“What happened to him?” Gabriel asked.
Pierce shifted his weight. “Met with another man before dawn. Left by the cliff path. Didn’t take the main road. Went north.”
Leticia tucked that away. North, toward the Morton lands and the old auction house that kept appearing in her notes. The information brushed cold fingers down her spine. The shape of a pattern brushed her mind, then slipped away, gone, leaving a chill.
Pierce squinted at her. “You’re not just here to listen.”
“I’m here because this concerns my family,” she said evenly. “Pieces of what you’ve said fit with what we already know.”
He didn’t ask how. “Careful with that sort of talk, Lady Salisbury. You’ll find yourself with more trouble than you want.”
Gabriel’s voice was quiet but firm. “She already has.”
For a moment, only wind and the hiss of the waves filled the space between them. Pierce looked past Gabriel to the curve of the bay. “Ifyou’re looking for where the man went after he left here, ask after a place called Dunmere Cross. Not much more than a marker stone and an old smuggler’s shed. The right sort knows it.”
“Why tell us?” Leticia asked.
Pierce’s eyes hardened. “Because the men you’re chasing don’t belong here. They think they can use our coast for their dealings. They’re wrong.”
Lady Eastbury drew her shawl tighter. “Well. We’ve been suitably chilled by both the wind and our company. Perhaps we might take our leave?”
“Wait.” Pierce tipped his head toward the bluff. “Guard on the upper path these days. Not a constable. Someone else. If you must climb, keep your heads down on the turn.”
Gabriel’s attention sharpened. “You saw him?”
“I saw enough.” Pierce tipped his cap, already turning away. “Be careful on the climb back. Rocks are slick.”
Gabriel waited until they’d walked out of earshot. “He gave us more than I expected.”
“He gave us Dunmere Cross,” Leticia said. “And a smuggler’s shed.”
“And a direction,” Gabriel added.
They began the ascent toward the path. The sea boomed behind them, filling the silence. Halfway up, Leticia paused to look back. Pierce was gone, swallowed by the curve of the cove. She could feel the cliff’s shoulder to her left, the drop to the rocks below on her right. Gabriel shifted to walk on the outside edge, always between the ladies and catastrophe. His presence there, wordless and deliberate, felt something like a vow. Lady Eastbury puffed slightly from the climb.
“If I’d known we were going to be trudging over rocks and through wind for a few scraps of gossip, I’d have sent a footman.”
“It’s not gossip,” Leticia said. “It’s a trail.”
Gabriel met her gaze over his aunt’s shoulder. “One we’ll follow inSommer-by-the-Sea.”
They reached the turn where the path narrowed and stopped for a breath. Leticia tasted the odd, metallic quiet that comes when a bird of prey passes overhead, and everything goes still. The stillness stretched so thin she could feel her pulse inside it. A gull shrieked, and the world resumed. Gabriel’s shift to the outside edge without comment set something steady and low inside her, an answer to a question she had not dared put into words.
*
Back at theinn, the warmth of the fire made the salt-stiff air sharper in her lungs. Smoke curled lazily above the hearth, the scent of peat and ale settling around them like a shawl. Leticia loosened her shawl and sat near the hearth. Gabriel stood by the window, looking out at the lane as if the man from Pierce’s story might walk past. The low murmur of voices from the bar blended with the pop of peat in the grate.
“Dunmere Cross,” she said, trying the name aloud. “It sounds like something out of a smuggler’s tale.”
“It is,” Gabriel said. “Old stories say it was where smugglers met to divide cargo. That shed’s been empty for years, but if Pierce says someone’s using it again, we’ll find out who.”
Lady Eastbury, unpinning her hat, glanced between them. “You’ll do no such thing without me.”
“We’ll be going back to Sommer-by-the-Sea,” Gabriel said. “The next step is there.”
Leticia caught the faintest emphasis on we. “And what will you do with what Pierce gave us?”
“Start pulling the threads,” Gabriel said. “See where they lead.”
