Not quite a lie. It had been true last spring.
Maybe not a lie; maybe it was a fantasy.
Maybe it was a plan.
After the party, in a private room in an opium den, Peter learned that Pipperly had paperwork in his shipment. This could be it, the conclusion in his hands right here—he could go back to Celia.
“Just look atthis!” Henry Pipperly slammed the letters on the table, oddly flushed, laughing too loudly. He wasn’t taking opium, it was something else. “Lord Courtemanche. Sir Fart-Head Barbineaux. Ha. Ha! Writing letters to their English lady-loves. How many of them do you think are married? Ha!”
Peter held out his hand, and Pipperly passed the bundle, although it landed somewhere between Peter’s elbow and his water glass.
Damn. It was. The Crown didn’t care about love letters.
Peter was obliged to continue keeping company with Britain’s most hopeless criminal.
*
Check in withyour boss, said the runner.
Don’t think we don’t see, Jackdaw told him. Stop going to places where Hughes doesn’t belong.
Jackdaw wasn’t anything like a superior officer, and Peter didn’t like being told what to do.
He called on Uncle Derrick again, where Hughes definitely did not belong. This time, Peter left his address, so his uncle could write to him. Or in case anything went wrong, his housekeeper could send word and Peter could be there in an hour. Derrick wasn’t a young man, and Peter had already wasted too many of his years.
After, he went to an organ recital and sat in the balcony where he could watch Celia. The music rolled over him, churned in his gut and peeled back his skin. The low pedals were like the rumbling of artillery, the stops keened like the moaning wind and the high notes of men laying in the bloody mud. Melodies heroic or tragic. Peter had always loved music.
Meanwhile, he watched Celia’s subtle gestures to Marianne, the way Marianne tilted slightly closer. They loved each other in a way that was completely foreign to Peter; or maybe just completely lost. His little siblings had loved him once like that. The organ susurrated like the sea; shimmered like the sparkle in Elinor’s face when she saw the ocean for the first time, although she’d lived within miles of it her entire life. One little hand in each of his, walking back to the house he’d rented. He was on medical leave, then, and they were there on a lie. Six stolen weeks together—he promised he would come back.
That was nine years ago.
That was the last time.
When the entire church was empty, Peter walked into the street and realization hit him like the too-bright sunlight.
Even if he could buy a house, even if he could make the switch from Hughes back to Alcott, even if he could find all the correct tutors and make the right introductions and do all the right things for a vulnerable young woman—even with all that—if he were going to have Elinor he would have together. He would have to go home again.
He would have to face his father.
*
Swirling steam, skirlingarguments, low dark beams. Peter pressed through the crowd, raised voices, smell of coffee and wet wool and male sweat. He’d been enrolled at Cambridge and awarded a degree, but spent more time at the “penny universities” like these, watched over by a man in a fez and his cups of aromatic brew. Peter tipped his hat to the men at the table under the faded tapestry—radical politicians, all of them. In February, Peter had been so full of ideas that he’d stood on that very table and delivered an impromptu speech about the state of British mill workers, making dozens of new friends in the space of an hour—no time for that today. Now he visited the coffee shops for gossip.
Besides, it was raining outside and warm in here. He passed his coin to the Turkish fellow at the back counter; stepped against the wall to watch the mesmerizing passage of little gold pots sliding on the hot sand, the hiss of water and the clink of the copper spoon, the sweet earthy aroma from the jar of ground beans.
Peter sensed eyes on himself and turned to find John Brennan almost at his elbow. Peter smiled, because he liked the man, but his chest went stiff, because he never knew what Brennan expected. He wasn’t sure if they were friends.
“You all right?” Brennan nodded a greeting. “I’ve got a table, yonder. Come sit with me.”
Peter might have made an excuse, but the Turk handed him a cup, and now Peter couldn’t leave until he had drunk it. Hefollowed in Brennan’s wake, around a corner into a nook. They slid onto benches, the table so small that their knees bumped.
“I’m doing as well as anyone.” Peter sipped his coffee. Too strong. Too bitter. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You’d told me your new boss was Dempsey.” There was an accusation in Brennan’s voice. “Took Francis all this time to get me to repeat the name and figure out you meant Jackdaw—the infamous Jackdaw!”
Peter shrugged. “Home Office would have put some shackles on him.”
Brennan raised his eyebrows and dropped his voice. “Francis knows the word on the street, and he’s not happy about it.”
