The library door yielded to her touch with its familiar whisper: she’d oiled those hinges herself a fortnight ago, when such mundane tasks still structured the days. Tess had expected darkness, the familiar geography of furniture rendered safe by absence. Instead, lamplight pooled across the Persian rug like spilled honey, and her breath snagged in her throat.
A figure hunched over Lord Ashford’s desk, surrounded by papers that had no business being accessible. Leather-bound ledgers lay splayed open, their spines cracked wide as anatomized bodies. Even from the doorway, she recognized the red wax seals catching lamplight: colonial office correspondence, shipping manifests from Malaya, the private records His Lordship kept locked in the study behind the Shakespeare folios.
The bookbinder. Thorne, he’d called himself when the quarantine trapped him here. Working late, apparently. Working through documents that should have remained sealed.
Her fingers found the pamphlets in her apron pocket. Three copies of “The Price of Rubber: Blood on British Hands,” the ink still fresh enough to smudge. The paper felt suddenly incriminating against her palm. Her chest tightened with the mathematics of assumption: he was protecting them. Cataloguing evidence before it could be weaponized against the family. Probably inventorying which documents to destroy, which truths to bury deeper.
The lamplight illuminated columns of figures in his careful hand. Mortality rates, she could see even from here. Profit margins. The bureaucratic language of systematic murder, rendered neat and manageable in double-entry bookkeeping.
Something hot and reckless moved through her veins: not fear, though fear would have been sensible. Rage, perhaps. Or that particular species of exhaustion that makes caution seem like cowardice. She’d spent twenty-three years making herself small, invisible, safe. Three weeks of plague and death had stripped that patience thin as parchment.
The sensible choice lay behind her: the dark corridor, the servants’ stairs, the narrow bed where she might pretend she’d never seen this. Where she could remain invisible, safe in the armor of insignificance.
But Tess’s boots found the floorboards with deliberate weight.
The sound carried in the library’s hush. One step, then another, each a small declaration. Her pulse hammered against her throat, yet her hands stayed steady. The pamphlets pressed against her hip through the apron fabric, their presence both talisman and indictment. Three copies of truth rendered in cheap ink, naming the crimes this man was so carefully documenting.
For what purpose? To hide them more efficiently? To calculate which evidence might prove most damaging, which records should accidentally find their way into the garden bonfire where they burned the plague-soiled linens?
She watched his pen move across the page, transcribing mortality rates with the dispassionate precision of a clerk. As though those numbers weren’t lives. Weren’t men worked to bone and fever in the Malayan heat, their deaths distilled to entries in a ledger.
Let him see her. Let him try to justify this midnight accounting of atrocity.
Lex’s head snaps up at the footfall, amber eyes sharp with the guilty alertness of someone caught. His hand moves to cover the topmost page.
Then he sees the uniform. The cap with its wilted ribbon. The apron with its telltale stains of kitchen work.
Just a servant.
His shoulders drop fractionally. The wariness in his posture eases into something closer to irritation at the interruption. His gaze returns to the manifest before him, tracking tonnage of raw rubber against “labor losses”. That bloodless bureaucratic phrase for men worked to death in the Malayan heat.
He makes a notation in his own hand, copying figures with practiced efficiency.
She’s watching him with an intensity that prickles the back of his neck, but he dismisses the sensation. What threat could she possibly pose? She probably can’t even read these documents, can’t comprehend the machinery of empire laid bare in columns and calculations.
Still. Witnesses are complications, however insignificant.
His fingers drum once against the ledger’s edge. A tell he’d curse himself for later. The silence stretches taut between them, charged with mutual reassessment.
“You read,” he says finally. Not a question. An accusation wrapped in surprise.
Her chin lifts, grey eyes meeting his without the deference he’d expected. “And you’re no bookbinder.” She gestures at the documents spread before him. “Not unless binding involves memorizing plantation death tolls.”
The ink-stained fingers freeze. His amber eyes sharpen, reassessing her with sudden wariness that borders on alarm. She’s not parroting overheard phrases: she understands the mechanisms of extraction, the mathematics of exploitation. His gaze drops to her apron pocket, then back to her face, calculating.
“Where,” he asks slowly, each word deliberate, “does a housemaid learn colonial accounting?”
The fury that rises in Tess is white-hot, clarifying. She has spent years perfecting invisibility. The downcast eyes, the murmured “Yes, ma’am,” the careful erasure of self required to move through rooms where her presence is tolerated only as function. She has scrubbed floors while men discussed philosophy above her bent back. She has served tea to women who spoke of charity whilst wearing stones torn from colonial earth. She has been furniture, wallpaper, a pair of hands disconnected from thought.
But this, this casual dismissal from a man who sits in stolen comfort, handling documents stained with her brother’s blood, ignites something beyond anger. It is recognition. He sees her exactly as they all do: a body without mind, a voice without authority, words without weight.
Her brother died because men like this calculated profit margins against human life and found the arithmetic acceptable. Thomas, who taught her letters by candlelight, who believed she could be more than what their station promised, crushed between machinery whilst the factory owners debated insurance costs. Her mother, dismissed after thirty years’ service, left to starve with dignity because pension payments affected quarterly returns.
“I know,” she says, and her voice is steady now, cold as the stone walls around them, “that those twelve thousand pounds purchased this library. These books. The very chair you’re sitting in.” She takes one step forward, watching his shoulders tense. “I know the mortality rate because I can read the reports your masters hide in locked studies. I know the forced labour figures because I’ve seen the correspondence they burn in drawing-room grates.”
Another step. Her hands are steady at her sides, though her pulse hammers in her throat.
“I know because while you catalogue their crimes for coin, I’ve been stealing their secrets for revolution.”
His hand stills on the document. For three heartbeats, neither moves. The pamphlet lies between them like a gauntlet thrown: she can see him reading the title upside-down, recognizing the publisher, the dangerous words. Workers’ Liberation Front. Colonial Extraction and Domestic Oppression: The Same Machine.
When he looks up, the condescension has vanished, replaced by something sharper. Calculation. Reassessment. His amber eyes narrow, and she sees the exact moment she transforms in his perception from furniture to threat.
“You’re carrying sedition,” he says quietly. Not a question. An accusation that could see her hanged.
“And you’re carrying forgery tools.” She nods toward the desk where his bookbinding supplies conceal instruments no legitimate tradesman requires. “We both have secrets that could end at the rope.”
The silence stretches taut between them. Outside, an owl calls. The house settles around them with its burden of sickness and lies.
He leans back slowly, reassessing her with the focus of a man who has badly miscalculated an opponent. “What do you want?”
She doesn’t answer immediately. Instead, she watches him watch her, seeing the tradesman’s mask slip further. His question wasn’t shock. It was recognition. The kind that comes from familiarity.
“The same places you’ve been, I’d wager.” Her voice drops to barely above a whisper, conscious of the sleeping house around them. “Though I didn’t need to cross class boundaries to find them. They come to us. In kitchens and factory floors and dockyards.” She pauses, lets the implication settle. “The question isn’t where I got it. The question is why a bookbinder cares enough to ask.”
She’s turned his interrogation back on him, and they both know it.
The question hangs between them like smoke. Lex’s jaw tightens. He’s made a tactical error, shown too much knowledge, too much investment. A bookbinder wouldn’t recognize the pamphlet’s provenance. Wouldn’t care about its circulation networks.
His fingers still on the Malayan manifest. When he speaks again, his voice has lost its dismissive edge, gained something harder. More honest.
“Touché, Miss Barlow.”
The use of her name, which she hasn’t given, is its own confession.
The silence stretched taut as catgut. Tess’s pulse hammered against her collar, but she held his gaze: let him see she wasn’t afraid, wasn’t backing down.
“I could ask,” she said quietly, “what a bookbinder needs with prussic acid. Or why your Latin’s better than the vicar’s.”
His hand stilled on the papers. A muscle jumped in his jaw.
“And I could ask,” he replied, voice soft and dangerous, “what happens to seditionists in quarantine houses.”
His mind catalogued the evidence with the precision of a man who’d learned to inventory threats before breakfast. Three weeks of careful invisibility, dismantled in a moment.
She’d been there Tuesday last when he’d worked the study lock with a bent wire. He’d dismissed her. Polishing brass in the corridor, he’d thought, another piece of the household furniture. But she’d been watching his hands, learning the rhythm of the tumblers. Thursday she’d lingered over the grate in the reading alcove while he’d transcribed shipping manifests, close enough to see the changes he’d made to dates and tonnage. He’d thought her illiterate, assumed the pages meant nothing to her.
