reaction to her discovery.

Jo turned over the papers consideringly. By themselves, they told her nothing. It would be much better to present him with some actual information.

An idea formed in her head—an exciting idea.

Elliot had said Daniel Morrison lived just off the North Road in a cottage not far from the Three Brothers posting inn.

That was before Edgware, so less than ten miles from London.

Jo glanced at the clock. It wasn’t yet seven; she had plenty of time to go and come back, but not in a carriage. She’d need to rent a hack, and she’d need to dress in breeches, neither of which she could do from home—at least not without drawing attention from Edi and creating a fuss.

She’d go to the Fayre and leave from there. That way, she could tell Helen where she was going, as well.

* * *

After a little bit of trickery with her maid—whom Jo refused to take with her to visit the Fayre on the grounds that she would be there all day long, packing up the belongings she’d left with her ex-employer—Jo was mounted on a decent hack from the livery down the street and already riding through Clerkenwell by ten o’clock.

Angus was delighted to be on the road again and was dipping and diving and generally behaving like a newly fledged raven on his first flight. It had rained last night, but it mustn’t have been much, because while the dust had been dampened, the road wasn’t miserable and mucky. It was, in short, a lovely day for a ride in the country.

Jo felt a little bit like a new fledgling, herself. It had been ages— not since last year in France—since she’d worn her ratty old clothing. She would have been on the road earlier if she’d not enlisted Helen’s help and copied the contents of the six sheets of paper onto other pieces of parchment as a precaution.

The other woman had helped her with the transcription process without asking even one question. Perhaps the saddest part of Jo’s new life was the fact that she would not get to operate the Fayre with her new friend. Helen Carter was an interesting woman who’d left behind her life as one of the wealthiest heiresses in Britain to work as a governess-cum-circus-manager, and she seemed to love her new existence, even though she had a great many concerns and responsibilities.