At Shrike’s nod, Wren trotted ahead to the door in the southern leg of the arch. He paused on the step and glanced surreptitiously up and down the street.
“Shall I keep watch?” Shrike murmured, having caught him up by then and shielding him from view with his own cloaked bulk.
Wren hesitated before replying in an undertone, “If it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer you by my side.”
Shrike’s heart yearned for nothing more.
Wren clenched and unclenched his fists at his sides. Then he raised his arm, hesitated, and lightly rapped his knuckles against the door.
No answer came.
Another minute passed in silence before Wren put his fingertips to the iron latch. It clattered beneath his hand, and the door swung a few inches inward. Wren flinched from it, then set his jaw again and pushed the door fully open.
A dark and narrow stair loomed before them. Worn patterned carpet lay over the warped wooden steps. Simple iron sconces with unlit candles flanked the upper and lower landings. Another door stood at the top.
With a final glance up and down the street, Wren passed over the threshold and indicated for Shrike to follow him up the stair.
“I suppose,” Wren said over his shoulder in a low tone, “I oughtn’t be surprised it’s not locked during the day, even if he has gone out. There are perhaps twelve persons in Rochester, and they all attend the same church.”
Shrike chuckled. Wren shot him a wan smile.
They reached the upper landing. Wren knocked again. No one answered. Yet the second door proved not so unlocked as the first. Wren swore a blistering oath. He began patting down his coat, waistcoat, and trousers alike. These efforts produced a button-hook, but this didn’t satisfy him.
“Have you anything like a hairpin?” he asked Shrike. “Something long and thin, like a needle or—”
Shrike dipped his hand into his cloak pocket and produced a silver awl.
Wren raised an eyebrow. “That’ll do.”
Shrike dropped the awl into Wren’s outstretched palm. Wren crouched before the lock.
“I required the contents of my father’s wine-cellar to survive the holidays at home during my university years,” Wren explained as he probed the mechanism with button-hook and awl. “Neither he nor his butler felt inclined to furnish me with the key.”
Shrike, to whom it had not occurred to demand an explanation for such fortuitous skill in night-work, cocked his head as he watched Wren’s progress against the lock.
After a considerable amount of rattling, a decisive click resounded through the hall. Wren’s shoulders slumped in a sigh of relief. He rose to his feet and turned the knob.
Sunshine poured into the stair as Wren opened the door. The room within was warm and bright. A merry crimson carpet lay across the floorboards, and the mantle above the fireplace held a porcelain vase filled with golden aconite blooms. Glass-fronted shelves held a multitude of bound tomes along one wall. A window in the wall opposite looked out over High Street and the bridge over the River Medway beyond.
A desk stood between the window and the fireplace. It appeared much like the one Shrike had found in Wren’s garret, except its brass fittings shone brighter, its gleaming wood bore more intricate carvings and flourishes, and it had a horseshoe-ring of small drawers surrounding its writing surface instead of the myriad pigeon-holes into which Wren stuffed his papers.
Wren fell upon these drawers at once. The shrill scrape of wood-against-wood rang in Shrike’s ears as Wren yanked each open in turn, flicking through their contents with furtive rapidity and cursing under his breath as he failed to find what he wanted. One particular drawer, however, did not open. To this Wren applied button-hook and awl.
Shrike left him to it. His own hands itched to prove some aid to Wren’s cause, and so he turned to the remainder of the room. Running his fingertips over the chimney-bricks in search of loose mortar turned up nothing. Likewise the hearthstones beneath revealed no secrets. Flipping and shaking the rug proved fruitless. None of the floorboards rang hollow under his boot-heels.
But through an open doorway in the far corner of the room, he glimpsed the corner of a bed. And so he crept onward.
The bedroom appeared as warm and bright as the parlour. The bed lay between a wash-stand and a chest of drawers. Shrike considered the quilted counter-pane for a long moment, wondering if he ought to rip its seams to see if Tolhurst had sewn Wren’s manuscripts into the patches. However, as he laid his hands on it, he felt not crisp or crumpled paper but mere feathers beneath the fabric. He settled for merely stripping the bed and flipping the mattress. These efforts revealed nothing.
Shrike turned to the chest of drawers. Scarves and handkerchiefs abounded in the upper, whilst shirts, trousers, waistcoats, and small-clothes dominated the lower. In the very bottom drawer, however, after Shrike had tossed out the linen bed-clothes, he found something.
A cache of papers lay beneath all.
Shrike snatched them up—only for the thrill of victory to vanish as his eyes fell on unfamiliar scrawls. Nothing he now held looked like Wren’s handiwork. Most of it took the form of random dots laid out over parallel lines. The only drawing in the bunch was a sketch of a young woman, fair-haired and vacant-eyed, with her figure warped by the artist’s unskilled hand and a face that, if it reflected reality, marked her out as a most unfortunate creature.
Still, while the scribbles meant nothing to Shrike, they might yet mean something to Wren, and so Shrike brought them out with him when he returned to the parlour.
Wren, meanwhile, had made great progress against the desk and book-cases. The glass-fronts had divulged their tomes onto the carpet to lie gaping open in piles. Every desk drawer was out and spilled over onto the floor, where Wren now sat sorting the contents into neat stacks, his speckled brow stormy with intense concentration. At Shrike’s entrance he glanced up. His gaze flew to meet Shrike’s own, then darted to the papers Shrike held before him. At once the storm on his brow broke out into a sunshine smile of sheer relief.