Fool. Arrogant bloody fool.
His fingers had drummed against the desk before he’d caught himself. She’d noticed. Of course she had. Her grey eyes tracked the movement like a cat marking a mouse’s bolt-hole.
How much had she pieced together? The binding press in the corner held more than book-board and leather. Beneath the false bottom: three forged letters of transit, two sets of identity papers, and the stolen research documents that would buy his passage to Amsterdam if they didn’t buy him a hanging first. The prussic acid she’d mentioned, insurance, he’d told himself, though against what he hadn’t quite decided.
She knew about the acid. Which meant she’d been through his supplies, his carefully arranged tools. Which meant she’d been close enough to find the compartment in his work-case where he kept the sealing wax in six different colours, each matching a different government office.
He forced his breathing steady, his expression neutral. She was reading him the way he’d learned to read forged documents. Looking for the places where the ink sat wrong, where the hand had hesitated.
“You’ve been busy,” he said, investing the words with boredom he didn’t feel. “For a housemaid.”
The equation balanced with brutal clarity. She possessed enough to destroy him three times over: the lock-picking, the altered documents, the chemistry set no legitimate bookbinder required. One word to Lord Ashford and he’d hang before autumn ended.
But he’d watched her polish that same brass fitting four times in an hour while he’d worked. He’d seen the pamphlet corner protruding from her apron pocket Tuesday last. Red ink, crude typesetting, the unmistakable layout of seditious literature. He knew about the loose panel in the servants’ linen closet; he’d followed her there Thursday evening, watched her retrieve papers and secrete them elsewhere.
Her literacy alone could cost her the position her family had likely held for generations. The political materials? Transportation to the colonies, if the magistrate felt merciful. Prison, more likely. The kind where women didn’t survive their sentences.
They’d circled each other like duelists, each assuming the other was unarmed.
His pulse steadied. Stalemate, then. The most dangerous kind: the sort where one flinch, one miscalculation, would bring both their houses down.
“Busy,” she repeated, tasting the word. “Yes. I suppose we both have been.”
The arrogance of it burned like carbolic on raw skin. He’d catalogued the family’s vulnerabilities with surgical precision: the son’s gambling debts, the daughter’s laudanum habit, Lord Ashford’s rubber plantation atrocities. He’d mapped every pressure point in the household’s architecture of power.
And he’d dismissed the servants entirely. Furniture with pulses.
She’d been doing the same work he had, from an even more precarious position. No false papers to hide behind, no trade to justify her presence. Just the grey dress and white apron that rendered her invisible, the perfect camouflage for someone moving seditious literature through a house full of imperial profiteers.
He’d underestimated her because she was precisely what he’d been pretending to be: beneath notice.
Her politics weren’t just dangerous: they were incorruptible. He’d spent years learning to read people through their compromises, the small corruptions that made them pliable. But a woman who’d risk the noose for pamphlets wouldn’t flinch at destroying him for the greater good. She’d burn his escape route as readily as she’d burn the plantation records, and call it justice.
The calculation turns visceral: she’s made him the specimen, pinned and catalogued. Every assumption he’d built, the invisible tradesman, the harmless bookbinder, collapses like rotted scaffolding. She’d let him believe his own performance while constructing this cage around him. The documents suddenly feel like bait he’s already swallowed. His throat tightens. When had the hunter become the quarry?
The air between them crystallizes into something dangerous. Lex’s hand hovers above the papers, suddenly aware that every movement is being catalogued, assessed. She’s not simply angry. She’s been waiting for this.
“How long?” His voice comes out rougher than intended. “How long have you been watching me?”
“Since you arrived.” Tess doesn’t move, but her stillness has changed quality. “Since you asked for the Malayan shipping records on your second day. No bookbinder needs those. Since you spent forty minutes examining the lock on the study door when you thought the house was at dinner.”
Each observation lands like a blade. He’d been so careful, so certain of his invisibility. The servants who’d brought his meals, emptied his washbasin, trimmed the library lamps: he’d barely registered their faces. And all the while, she’d been compiling evidence.
“You’re blackmailing me.” It’s not a question.
“I’m understanding you.” She shifts slightly, and he catches the outline of something rectangular in her apron pocket. Not the pamphlets. Something harder-edged. “You’re not here for the family. You’re here for what they’ve done. The question is whether you’re after justice or profit.”
The distinction shouldn’t matter. He’s long past the luxury of moral categories. But the way she says justice, like a word that still has weight, still means something beyond leverage and transaction, makes his chest constrict.
“And if I say profit?” He keeps his voice level, testing.
“Then we’re enemies.” Simple. Final. “And I’ll make certain you leave here with nothing but a noose waiting in London.”
She knows about the forgery charges. Christ. She knows everything.
“But if it’s justice?” The question escapes before he can stop it.
Her expression shifts. Not softening, but recalculating. “Then perhaps we’re not on opposite sides after all.”
“Abstractions?” The word comes out low, vibrating with something beyond anger. “My brother was crushed between factory gears for eleven shillings a week. My mother scrubbed floors until her hands bled, then was turned out without reference when her back gave way. Those aren’t abstractions, Mr. Thorne. Those are the operational costs you’re so eager to monetize.”
She moves closer, close enough that he can see the fine tremor in her jaw, the exhaustion bruising the skin beneath her eyes. Close enough to be dangerous in entirely new ways.
“You’ve learned their language to exploit them. I’ve learned it to expose them.” Her voice drops to something almost intimate. “We’re both thieves here, stealing from the same locked rooms. But I’ll burn what I take. You’ll sell it to the highest bidder and call yourself clever.”
The contempt should sting less than it does. He’s been called worse by better people. But the way she’s looking at him, like she’d expected more, somehow, from a fellow trespasser, lands differently than any insult.
The silence stretches taut between them. Lex feels something shift in his chest. Not agreement, but recognition. She’s named the thing he’s spent years refusing to examine: that survival and complicity might be the same bargain, differently dressed.
“And how many will you take down with you?” His voice comes rougher than intended. “When they find your pamphlets, when they trace your sedition. It won’t be Lord Ashford who hangs. It’ll be you, and every servant who knew you, and the laundress who can’t read but shared your room.”
He sees her flinch, just barely. The tremor of someone who’s already counted that cost in sleepless hours.
“You call me coward,” he continues, quieter now. “I call you reckless with other people’s lives.”
“Blood money that buys lives,” he counters, leaning forward. “How many workers could flee with forged papers? How many families could I extract before your revolution arrives. In what, a generation? Two?” He watches her jaw tighten. “You’d sacrifice the living for the principle of the thing.”
“Principles are what separate us from them,” she hisses, but her hand trembles against the desk’s edge.
The silence stretches taut as wire. Lex’s hand moves: not toward weapon or door, but to the documents between them, deliberate and slow. “So we’re both liars,” he says finally, amber eyes fixed on hers. “Both thieves in our way.” His voice drops. “The question is whether we’re thieves with compatible aims, or whether one of us leaves this room in chains.” Tess’s pulse hammers against her throat, but she doesn’t retreat.
The pamphlets land with a slap that echoes in the midnight library, cheap paper against mahogany worth more than Tess will earn in a lifetime. Her fingers remain splayed across them, The Worker’s Voice, Colonial Crimes Exposed, holding them down as if they might escape.
“You think I’m a fool who can’t read these?” She taps the colonial documents with her other hand, the gesture sharp enough to make Lex’s eyes narrow. “Rubber quotas. Severed hands as proof of discipline. Villages burned for missing harvest targets.” Her voice stays low, but fury runs beneath it like current. “I know what these words mean. I’ve memorized what these words mean.”
Lex has gone utterly still, the quality of his attention transforming. She watches the calculation happen behind those amber eyes. Watches him discard his first assessment of her and construct something new. Something considerably more dangerous to him.
“And you,” she continues, leaning across the desk until the firelight catches the grey of her eyes, “are no bookbinder. Your hands are too soft for honest work.” She gestures to his ink-stained fingers, and he reflexively curls them. “But those stains. That’s forger’s ink. I’ve seen it before on the union organizer they arrested in Derby. The kind that doesn’t wash clean because you’re mixing your own from chemicals.”
The masks have fallen. Between them, the documents and pamphlets lie intermingled: evidence of atrocity beside calls for justice, the raw material of two entirely different schemes.
