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He hauled himself to his feet and grabbed his jacket off the back of his chair. “Do me a favor and look into this Douglas character Lavinia mentioned earlier in the letter.”

“Where are you going?” Gillie asked.

He shrugged on his coat and flicked the lapels into place. “To get my asset back into line.”

Chapter Eight

AFTER A DAY of cutting a rainbow of gowns, stitching until her fingers were numb, and stacking poor little Fiona up with boxes of finished orders to rush to customers’ homes, Mrs. Parkem’s had finally quieted enough for Lavinia to relax as much as a seamstress could before a royal visit. She’d reluctantly sent Siobhan and the girls home an hour earlier. She hated to keep them as late as ten, but every moment was valuable at a time like this. However, despite the mounting pressure as they got closer to the royal visit, she couldn’t help but enjoy the luxurious silence that fell over her workshop in the very late evening through early morning.

Her back ached and her eyes felt like she’d plunged them into a bucket of fine sand, but she continued to sew. There was something meditative about the pursuit that filled the spaces of her mind. With a needle in her hand she could simply be.

She was just finishing the fine stitches that edged a buttonhole on a heather-blue wool day dress for Mrs. Campbell when a noise caught her attention. It sounded like someone tapping their fingers along glass. Untucking her feet from under her, she stood, the soft petticoats she favored when she was at work falling around her legs.

There it was again—the same sound, but this time more like a clatter than a tap.

With a frown, she went over to one of the three windows that looked down into the close at the back of her shop. Something moved in the dark, and she caught a glimpse of pale skin in the faint light of the quarter moon.

Annoyed that one of the neighborhood children was throwing pebbles, she undid the latch and pushed the glass open so she could poke her head out. She was about to shout down when a low whistle of three cascading notes pierced the night. The three notes were those that Andrew had whistled under her window when they were younger, his signal that it was safe for her to steal out into the night so they could be together.

She quickly pulled the window shut, locking the latch into place with more force than perhaps necessary. Hand still on the cold metal, she stood there, her breath coming in light pants as she felt as though her chest were being squeezed from all sides. She didn’t know whether Andrew was calling up these little things from their shared past as some coy punishment for the decisions she’d made, but that’s what it felt like—constant reminders that he’d once known her better than anyone and that she’d turned her back on him.

She heard the whistle again and shook her head. She had a job to do, a reward to earn, and then she and Andrew would both go their separate ways. She’d pay Caleb’s debt and then everything would be normal again. That was what she wanted more than anything.

She hurried down the stairs and through the kitchen to the back door of the shop. When she opened it, Andrew stepped out of the shadows and into the beam of light streaming out of the door.

“What are you doing here?” she asked in a rush, glancing around the close. If anyone saw her talking to a man at her back door around midnight . . . Well, every merchant on Victoria Street and then some would know about it by noon the following day.

“We need to talk,” he said, brushing past her into the kitchen.

“Do come in,” she muttered under her breath.

She shut the door and threw the heavy iron bolt to lock it. When she turned around, arms crossed over her chest, Andrew was at one of the two doors leading off the kitchen, peering around it.

“Where will we have the most privacy? There are two doors in this room and a staircase. It’s too easy for someone to overhear us,” he said.

“Has anyone ever told you that espionage has made you rather paranoid?” she asked.

He scowled. “What you call paranoia, I call an instinct for survival.”

“There’s no one in the house but me, but let’s go to my workshop. I just put more coal in the stove so it will be warm there and there’s no chance of Caleb stumbling in.”

“He doesn’t live with you, does he?”

“No, but he likes showing up to the shop from time to time looking for sympathy or breakfast or whiskey. In fact, he was just here the other night,” she said.

“But he won’t come into the workshop?” he asked.

“I never let him in.”

“Why not?”

“Because everyone in that workshop is required to do something useful, and Caleb finds the entire idea of me being a dressmaker rather unsavory—never mind that he flirts outrageously with my head seamstress, who’s far too intelligent to pay him any notice,” she said.

“What does he think you should do instead?” he asked. “Your husband and your parents are all dead.”

Bitterness tinged her laugh. “He wants to see me remarried, of course.”

Without a glance back, she picked up her skirts and began to climb the stairs. After a moment, she heard the scrape of hard leather soles against the wood.