Chapter 34: The Ledger of Small Hours

The night air was thick with the smell of the river—mud, salt, and the faint rot of things better left unexamined. Edmund followed Cecily along the water stairs, their boots slick on the wet stone. The tide was low, and the exposed steps glistened like the back of some great dark fish. A wherry bobbed at the lowest landing, its single lantern shuttered to a sliver of light.

He did not ask where they were going. Experience had taught him that Cecily’s answers, when given freely, were rarely the whole truth, and when given grudgingly, were usually worse. So he simply stepped into the boat, settled onto the damp bench, and let the ache in his shoulders speak for him.

“You look like a man being rowed to his own hanging,” Cecily said, taking the sculls herself. The boatman had vanished—paid, no doubt, to disappear.

“A hanging would at least provide a conclusion,” Edmund said. “I am beginning to suspect this business has no end. Only more stairs, more fog, more widows with secrets.”

She pulled hard on the oars, and the boat slid out into the current. “You are learning, then.”

The river was quiet. The watch fires along the banks were distant smears of orange, and the great hulks of anchored ships rose like sleeping beasts. Edmund watched the shore slide past, trying to orient himself. They were heading east, past the Tower, past the docks, toward the stretch of river where the lesser merchants kept their warehouses.

“Walsingham’s house is behind us,” he said.

“Yes.”

“And the blue door is behind us as well.”

“Also yes.”

“So we are not going to either of those places.”

Cecily smiled in the dark. “You are quicker than you pretend, my lord.”

“I am far too tired to pretend anything.” He rubbed his eyes. “Where, then?”

“There is a man. A clerk in the Exchequer’s office. He keeps a ledger—a private one, not the Queen’s—of certain payments made to certain persons. Payments that do not appear in any official record.”

Edmund sat up a little straighter. “And how does a lady of leisure know of a clerk’s private ledger?”

“Because I paid him to keep it,” Cecily said. “For the last three years.”

The words hung in the cold air. Edmund turned them over in his mind, looking for the hidden catch, the trap disguised as a confidence.

“You have been spying on the Exchequer,” he said slowly, “before ever you met me. Before Walsingham ever summoned you.”

“Before I ever wore black silk for a dead husband, yes.” She did not look at him. The oars dipped and pulled, dipped and pulled. “I told you that my loyalties were unclear. I did not say they were newly made.”

Edmund let out a long breath. “You could have told me.”

“Would you have believed me?”

He considered the question with the seriousness it deserved. “No. Perhaps not. But I might have been more suspicious of you, which would have been exhausting. So perhaps it is better this way.”

She laughed—a low, genuine sound that surprised them both. “You are the strangest man I have ever met, Edmund Ashworth.”

“I am too tired to be strange. It is merely my natural state, revealed by exhaustion.”

The boat bumped against a wooden jetty. Cecily shipped the oars and stepped out, tying the line to a cleat with the efficient motions of someone who had done it many times. Edmund followed, his legs protesting as he climbed onto the dock. Before them rose a narrow building, its upper storeys leaning toward the river like a drunkard seeking a wall.

“The Exchequer’s clerk lives here?”

“He lodges here. He works above a chandler’s shop on Thames Street, but he keeps his private books close to the water. Easier to burn them if need be.”

“And you know this because you paid him.”

“I know this because I paid him well enough to tell me where to find him when the time came.” She crossed to the door and knocked—three quick taps, then two slow ones. A pattern, Edmund noted, that did not match any he had heard before.

The door opened a crack. A voice, thin and reedy, said, “Who knocks at the hour of the rat?”

“The widow who pays your salt,” Cecily replied.

The crack widened. A small man with a face like a crumpled receipt peered out, his eyes darting to Edmund and then back to Cecily. “You brought company, madam. That was not the agreement.”

“The agreement has changed. Let us in, Master Crouch, before we all freeze.”

The man—Crouch, presumably—hesitated, then stepped back. The door swung open to reveal a cramped room lit by a single tallow candle. The walls were lined with shelves, and the shelves were lined with books: not grand volumes, but the plain, unadorned ledgers of a man who dealt in numbers rather than poetry.

Edmund stepped inside, and the warmth of the room hit him like a blessing. He sank onto a wooden stool without being asked, letting his head fall forward.

“My lord?” Crouch’s voice was nervous. “Is he unwell?”

“He is lazy,” Cecily said. “It is a chronic condition. Pay it no mind.” She turned to the clerk, her voice dropping to something sharp and low. “I need the list. The one you keep with the red ribbon.”

Crouch’s face went pale. “Madam, that list—I told you, it is dangerous to even open it. The names on it are powerful.”

“Which is precisely why I need it.”

The little man wrung his hands. “If anyone learned I had kept such a record, I would hang. I would be drawn and quartered. My family—“

“Your family is in Deptford, living on the allowance I have provided for them these three years past,” Cecily said, her voice flat as iron. “Do not pretend you have not considered the cost of our arrangement. Now. The list.”

Crouch’s mouth worked for a moment, then he shuffled to the back of the room. He climbed onto a stool, reached behind a loose beam, and pulled out a slim volume wrapped in oilcloth. He returned and placed it on the table, but did not open it.

“What is in it?” Edmund asked, his voice muffled against his sleeve.

“Payments,” Cecily said. “Secret payments from the Spanish pension—gold that has flowed into England to buy friends. Every name, every sum, every date. The one thing the Privy Council has never been able to prove.”

She reached for the book. Crouch’s hand shot out, gripping her wrist.

“The last page,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “There is a name there I did not write. It appeared one morning, as if written by a ghost. I have not touched the book since.”

Cecily looked at him, then at Edmund. Slowly, she opened the ledger.

The pages were filled with neat columns of figures, names of merchants and lords, sums in Spanish ducats converted to English pounds. Edmund leaned forward, his exhaustion forgotten. There, on the final page, in ink that was still slightly wet-smelling, was a single line:

*To be delivered: the Earl of Morland.*

His own name. Staring up at him from a dead man’s book.