Lex’s mouth curves, but there’s no humor in it. “You’re cleverer than you pretend.”
“And you’re exactly as dangerous as you look.” Tess straightens, but doesn’t step back. “The question is what we do about it.”
The fire pops. Somewhere above them, someone coughs: wet and rattling. The plague doesn’t care about their standoff.
“You want to sell those atrocities to the highest bidder,” Tess accuses, disgust sharp in her whisper. Each word is a blade. “Profit from suffering twice over.”
Lex’s jaw tightens, muscle jumping beneath the scar. “I want to survive.” The word comes out harder than he intends. “Your revolution is a fantasy. Mine is a ship to America and a new name.” He leans forward, and she catches the scent of ink and something sharper. Desperation, perhaps. “You think your pamphlets will topple an empire? I’ve seen what happens to idealists. They hang.”
But she doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t retreat even an inch. “And I’ve seen what happens to men like you. You trade in other people’s pain until you’re hollow.”
She’s not wrong. He hates that it lands, hates the way something in his chest constricts. “At least I’m honest about the world as it is,” he counters, but his voice has lost its edge. “You’re chasing a dream that will get you killed.”
“Better than living as a coward.” The words are quiet. Devastating.
Lex spreads his hands, a gesture almost conciliatory. “We’re at an impasse.” His voice drops lower, conscious of the sleeping house. “You could expose me. Tell the family I’m a fraud, a criminal. I’d be hanged within the week.” His amber eyes hold hers, unflinching. “But I could tell them about your seditious materials. You’d be dismissed, prosecuted. Disappeared into a workhouse or worse.”
Tess’s fingers curl into fists against her apron. The pamphlets suddenly burn like coals against her hip. “So we’re both hostages.”
The word hangs between them, stark and true.
He nods slowly. “Or we’re both free. If neither of us speaks.”
But the silence that follows isn’t agreement. It’s assessment. They’re circling each other like duelists, each seeking advantage, each recognizing in the other a dangerous, unwelcome competence. The documents remain between them, unclaimed territory in their cold war.
“Why do you even care?” Lex asks, and beneath the challenge lies something uncomfortably close to genuine curiosity. “You could keep your head down, survive this quarantine, find another position when it’s done. Why risk everything for words on paper?”
Tess’s grey eyes flash with something between fury and grief. “Because my brother didn’t get to keep his head down. The factory took him piece by piece, his fingers first, then his lungs, until there was nothing whole left to bury.” Her voice cracks like ice over deep water, then hardens again. “Someone has to care, or it just continues. Forever.”
Something shifts behind Lex’s careful expression: not sympathy, which would be patronizing, but recognition. The kind that comes from shared scars.
“My sister,” he says quietly, the words pulled from him unwillingly. “Textile mill in Manchester. She was nine years old.” The admission costs him visibly; his jaw tightens as though he could take the words back. “Her hair caught in the machinery.”
Tess sees it then: the wound he’s built his armor around, the reason he trusts only leverage and lies. For one suspended moment, they’re not enemies separated by philosophy and method, but survivors of the same merciless machine, forged by identical cruelties into opposite shapes.
Then Lex’s face closes like a door slamming shut. “But caring didn’t save her. Grief doesn’t stop the gears.” He touches the documents with ink-stained fingers. “Only this only that keeps you breathing long enough to matter.”
Tess’s breath catches. “Those documents,” she says, voice stripped of ideology, suddenly practical. “If we both sicken. Lex is already moving, his hands steady despite the fear she can see tightening his jaw.”Tonight. Before, ”
“Before we’re the ones coughing.” She meets his eyes, and the alliance forms not from trust, but from the plague’s brutal arithmetic. Enemies can negotiate later. First, they must survive to remain enemies at all.
The silence after the cough stretches between them like a physical thing. Tess watches Lex’s hand, still gripping the desk edge, go white at the knuckles. She knows that grip. It’s the same way she holds the bannister when climbing the servants’ stairs in darkness, when one misstep means a broken neck.
“Mrs. Hendry was well yesterday,” she says, and hears the foolishness of it even as the words leave her mouth. Well means nothing now. Well is simply the hours before the fever declares itself.
Lex releases the desk, flexes his fingers as though testing them for steadiness. “The progression is faster than the village outbreak.” Not a question. He’s been tracking it, she realizes. Keeping his own ledger of symptoms and timelines.
“Three days from first cough to. Above them, Mrs. Hendry’s footsteps creak across floorboards. Slow. Unsteady. The walk of someone whose body has already begun its betrayal.
“To death,” Lex completes, clinical. “Sometimes four, if they’re strong.” His eyes move to the documents spread between them, then to the window where red quarantine flags hang limp in the darkness. “The guards won’t let an undertaker through anymore. Lord Ashford had to burn the last two bodies himself in the garden.”
Tess thinks of the master, soft-handed, imperious, dragging corpses wrapped in sheets across the lawn. The image should satisfy something in her, some hunger for the mighty brought low. Instead she feels only the walls pressing closer, the house becoming a mausoleum in slow motion.
“We’re cataloguing our own deaths,” she says. “Arguing over papers while the plague,”
“While the plague makes philosophers of us all?” Lex’s mouth twists. “How democratic.”
The bitterness in his voice mirrors her own. Class warfare seems absurd when they’re all just meat for the same fire.
The silence between them recalibrates. Tess watches him process the information, sees the exact moment his escape mathematics shift to include her. Or exclude her. She cannot tell which, and the uncertainty makes her reckless.
“The eastern perimeter backs onto Millfield Wood,” she continues, voice low. “The guards won’t follow far into the trees. Too afraid of what the darkness might carry.”
“Why are you telling me this?” His question cuts clean, surgical.
Because she’s tired of dying slowly in this house. Because the pamphlets hidden in her quarters will burn with her body if she doesn’t act. Because he’s the first person in three weeks who’s looked at her and seen something other than a servant or a contagion vector.
“Because you have something I need,” she says instead. “Those documents. The plantation records.”
His expression shifts, recognition, perhaps respect. “You can read them.”
“Every word.” She meets his eyes. “And I know what to do with them.”
The cough comes again from upstairs. Closer now. They both hear it counting down.
Lex turns back to the window, his body angling into a posture Tess recognizes from her own midnight calculations. He’s measuring. Days until quarantine might lift: unlikely. Routes through the overgrown gardens. Visible from the gatehouse. Distance to where the perimeter guards patrol: too far to run without being heard.
She watches him weigh her usefulness against the burden of her knowledge.
“The guards change shift at dawn,” she hears herself say. “Seven minutes when the eastern gate stands unwatched.”
His head snaps toward her, amber eyes sharp with suspicion and something else. Calculation, perhaps. Or the first dangerous flicker of alliance.
She shouldn’t be offering escape routes to a man who might yet betray her. But the plague has made enemies into the only partners available.
Tess’s throat tightens. Not from fever, though she feels its shadow there. The photographs blur before her: severed hands, children with swollen bellies, mass graves dug in neat colonial rows. Her brother’s factory accident was called misfortune. This was called progress.
“The plague doesn’t distinguish,” she says quietly, “between the hand that wields the lash and the hand that polishes its master’s boots.”
Tess’s pulse hammers against her collar. The coughing multiplies. Servants’ wing, then Lady Ashford’s chamber, then somewhere closer. She counts: five voices, perhaps six. Yesterday only three.
Lex sweeps the documents into his satchel, movements sharp with calculation. “Three days,” he says flatly. “Four at most before they burn this house with us inside.”
Not alliance. Arithmetic. The plague cares nothing for their opposition.
The servants remain frozen, caught between Tess’s ritual and this sudden intrusion of medical authority. Lex steps fully into the room, and she notices details that don’t align with the bookbinder he claims to be. The way he assesses distances between bodies, the unconscious gesture of pulling his collar over his mouth and nose, the vocabulary that belongs in a lecture hall, not a tradesman’s workshop.
“The miasma from decomposition,” he continues, moving toward the table with purposeful strides.
“Don’t you dare touch her.” Tess’s voice cracks like a whip. She shifts her position, placing herself between Lex and Mary’s shrouded form. “We’re saying words. That’s all. Words she earned with sixteen years of service to this house.”
“Words won’t stop what’s already begun in her lungs, in her blood.” He gestures sharply at the gathered servants. “But they will ensure you’re the next bodies requiring benediction. Do you understand nothing about contagion vectors? About transmission through respiratory droplets in confined spaces?”
