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It was not a pair. It was not a run. It added up to nothing she had a name for. No flush. No trick. No game she had ever been taught at any table in England. Her father had shown her how to read opponents who bluffed, opponents who cheated, opponents who were ruined and hiding it. He had never shown her how to read this. Her mother could not be told. Damian’s mother would not believe. The valet was unwilling to speak about his master.

Ophelia sat a moment longer. Then she opened the drawer and took out her father’s pack from where she had buried it. The cards came into her hands like an apology. She shuffled, cut, and laid out a game of patience by the last of the candlelight. The only game in the world a person could play entirely alone.

Patience, dearest, her mother had counseled.

Well … she was playing it.

* * *

The mutton arrived gray and bland. Two portions. Bread. A jug of beer. Fat already cooling white at the rim of the plates. The smell of it filled the little parlor, mutton and tallow and the damp wool of their coats. Luc’s stomach answered before he sat. The master looked at his plate and did not move.

“Eat,” Luc said. “You paid for it.”

The master pushed the plate aside. The rim grated over the boards. He unrolled the map into the space where his dinner should have been and set the mustard pot on one corner to hold it. Then he bent. His shoulders dropped, the taproom lost him. Only the finger stayed, already hunting a road.

Luc pulled the abandoned plate across. The gravy had begun to skin. He ate it anyway, then his own, mopping with the bread until the pewter showed. No greed in it. Hunger was a tool, same as a shovel. One of them had to be fit to think in the morning, and it would not be the man tracing the roads north with a finger gone thin as a quill.

The master had been thin in France. Now he was painfully so. Cheekbones like a saint on a church door. Cuffs still faintly stained, that no laundress this side of the Channel had shifted it. Eyes too bright in the tallow-light, as if the flame sat inside the skull and not on the spike. He ate enough to keep the machine turning, the master said, when he remembered to say anything relevant at all. He was a great one for machines, Luc reflected.

The muttering started up again over the map. German. The same words, round and round. Luc had stopped hearing them months ago. A miller’s ear. The wheel was only noise until it stopped.

He stared at the fire and counted what lay behind them, because that had always been his role in this partnership. Counting. Noticing. Keeping the two of them alive.

Dover was behind them. Lord Archer was ahead.

Two counties, the landlord’s boy had said. Two counties from the house. The fire was warm on Luc’s shins. The beer was not as bad as the French said English beer must be. He heard himself say it at last. He said it to the fire, not to the master, and he said it in French, because the taproom beyond the door was empty and the English tongue still sat in his mouth like a stone.

“C’est de la folie.”

The fire spat. He went on anyway, low, because what he had said was true. This was madness.

“In France, it was bodies. Bodies are cheap. Nobody’s. The field was full of them. This one has a name now. He is a lord. You understand what that is, in this country? The lords sit as judges here. On their own land. In their own parishes. We are two foreigners walking into a courtroom to steal the judge.”

He turned the cup on the table, a full circle. Wood under the base, a soft scrape.

“They hang men like us, master. They hang them at the crossroads and leave them in the wind. He is not yours any longer. He is a lord, with servants and wealth and a wife, they say, and we are⁠—”

The finger traveled on. A half-inch of road at a time. The master did not glance up from the map.

Luc finished the beer. Bitter. Thin. That was the answer, then. The same answer as always. The bent head. The moving finger. The mill going round. There was no arguing with a man who did not know he was in the room. And there was no leaving him either. Not for Luc Morel, who had dug what he had dug and carried what he had carried and lied to two nations’ worth of officials. The rope did not care which direction he walked. It waited behind him. It waited ahead. At least ahead meant he was moving, harder to find, harder to … arrest.

He banked the fire in their room himself, with ash on his fingers. The last heat held under the coals.

When he woke in the dark of morning the candle had burned down to a thumb. The window was a paler square. The master was already dressed, standing there with the map rolled under his arm, peering north at the horizon.

Luc went down and counted the reckoning into the landlord’s palm. The shillings still felt like play-coins. Too light. Too small for what they bought: a roof, a fire, one night farther from the cellar and one night nearer the rope. He took up both packs, his own and the master’s. The master would walk off and leave his shirt, his razor, and his immortal soul behind if Luc were not here to carry them. But he would not leave his instruments.

Outside, the air was already warming. And the master was already through the gate and on the road.

Luc settled the straps across his shoulders and followed Dr. Rochat out.

CHAPTER 13

Dinner began well enough, as disasters often do.

The first course was white soup. The candles behaved. Outside, the rain had shut the world down to this one warm room. Four people, two branches of light, and the polished mahogany between Ophelia at its foot and her husband at its head. Neither of them meant to bridge that length.

Damian sat straight-backed and buttoned to the jaw as ever. He attended to his mother on his right with the grave, absolute courtesy he gave to everything now. His mother. His mutton. His wife. As though the whole of life had become a guard-mounting.