As she’d feared. “Did you burn it then?” she asked, there was an edge of new hurt in it. Her grandfather might have been eccentric, but those texts were his most prized possessions, and he’d been a good man.
Reginald closed his eyes. “Of course not,” he said. “Lord, but I should have. Couldn’t bring myself to in the end.”
Watery hope trickled in. “So you donated it?” she asked. “To the Morland archives?”
He scoffed. “That hovel?” he said cuttingly. “Absolutely not. They didn’t get a thing. Everything was given to the library here in Lavnonshire.”
Polly frowned. ButThe Stewards’ Testamenthad been filched from Morland. That’s what the Colsons and Theo had said; that it had been donated after her grandfather had died.
It didn’t matter now. If the cypher was in the Lavnonshire library, then it was free for the taking. It was a better outcome than she’d imagined.
“I don’t want to hear of you walking about society,” her father was saying now, rubbing his forehead. “Your mother—I don’t think she can bear any further disgrace.”
Polly nodded. “Tell her for me… that I’m sorry—”
“Oh, a sorrier child I cannot imagine,” Reginald agreed. His eyes swept over her moth-eaten clothing, at least four decades out of trend. “You had it all before you,” he said, and Polly wasn’t sure if he were speaking to her or to himself. “Everything that I never did. And you squandered it.”
The last time Polly had sat here, her father had used the same words, only then, she’d been cowed and shaking. Now, she stood tall. She still felt the shame, but she didn’t let it curl her spine. If she was to disgrace her parents anyway, then best to not disgrace herself, too. She would do what she thought was right.
“I went where the House told me to go,” she said. Her voice was soft, but sure. “Without question. I gave them the information they sought, at great personal cost.” And at the cost of others. So many others. “And all I asked for was safety. A modest remit in a place that wouldn’t be razed by the Lords’ Army,” Polly’s lungs swelled. “They took that information, and in return they stripped me of my fellowship.” Tears sprang up in her eyes. “I wasloyalto the House.”
“You were a Unionsympathizer!” he volleyed, and then he went to the bookshelf and opened a drawer there. He pulled out sheets of parchment in his fists and slammed them down on the tea cart, bouncing the cups on their saucers, the milk overturning. “Three letters in the firstweek!” he spat, rage overspilling. “Hand-scribed, if you can believe it! All of them sent personally to our door.”
Polly saw the crude quill work. The too-big letters. The first word on each was her name. The last was Otto’s.
I still can’t bring myself to believe it… Tell me it’s not true, Pol… I only want to know that you are safe, and I’ll write no more…
Reginald measured each of his breaths, reuniting with some severed part of his early days, his fists balling as though he might swing on someone. “SomeCrafterkid,” he said. A voice he’d shed long ago came up his windpipe, foaming and seething. “Some piece of brink scum, sending notes by fuckin’ hand tomydaughter. Tomyhouse!”
You ought to know I loved you, though I was too much a coward to say it… I love you still, even though I shouldn’t…
Tears fell free, coursing down Polly’s cheeks. Damn it, but she was shaking after all.
“Do not stand there and preach about yourloyalties!” her father said. “What of your loyalty tome? To yourmother? Do you have any idea the deals that were made to instate you as an Artisan in the first place?” He sent the letters and sugar cubes and milk flying. He stormed across the room, trying to leash that part of him that was born in the brink, that he’d buried long ago.
And did he hate that part so much that he couldn’t bear his own daughter loving a Craftsman?
Polly picked up each letter, one by one, crumpled now and soiled with milk. She did not give her father the courtesy of a goodbye. She did not apologize to him like she had the last time, bawling and begging as her father shoved her over the threshold.
This time, she walked out with her chin lifted against the weight of three millstones. She pulled along behind her every terrible choice she’d ever made. There was no freeing herself from them. She could only persevere.
She thought, as she closed the door to her family home, that she heard a keening—the first wretched sounds of a man breaking.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWOPATRICK
Patrick and John followed Polly at a distance through Lavnonshire and back to the cliffs, where the antiques shop was perched. They found Mrs. Trunk dusting a collection of cherub figurines and nodded to her as they passed. She didn’t look their way, but her mouth moved without emitting any sound. She shuffled away among her rows, as though wishing to disintegrate into them. The piano trilled something irritable-sounding. Patrick imagined their company was wearing on her.
Upstairs, Theo was sitting upright. Nina’s hands were on his bare stomach, reapplying a clean bandage. Patrick felt something gnash at his insides.
Nina stood at their arrival. “Well?” she asked, her eyes on Polly’s hands.
Polly sighed. “The cypher wasn’t there.”
Patrick thought she looked different. Sounded different. He wondered what had transpired in that house.
Nina’s face fell. John cursed beneath his breath.
“But it isn’t far,” Polly continued, her eyes hard. She squared her shoulders with the same surety she’d possessed in Kenton Hill. “My father donated it to the library.”