Cook makes a small sound, half-sob, half-protest. Thomas’s hand moves to Annie’s shoulder, protective.
Tess feels her fury rising, hot and clarifying. “She was nineteen years old. She scrubbed their floors and emptied their chamber pots and died alone in a locked room because they were too frightened to sit with her. And you.”You speak of her like she’s a problem of mathematics. Like her death is merely data for your calculations.”
“Her death is a warning,” Lex says, and something flickers across his face. Not quite emotion, but its shadow. “One you’re all ignoring while you perform theatre that serves only your own comfort.”
The words land like a slap. Behind her, Tess hears Annie’s sharp intake of breath, Cook’s muttered prayer.
The silence stretches taut as wire. Tess feels the weight of seven pairs of eyes upon her, waiting, needing her to answer this man who speaks with such cold certainty. She studies him properly now: the way he holds himself in the doorway, blocking their exit as surely as any locked door. Not the posture of a bookbinder worried about his station, but something else entirely.
“Your sentiment,” she repeats, tasting the word like poison. “Is that what you call it when we refuse to let our dead vanish without acknowledgment?” Her voice drops, becomes more dangerous. “When we insist that a life spent in service to people who never learned her surname still matters?”
Behind her, she hears the rustle of fabric as the servants shift, uncertain. The old hierarchies are fraying: who has authority here? The gentleman tradesman with his educated diction and medical pronouncements? Or her, with her workers’ prayer and her fury?
Lex’s jaw tightens. For a moment something flickers in those amber eyes. Not quite guilt, but perhaps recognition. Then it’s gone, shuttered behind that infuriating clinical mask.
The air in the servants’ hall thickens with more than contagion. Tess straightens slowly, her fingers still pressed against the coarse shroud. Territory claimed. The other servants haven’t moved, caught in the magnetic field between her defiance and this stranger’s sudden, unsettling authority.
“She deserves words,” Tess says, and each syllable carries the weight of every unmarked grave, every servant dismissed without reference, every life the house has consumed and forgotten. “She deserves witness.”
Lex doesn’t flinch. That clinical calm settles over his features like a mask, and somehow his detachment enrages her more than cruelty would. As though he’s calculating acceptable losses rather than seeing Mary’s still face.
“She’s dead,” he says flatly. “Your sentiment won’t resurrect her, but it will kill the rest of you.”
The library conversations collapse into sharp focus. His casual mention of miasma theory, the way he’d corrected her understanding of fever progression, that moment he’d translated a Latin medical text without thinking. Not bookbinding knowledge. Clinical expertise, worn like a second skin beneath the tradesman’s clothes.
Thomas shifts his weight. Annie’s hand finds the doorframe, steadying herself against this new uncertainty.
“You’re no tradesman,” Tess says, voice dropping to something more dangerous than her earlier fury. Each word precise, a scalpel rather than a bludgeon. “What are you?”
His jaw tightens, something almost like regret crossing his features before calculation reasserts itself. “Sentiment is a luxury you cannot afford.” But his voice has lost its clinical edge, softening fractionally. “Five minutes. Windows open despite the cold. Burn everything she touched.” He steps aside, the concession grudging. “Then separate rooms. Immediately.”
Tess holds his stare, memorizing this fracture in his performance. She nods once. Permission granted, truce accepted.
For now.
Tess’s hands curl into fists at her sides, the careful deference she’s worn like armour for years cracking apart. The rage that’s simmered through a lifetime of swallowed words rises hot in her throat. “She was twenty years old.” Her voice trembles, not with weakness but with the effort of containing fury. “She sent half her wages to her mother in Manchester: a widow with three younger children who’ll now starve because Mary’s dead.”
She takes a step forward, reckless, closing the distance between them. The other servants, Cook with her red-rimmed eyes, James gripping his cap, young Alice barely sixteen and terrified, shift uncomfortably behind her, caught between grief and the ancient habit of obedience. But Tess has moved beyond such calculations.
“But I suppose that’s inconvenient to your calculations, Mr. Thorne.” She spits his name like an accusation, investing it with all the contempt she’s learned to hide beneath “yes, sir” and downcast eyes. “A human life reduced to an inconvenience. How very efficient of you.”
The shrouded body lies on its makeshift bier in the corridor behind her, Mary, who’d laughed at Tess’s whispered jokes during endless silver-polishing, who’d dreamed of saving enough to open a hat shop, who’d coughed blood for three days while still scrubbing floors because they couldn’t spare the hands. The sheet covering her is already stained, and the smell of carbolic soap can’t quite mask the sweeter, sicker odour beneath.
Lex stands rigid in the doorway, blocking their path, his bookbinder’s apron somehow looking like a physician’s coat in this moment. The autumn light from the corridor window catches the sharp planes of his face, rendering him marble-cold, immovable. His amber eyes hold no sympathy, only that infuriating watchfulness, as though he’s cataloguing her rage for future reference.
“We’re going to pray over her,” Tess says, her voice dropping to something more dangerous than shouting. “We’re going to give her that much dignity before you have her burned like rubbish.”
“Inconvenient?” Lex’s voice cuts through her fury with surgical precision, each word measured and cold. “What’s inconvenient, Miss Barlow, is that plague bacteria can survive on fabric for upwards of seventy-two hours.”
He steps forward, and there’s something in his movement: not the deference of a tradesman but the authority of someone accustomed to being obeyed. His hand gestures toward the shrouded form with clinical detachment.
“That touching her winding sheet could seed infection in every person standing in this corridor. Your prayer gathering would create ideal conditions for transmission. Close quarters, shared exhalations, emotional distress compromising bodily resistance to contagion.”
The words flow too easily, too precisely. Not the rough approximations of someone who’s overheard physicians speak, but the fluent vocabulary of medical training. Tess feels her anger shift, sharpening into something more focused. She catalogues each term: bacteria, not miasma. Transmission, not God’s will. Compromising bodily resistance. The language of laboratories, not libraries.
“The pathogen doesn’t care about your grief,” he continues, and that word, pathogen, lands between them like evidence. “It simply spreads. Exponentially.”
The words strike like a physical blow. Tess feels the blood drain from her face, then return in a hot rush. He knows. About the pamphlets, the literature that could see her transported or worse. The corridor seems to contract around them.
“Careful,” she breathes, and it’s no longer about Mary at all. They’ve crossed into different territory entirely. Mutual exposure, mutual threat. Her mind races: how long has he known? What else has he discovered in his careful cataloguing, his access to rooms she can only enter with mop and duster?
Behind her, Cook’s breathing quickens. The other servants shift, sensing the conversation’s dangerous turn without understanding its full weight.
“We all have our secrets, Mr. Thorne,” Tess says quietly.
His expression shifts. Not quite regret, but a calculation recalibrating. “I catalogue books,” he says, each word carefully measured. “Sometimes I notice what falls from their pages. What people hide between Wordsworth and sedition.” A pause, weighted with meaning. “Just as you’ve noticed the colonial correspondence I’ve been photographing after midnight.”
They stare at each other, two wolves circling, each holding the other’s throat between their teeth.
The accusation hangs between them, sharp as a blade. Tess’s pulse hammers against her throat. He knows about the pamphlets, which means he’s been in her room, seen the seditious literature that could mean transportation or worse. But his midnight photography of colonial documents… that’s leverage, if she’s brave enough to use it. They’re locked together now, two criminals forced into an alliance neither wanted.
Tess’s jaw tightens, her grey eyes narrowing as she processes his threat: or is it a warning? The distinction matters, though she cannot yet say why. Around them, the other servants have gone still, their confusion palpable in the carbolic-thick air.
“Observant,” she repeats, and the word tastes of acid on her tongue. Her voice drops to match his dangerous register, but there’s steel beneath the forced deference. “Is that what you call rifling through a woman’s private belongings? Breaking into servants’ quarters whilst we tend the dying?”
Mrs. Hewitt, the housekeeper, makes a small sound of distress. The impropriety of it, a man in the maids’ rooms, registers even through her grief-fog. But Tess doesn’t look away from Lex, doesn’t give him the satisfaction of her embarrassment.
She takes a step closer, reckless with the anger that’s been building for three weeks of quarantine, for years of swallowed pride and bent neck. Close enough now to see the ink stains on his collar, the faint shadows beneath those calculating amber eyes. Close enough that the other servants cannot hear when she speaks again.
“What else have you ‘observed,’ Mr. Thorne?” Each word is precisely weighted, a lock-pick testing the mechanism of his composure. “What other secrets do you collect like your precious books? Do you catalogue them? Cross-reference them?” Her calloused fingers curl into fists at her sides. “Or do you simply hoard them, waiting to see which might prove most valuable?”
She’s pushing too hard, she knows it. But he’s seen her pamphlets, touched the dangerous words she’s hidden beneath her mattress, and that knowledge sits between them like a cocked pistol. If they’re to be bound together by mutual exposure, she’ll be damned if she’ll cower first.
For a moment something flickers across his face, surprise, perhaps, or reassessment. He studies her as though seeing her properly for the first time, not as a maid to be dismissed but as an opponent worthy of calculation.
“Careful,” he says, and there’s a new quality to his voice now, stripped of pretense. “You’re not the only one with secrets that could prove fatal.” He shifts his weight, angling his body to block the other servants’ view of her face. “Those pamphlets advocate for the overthrow of the very system that feeds you. My knowledge”, his jaw tightens, “my knowledge might actually save lives in this godforsaken house.”
The air between them crackles with mutual recognition: they are both impostors, both playing roles that could collapse at any moment. Both carrying knowledge that makes them dangerous.
“I’ve seen plague in Cape Colony,” he says finally, each word deliberate. “In the compounds where your Lord Ashford’s rubber workers die by the dozen. Satisfied?” His eyes challenge her. “Now tell me. What exactly do you plan to do with those pamphlets once we’re all dead?”
“Keep people alive?” Tess’s laugh escapes sharp and bitter, a sound that belongs in the gin-houses near the docks, not a country estate. “You speak of contagion and vectors like you’re lecturing at a university, not binding books in a country house.” She steps closer, reckless now, her voice dropping to something dangerous. “Who are you really, Mr. Thorne?”
The question hangs between them, weighted with all the things they both know and shouldn’t.
She’s aware she’s exposing herself further with every word, that fury has overtaken the caution that’s kept her alive this long. But Mary lies dead three feet away, and this man speaks in the language of physicians and scientists whilst claiming to be a tradesman.
“What ‘places’ have you seen plague? What are you truly doing in this house?”
For a heartbeat, something unguarded crosses Lex’s features. Not calculation this time, but something rawer. Recognition, perhaps. Or warning.
“Someone who knows sentiment kills as surely as plague.” His gesture toward Mary’s shrouded form is almost violent. “Your workers’ prayer changes nothing. Distance might. Hygiene. Knowledge.”
He leans closer, voice dropping to urgent intimacy. “And if you possessed any instinct for self-preservation, you’d burn those pamphlets tonight.”
The question escapes before she can stop it, sharp with suspicion. “Someone else like me?”
Her hands shake: rage or fear, she cannot parse which. The remaining servants watch this exchange like spectators at a bare-knuckle match, confused but transfixed. She forces breath into her lungs, forces thought through panic.
He could have exposed her already. To Lord Ashford. To the guards beyond the gates.
He hasn’t.
“What do you want, Mr. Thorne?” Each word costs her. “What’s your price for silence?”
Lex meets her eyes with that unnerving amber gaze, and for a moment something flickers there. Recognition, perhaps. The look of one fugitive acknowledging another across a crowded room.
“I don’t want your money, Miss Barlow.” He says her name deliberately, precisely, like he’s testing the weight of it. Like he knows it’s real, unlike the half-dozen aliases she suspects he carries. “And I’m not interested in seeing you hanged for sedition, if that’s what you’re asking.”
The words should reassure her. They don’t. Men like him, educated, mobile, dangerous, don’t offer mercy without motive.
He glances at the other servants, still frozen in their tableau of grief and confusion, then back to her. His voice drops lower, meant for her ears alone despite the crowded room. “What I want is for both of us to survive the next fortnight without drawing the attention of people who’d be very interested in what we’re each carrying.”
The phrasing snags in her mind. What we’re each carrying. Not who we are. Not what we’ve done. But what they possess, here and now, in this plague-house.
Her pamphlets. His forgeries. Whatever else he’s hiding in that leather satchel he keeps locked in the library.
“You’re proposing an alliance.” She keeps her voice flat, drained of the fury that was there moments ago. Let him think she’s considering it rationally, not scrambling to understand what game he’s playing.
“I’m proposing we stop making each other’s situations worse.” His mouth quirks, not quite a smile. “You need someone who understands how to move through systems without leaving traces. I need someone who knows every hidden corner of this house and who can be trusted to keep their mouth shut when it matters.”
“Trust,” she says, bitter. “From you.”
“Necessity,” he corrects. “Which is more reliable.”
The footsteps resolve into a figure, and Tess’s breath catches. Lord Ashford materializes in the doorway like something conjured from her worst imaginings: face drained of color, eyes fever-bright with the particular terror of a man who’s watched his world contract to these forty rooms and their invisible contagion.
“What is this gathering?” Each word carries the crack of authority fraying at its edges. His gaze sweeps the scene: Mary’s shrouded form, the servants clustered too close, Lex standing among them like he belongs there. The wrongness of it all seems to strike him simultaneously. “I gave explicit orders: no congregating. Do you want to spread this pestilence through the entire household?”
Tess feels the pamphlet in her pocket like a brand against her hip. Beside her, Lex has gone utterly still, but she catches the minute shift of his weight, the calculation happening behind those amber eyes. They have perhaps three seconds before Lord Ashford’s fear curdles into the kind of scrutiny that will destroy them both.
Three seconds to become allies instead of enemies.
Tess’s mind empties of everything but animal panic. The pamphlet in her pocket, her brother’s name on her lips moments ago, the seditious words she was about to speak over Mary’s body. Then Lex moves, a subtle shift that places him fractionally between her and Lord Ashford’s scrutiny.
“My lord.” His voice has transformed entirely, shed its careful neutrality for something crisp, authoritative. “Forgive the disturbance. I came upon the servants preparing the body and felt duty-bound to intervene.”
He gestures toward Mary’s shrouded form with the dispassionate precision of a physician discussing a specimen. “I’ve bound medical texts, anatomy, pathology. The procedures for handling plague victims are quite specific. I was attempting to ensure proper precautions.”
The lie is so smooth, so perfectly calibrated to Lord Ashford’s fears, that Tess almost believes it herself.
Lord Ashford’s gaze sweeps over them both. The defiant maid suddenly docile, the tradesman who speaks like a gentleman. Suspicion tightens his features, but beneath it Tess recognizes something more useful: fear. He needs them. The healthy are too few, the dead too many.
“See that it doesn’t happen again.” His voice cracks slightly on the command. “Burn the body by nightfall.”
Her heart hammers against her ribs as she sinks into a curtsy, eyes fixed on the floorboards. The lie tastes bitter. “The bookbinder was instructing us on proper handling of the deceased, my lord. To prevent further spread.”
The words emerge steady, colourless: everything she’s learned to perform. Beside her, Lex shifts almost imperceptibly. Relief? Recognition? They’ve become unwilling conspirators, speaking the same language of survival through deception.
The servants file out in a ragged procession, their footsteps quick and uneven on the bare floor. They cast glances back at Mary’s shrouded form: some fearful, some resentful, all exhausted. Tess watches them go, recognizing the particular slump of shoulders that comes from swallowing grief because there’s no time for it, no permission.
Mrs. Hewitt lingers at the doorway, one hand gripping the frame as though the wood might steady her. She’s aged a decade in three weeks. Her gaze moves from Mary’s body to Tess, then to the bookbinder, and something complicated passes across her weathered face. Not quite suspicion. Not quite understanding.
“See that she’s prepared properly,” she says at last. Her voice fractures on the final word. “She deserved better than this.”
Than dying alone. Than being reduced to a contagion risk. Than all of it.
The door closes with a soft click that sounds like a verdict.
The room contracts around them. Four walls, one corpse, two people who’ve just lied in perfect synchronization to a man who could have them both dismissed. Or worse. The carbolic smell intensifies in the stillness, chemical and sharp, failing to mask the sweeter, sicker scent beneath. Someone has draped Mary’s face with a cloth, but Tess can still see the outline of her features, the way her mouth had fallen open in that final hour.
She keeps her eyes fixed on that shrouded shape, on the girl who’d shared her room and her secrets, who’d listened wide-eyed to whispered readings from forbidden pamphlets. Mary, who’d believed things could change.
Tess’s jaw aches from clenching. She will not look at him. Will not acknowledge the man who’d transformed her grief into theater, who’d spoken over Mary’s body as though it were merely a problem of hygiene and management.
“I didn’t ask for your protection.”
Tess’s voice cuts through the silence, low and hard as struck flint. She still hasn’t looked at him, but her words find their target with precision.
Lex turns from where he’s been standing near the window, his posture carefully neutral. The afternoon light catches the sharp planes of his face, throws shadows beneath his cheekbones. “I wasn’t protecting you. I was protecting myself. Your rebellion draws scrutiny I can’t afford.”
The honesty of it surprises her: no pretense, no deflection, no attempt to claim noble motives. She crosses her arms and finally meets his gaze, studying him with the attention she’d give to a locked door she’s deciding whether to pick. He’s not performing now. Not the deferential tradesman arranging books with ink-stained fingers. Not the cold rationalist reciting medical facts over a dead girl’s body.
Just a man with something to hide. Something significant enough that he’d risk Lord Ashford’s displeasure to create a diversion.
Her curiosity sharpens despite herself, despite Mary lying three feet away, despite everything.
She studies the angles of his face, searching for the flinch or shift that marks a lie. Her brother taught her that: how to read men who’d promise safety on factory floors, then walk away when the machines took fingers, lives.
“What are you really doing here?”
His jaw tightens. She watches his hands still at his sides, the careful control of someone accustomed to concealing impulse. For a breath, she expects another deflection, the smooth tradesman’s manner sliding back into place.
Instead, his amber eyes hold hers with unexpected directness.
“The same thing you are, I suspect.” His voice drops, meant for her alone. “Trying to survive powerful people who consider us expendable.”
The words settle between them like contraband passed in darkness. Not an answer: he’s revealed nothing concrete, given her no leverage. But an acknowledgment. They’re both playing games that could hang them.
Tess wants to press him, to strip away the careful evasions until she finds what he’s hiding. But something in the tightness around his eyes arrests her. The particular weariness of perpetual performance. She knows that exhaustion intimately: the constant vigilance, the measuring of every word.
He understands contagion like a physician. She reads political theory like a scholar.
Both of them wearing borrowed skins that chafe.
The recognition lands heavy in her chest, unwelcome as kinship.
She nods once, curtly: a gesture stripped of everything but necessity. “This changes nothing between us.” The words taste like armor, protection she desperately needs.
“Agreed,” he says, but his amber eyes hold something she cannot name. Respect, perhaps. Or recognition of a fellow liar.
He turns toward the door, hesitates. “The prayer you wanted. Mary would have valued the intention.” His voice drops. “Even if the risk was foolish.”
Then he’s gone, leaving her with the dead and the dangerous realization that he sees her clearly.
The medical text lies open on the narrow table in the servants’ hall, its pages illuminated by the weak morning light filtering through the high window. Tess’s fingers hover above the bookmark. A strip of paper torn from quality stock, the kind used in the library. Not random. Deliberate.
The page describes preparation of the deceased: how to wrap the body, which solutions to use, the precise temperature at which contagion loses its virulence. Clinical instructions, yes, but beneath them: permission. He’s showing her how to honor Mary without killing the rest of them.
Her throat constricts. She’d expected mockery, perhaps another lecture on sentiment versus science. Not this careful offering of knowledge that bridges both.
She closes the book quickly as footsteps approach, tucking it beneath her apron.
Across the house, Lex sits at the library desk as dawn bleeds grey across the floorboards. The pamphlet lies flat before him, its pages worn from multiple readings, passed hand to hand through networks he can only imagine. He’s read seditious literature before: crude broadsides, inflammatory rhetoric designed to ignite rather than illuminate.
This is different.
The arguments unfold with surgical precision. She’s cited the Factory Acts, cross-referenced testimony from the 1906 inquiries, quoted Mill and Morris with the fluency of genuine understanding. Her handwriting flows across the page in confident loops: someone taught herself not just to write, but to think on paper.
He traces a marginal note, her ink slightly smudged: If capital depends on our labor, withdrawal of that labor is not violence but negotiation.
The logic is sound. Uncomfortably sound.
Lex closes the pamphlet with more care than he’s shown any document in months, his forger’s hands suddenly uncertain. He’d dismissed her as a passionate fool playing at revolution. But fools don’t argue like this. Fools don’t cite sources he respects.
The realization settles like cold stone in his chest: she’s dangerous precisely because she’s right.
They pass each other twice that day in the corridor. Once when she’s carrying linens still warm from the press, once when he’s fetching ink from the supply cupboard. Both nod, nothing more, but the quality of silence has shifted like a door left slightly ajar. No longer the brittle hostility of yesterday’s confrontation. Instead, something wary, weighted with reassessment, each measuring the other against new information.
In the servants’ hall that evening, another maid (young Sarah, red-eyed from crying) asks if “that bookbinder” gave her trouble yesterday about the gathering.
“No more than expected,” Tess says, folding napkins with mechanical precision. But her voice lacks its usual cutting edge, the reflexive contempt she reserves for those upstairs. The words come out neutral, almost thoughtful.
Lex, questioned by Lord Ashford’s son about “the disturbance with the staff,” responds with careful neutrality: “The girl was grieving. Understandable, if unhygienic.” The young lord nods, satisfied with this dismissal.
But Lex doesn’t embellish. Doesn’t paint her as hysterical or insubordinate. Doesn’t suggest discipline. The restraint costs him nothing, yet feels significant. A line he’s chosen not to cross.
Three days later, Tess finds the volume wedged behind the flour sacks where only servants’ hands reach. Her pulse hammers against her throat. Possession alone means transportation, perhaps hanging. Yet someone has placed it precisely where she’d find it, where no family member would ever look.
That night, her hands steady with decision, she leaves the map folded inside Blackstone’s Commentaries: a book no one reads. Each death marked with a small cross. The pattern screams what no one upstairs will see: the plague follows the new conservatory pipes like a river finding its course.
When Lex discovers it at dawn, his fingers trace her careful notations. Then he adds his own in different ink: ventilation schematics, dates of colonial shipments, a question mark beside the water system.
They don’t speak of the exchanges, but the silence itself becomes a language. Tess absorbs miasma theory between scrubbing floors, her lips forming unfamiliar Latin terms. Knowledge has always been her weapon; now it sharpens differently. Lex watches her navigate the house’s hierarchies: how servants orbit her quiet authority, how she’s weaving solidarity from fear’s threads. He knows insurrection’s architecture. He’s forged enough manifestos to recognize one being written in flesh.
The library door clicked shut behind her. Tess’s pulse hammered against her throat as Lex straightened from the desk, candlelight carving shadows beneath his cheekbones.
“The conservatory,” she said, voice barely above a whisper. “You marked it on the floor plan.”
His amber eyes narrowed. “You’ve been tracking the deaths. Mapping them.”
She should retreat. Instead: “Someone must bear witness.”
His expression shifted. Something raw breaking through calculation. “Yes,” he said quietly. “Someone should.”
Neither moved. The admission hung between them like smoke.
The key turned with a sound like a bone snapping. Tess flinched despite herself, watching the shadow of Lady Ashford’s skirts disappear beyond the frosted glass panel. The study seemed to contract around them. Mahogany walls pressing inward, the air already stale with the smell of old leather and her own fear.
She positioned herself by the window, arms crossed tight against her ribs. A guard’s posture, though her heart hammered so violently she was certain he could hear it. Three feet of Persian carpet separated her station from his. It might as well have been an ocean. Or a hair’s breadth. She couldn’t decide which felt more dangerous.
Lex moved to the desk without so much as glancing in her direction. His hands, those ink-stained, careful hands she’d watched sketch the conservatory’s layout, laid out his tools with methodical precision. Ledger. Pen. Blotter. A small brass ruler. Each item placed just so, as though arrangement could impose order on the chaos that surrounded them.
The silence stretched taut as a wire. Tess fixed her gaze on the gardens beyond the window, where autumn had turned everything to rust and ash. The quarantine flags hung limp in the still air. She was aware of every sound: the scratch of his pen on paper, the rustle of his sleeve against the desk, her own too-quick breathing.
She watched his hands when she thought he wouldn’t notice. Watched them sort through the first stack of correspondence with a speed that suggested familiarity. He was searching for something specific. She’d suspected it in the library, but here, surrounded by the master’s private papers, his fingers moving with such purpose, she was certain.
The question was whether she would let him find it. Or whether she’d find it first.
The words hang between them like smoke. Tess’s hands still on the bundle of letters she’s been sorting, her pulse suddenly loud in her ears. She could deflect with deference, thank you, sir, and retreat behind the mask she’s worn since childhood. But something in the stale air of this locked room, in the way death has stripped the house down to its bones, makes her reckless.
“For a maid,” she repeats, her voice level. “Yes, I suppose I do.”
She sets the letters down with deliberate care and reaches for the next stack. Her fingers don’t shake, though she wants them to. “My mother couldn’t read. Nor her mother before her. They thought it made them safer: knowing less.” She glances up, finds him watching her with an expression she can’t parse. “They were wrong.”
Lex’s pen remains suspended above the ledger. Something shifts in his face: not quite surprise, not quite recognition. More like a door opening in a house he thought he knew.
“Yes,” he says finally, returning to his catalogue. “They usually are.”
The silence that follows feels different. Weighted with new possibility.
She should close the ledger. Return to the safe work of sorting correspondence, maintain the careful distance they’ve established. Instead, her thumb marks the page, holding it open like evidence she cannot unsee.
“You’re meant to be watching me,” Lex says, his voice carefully neutral. “Not reading.”
The words should be a warning. They sound almost like a question.
Tess’s jaw tightens. “I’m doing both.” She forces herself to look at him directly, though her heart hammers against her ribs. “These numbers: do you know what they represent?”
His amber eyes hold hers for three beats too long. When he speaks, each word is precisely measured. “I know what ledgers like that always represent.”
He doesn’t tell her to close it. He doesn’t look away.
Her hands are steady as she opens the ledger, Overseas Holdings 1904-1907, then they are not. The columns resolve into terrible clarity: names, numbers, causes. Hundreds of names. Fever. Exhaustion. Accident. Disciplinary action. The Ashford rubber plantation in Malaya, rendered in meticulous copperplate. Her brother’s death killed one man. This documents systematic slaughter across three years. The page trembles. She cannot still her hands; her breath has gone shallow, sharp. Across the desk, Lex’s pen has stopped moving. When she looks up, he’s watching her with something sharper than surprise. Recognition, perhaps. Or calculation. His expression says: I wondered when you’d find it.
“That needs to be catalogued,” Lex says, his voice carefully neutral.
Tess’s fingers tighten on the ledger. She should close it, pass it over, resume her role. Instead she turns another page. More names. More deaths rendered in indifferent ink.
“Tess.”
He’s never used her name before. She looks at him. His expression is unreadable, but he makes no move to take the ledger from her hands.
“I need to record it,” he says quietly. “But I don’t need to record it today.”
The implication hangs between them: this ledger could disappear into the chaos, resurface later, be copied first. He’s offering her something, time, perhaps, or complicity. A choice that makes them equals, however briefly.
She closes it carefully, sets it aside, not in the completed stack.
Their eyes meet. Neither speaks. They return to work, but the air has changed. Charged now with conspiracy, with the terrible weight of shared knowledge and what it might cost them both.
Lex gestures toward the desk, his movement economical, still not meeting her eyes. “Start with the correspondence. Read the sender and date. I’ll record.”
Tess approaches, acutely conscious of the space between them. Three feet that might as well be the distance between continents. The first letter sits atop the pile, heavy cream paper with a wax seal pressed deep into burgundy. She lifts it carefully, aware her hands should be rougher, clumsier with such fine things.
“Lord Pemberton,” she reads, her voice steady and clear. “April 1906.”
The words emerge with the precise diction her mother had beaten into her during those secret midnight lessons, before the factory took her brother, before everything collapsed. Wrong for a maid. Dangerously wrong.
Lex’s pen pauses mid-stroke. The nib hovers above the page, a drop of ink threatening to fall and betray his surprise. The silence expands between them, thick as the carbolic-soaked air.
He writes. The scratch of pen on paper releases them both.
They continue. Letter after letter. She reads, he records, neither acknowledging what her clear pronunciation reveals. Ten letters. Fifteen. Twenty. The pile diminishes with excruciating slowness.
Finally, he speaks. “Where did you learn?”
Not accusatory: the tone catches her off guard. Curious, almost careful, as though he’s handling something fragile that might shatter if gripped too firmly.
She considers the lie about her mother, the safe fiction she’d offered before. But something in the quiet room, in the conspiracy of the hidden ledger, makes her choose differently.
“Wherever I could.” The truth, stripped bare. Kitchen tables after midnight. Stolen primers hidden beneath her mattress. Words scratched in coal dust on cellar walls, practising until her fingers bled from cold.
His pen stills again. When he looks at her this time, she meets his gaze directly, no longer making herself small.
They fall into a rhythm that feels dangerous in its ease. She reads, voice steady over atrocities rendered in copperplate script. He records, pen moving with mechanical precision. Neither speaks of what her clear diction means, this maid who pronounces Latin plant names correctly, who doesn’t stumble over legal terminology.
But the documents themselves become a conversation. Investment portfolios in Malayan rubber. Correspondence with plantation overseers. Polite language concealing brutality.
“Disciplinary measures resulted in reduced incidents among native workers,” she reads. Her voice hardens on disciplinary, the word sharp as broken glass.
Lex’s pen scratches faster across the page.
She reaches for the next stack. Their fingers brush. Both jerk back as though the touch burned. The air between them crackles.
“Sorry, sir.” The words automatic, ground into her by years of training.
“Don’t.” His voice cuts across hers, surprising them both. He looks up, amber eyes intense. “Don’t apologize for that.”
The silence that follows holds weight. Outside, a crow calls. Inside, something fundamental has shifted, though neither can name it yet.
A letter slips from her hands. Plantation correspondence, heavy paper with embossed letterhead. It flutters between them like a wounded bird.
They both reach. Knees meeting carpet, inches apart. Close enough that Tess sees the scar along his jaw properly now, a white line against stubble. The ink stains on his fingers, permanent, worked into the whorls. Working hands, despite the educated voice.
He sees her calluses. The quick intelligence she’s learned to veil.
“You’re not really a bookbinder.” Not a question.
His amber eyes hold hers. “You’re not really just a maid.”
The letter lies forgotten between them. Someone coughs upstairs. They stand. Resume positions. But the distance has changed entirely.
The silence stretches. Tess’s finger traces a column. Rubber production figures beside mortality rates. A correlation so obvious it screams.
“This is what you came for.” Her voice steadies. “Isn’t it?”
Lex doesn’t deny it. His jaw tightens. “Among other things.”
“And then what? Sell it to the highest bidder?”
“Use it,” he corrects quietly. “There’s a difference.”
She turns, faces him fully. “Show me.”
The third drawer resists, swollen with damp, then surrenders with a groan of wood on wood. Tess’s fingers find leather bindings, recent years embossed in gold. She lifts 1907 free.
The pages fall open. Columns march across ruled lines: names she cannot pronounce, ages, causes of death rendered in clipped abbreviations. Her vision narrows.
Forty-seven. Just in this year.
The desk edge bites into her palms. Lex’s chair scrapes behind her (close, too close) his breath audible as he reads over her shoulder.
He goes absolutely still.
“They documented it,” she manages. “Like… like spoiled goods.”
“Evidence of administrative competence.” His voice emerges flat, strange. “They always keep records.”
The ledger trembles violently in her grip.
The ledger’s weight seems to increase in her hands, as though the names themselves possess mass. Tess forces herself to read another entry: Kimani, age unknown, fever following punishment. The clinical notation makes her stomach turn.
“You should put it back.” Lex’s repetition carries a different quality now ”
“Could what?” She doesn’t look up from the pages. “Hang me? They’re already killing us. Just more slowly. More profitably.”
He moves then, not to take the ledger but to position himself between her and the door. The shift is subtle, protective in a way that makes her breath catch. “There’s a difference between knowing and proving. Between suspicion and evidence.”
“This is evidence.” Her voice shakes with fury she can no longer contain. “Forty-seven people. Their names. Their.”They were people.”
“I know.”
The simplicity of his response makes her finally meet his gaze. His face remains carefully neutral, but something in those amber eyes has changed: a crack in the facade she’d thought impenetrable.
“Do you?” The challenge escapes before caution can stop it. “Or are they just… useful information to you? Another document to forge or sell?”
His jaw tightens. For a long moment he says nothing, and she thinks she’s miscalculated, revealed too much of her own hand. Then he reaches past her, she tenses, but he only pulls open the drawer further, extracting a second ledger.
“1905,” he says quietly, setting it beside the first. “There are four more years. All documented with the same precision.” He pauses. “All equally damning.”
Her hands have stopped trembling. “Why are you showing me this?”
“Because,” he says slowly, as if discovering the answer himself, “I’m beginning to suspect we want the same thing.”
Her question strips away pretense. Lex’s pen stills against the catalogue page, ink pooling where the nib rests too long. When he looks up, his gaze holds a new quality, assessment, yes, but also recognition. Not the maid who empties his grate, but an adversary. Perhaps an ally.
“Since before the quarantine.” His voice drops to barely above a whisper. “The colonial office maintains shadow archives. Duplicates of documents that might prove… inconvenient should originals disappear.”
The implication settles between them like sediment.
“You came here for these ledgers.” She states it flatly, watching his face.
He could deflect. His survival has always depended on misdirection, on maintaining the careful fiction of the harmless tradesman. Instead, something shifts in his expression. A calculation made and abandoned.
“Among other things, yes.”
The admission costs him. She sees it in the tightness around his eyes, the way his shoulders draw back as if bracing for her reaction. Three words that make them conspirators. Three words that could hang them both.
The autumn light slants through the window, illuminating dust motes between them like a physical manifestation of all the dangerous truths now suspended in the air.
She turns to the window, ledger clutched against her chest like armour, and stares at the quarantine flags snapping in the autumn wind. Forty-seven names. Forty-seven families who will never know how their sons and fathers died, crushed beneath the weight of England’s appetite for rubber and profit.
Behind her, she hears Lex moving: not toward her, but to the door. Her spine stiffens, every muscle preparing for betrayal, for the inevitable moment when self-interest trumps whatever understanding has passed between them.
But he’s only checking the corridor, his movements economical and practiced.
When he returns, he speaks quietly: “What will you do with it?”
The question acknowledges everything. Her literacy, her politics, her rage. She should be terrified that he’s seen so much, that her carefully maintained mask of deference has shattered completely. Instead, she feels the strange liberation of being witnessed, of standing before someone who sees not a servant but a woman capable of dangerous thought.
“I don’t know yet.” Her reflection in the glass shows someone transformed by fury into something incandescent, unrecognizable. “But they documented their crimes in their own hand. They gave us weapons.”
She watches him struggle with the decision, sees the exact moment calculation shifts to commitment. The silence stretches taut between them, charged with the weight of what they’re choosing.
“This isn’t my fight,” he repeats, but his hand moves to his jacket pocket, checking for the tools he’ll need. The gesture betrays him completely.
“Isn’t it?” She keeps her voice low, urgent. “Those documents you’re after. They’re written in the same ink, signed by the same hands.”
He’s offering partnership, and the enormity of it steals her breath. She’s spent years cultivating solitude, trusting no one with her seditious heart. Now this criminal with his amber eyes and ink-stained conscience wants to bind their fates together.
“Three pages,” she agrees, her voice steady despite the hammering of her pulse. “Tonight, after the family retires. The study connects to the library through the panel behind the folios.”
His eyebrow lifts. “You’ve mapped every hidden passage.”
“I’ve had to.” The words carry years of necessity, of survival requiring absolute knowledge of escape routes and surveillance gaps.
The accusation hangs between them, sharp as the carbolic smell that permeates everything now. Tess watches Lex’s fingers still on the document. A manifest of rubber shipments with mortality rates penciled in the margins like afterthoughts, like the dead were merely spoiled goods.
“A hypocrite,” he repeats, and there’s something almost curious in how he tastes the word, turns it over. “Because I won’t pretend my motives are pure?”
He sets the paper down with such deliberate care that it feels like a threat. The afternoon light through the study’s single window catches the dust motes between them, makes the air visible, thick.
“At least I’m honest about what I am.” His voice remains level, but she hears the edge beneath. “You’re the one who thinks serving their meals with poison in your heart makes you morally superior to serving their interests for coin.”
The comparison strikes like a palm across her face. Heat floods her cheeks because there’s truth in it, truth she’s spent three years not examining too closely. Her hands curl into fists at her sides, nails biting crescents into her palms.
“That’s not.”You polish their silver and press their linens and smile when they require it, all while telling yourself you’re different because you hate them whilst you do it. At least I don’t dress my theft in righteousness.”
“I have no choice,” she says, and hears how the words have begun to sound like an excuse rather than an explanation. How many times has she said them? To herself, in the dark, when her brother’s face surfaces in her dreams?
Lex stands. The movement brings him closer: two feet between them now, near enough that she can see the flecks of green in his amber eyes, the tension in his jaw.
“I have no choice,” she says again, but the words crack apart in her mouth, taste like ash.
Lex stands. The movement brings him closer. Two feet between them now, near enough that she can see the ink stain on his collar, smell the leather and paper-dust that clings to him.
“Everyone has choices.” His voice has gone quiet, dangerous. “You’ve simply calculated yours differently than I have mine.”
She opens her mouth to protest, but he continues, relentless.
“You could have left service. Could have joined the factory workers, could have gone to London, could have done a hundred things.” He takes another step. Eighteen inches now. “But you stayed because here you have access. Information. The master’s ear when you pour his wine. Don’t pretend you’re not using your position just as I use mine.”
The truth of it hits like a fist to her sternum. She wants to hit him. Wants to scream that it’s different, that her reasons are pure, that she’s nothing like him.
But somewhere beneath her fury, she recognizes herself in his mirror, and the recognition burns.
The words hang between them like smoke. Tess feels something shift in her chest, some locked door she hadn’t known was there suddenly springing open. She sees him differently now: not the calculating criminal, but someone equally trapped, equally desperate. Someone who’s made different bargains with survival but paid the same price.
“My brother,” she says, and her voice comes out strange, stripped of its usual armor. “He was nineteen. The factory machinery.”They sent us his wages for the week. Fourteen shillings. That’s what his life calculated to.”
Lex’s expression changes. Something raw crosses his face, quickly suppressed but not quickly enough.
“So yes,” she continues, “I stayed in service. Because here I can read their correspondence. Copy their documents. Learn the names of every man who profits from that machinery.”
Neither moves. The space between them has become charged, dangerous in ways that transcend plague or discovery. Tess watches a muscle jump in his jaw, sees his pupils dilate in the firelight. He’s angry too. Not cool dismissal, but something hotter, rawer.
“You think you’re the only one compromised?” His voice roughens. “You think I sleep well, knowing what I know?” His hand lifts toward her arm, trembles, falls. “At least your principles keep you warm. All I have is certainty that principles don’t stop bullets or buy passage to somewhere they’ll never find me.”
Something in his voice, that hairline fracture in his careful control, arrests her fury mid-breath. The anger between them hasn’t dissipated; it’s transmuting into something more complicated, more dangerous. Recognition.
“You’re afraid,” she says, and it’s no longer accusation but acknowledgment.
His laugh comes short, bitter. “Terrified. Every waking moment.” He meets her eyes. “Fear is honest, at least. It doesn’t pretend nobility.”
He steps back. Cold air rushes between them.
“But you’re right. I see what’s in these ledgers, and part of me wants to burn this house down with them inside.” He turns away. “That’s what frightens me most.”
The silence that follows stretches taut between them. Outside, someone coughs, wet, rattling, the sound they’ve all learned to dread. Neither of them acknowledges it.
“You’re angry with me,” Lex says finally, returning to the specimen jars with their Latin labels, their grim colonial provenance, “because I won’t be your martyr. Because I choose survival over your grand gesture.”
“I’m angry,” Tess corrects, her voice steady despite the tremor in her hands as she records another jar’s contents (Samples, Rubber Workers, Lesions) “because you see it all clearly. You understand what these men have done, what they continue to do, and you’ve decided understanding is enough.”
“Understanding keeps me alive.”
“Understanding without action is just.”Cowardice?” he supplies. “Yes. I’m aware.” He sets down a jar with excessive care. “But I’ve noticed you’re still here as well, Miss Barlow. Still cataloguing rather than striking matches. Still playing the obedient maid whilst seditious pamphlets moulder in your quarters.”
The fact that he knows about the pamphlets should terrify her. Instead it feels inevitable, as though they’ve been circling toward this mutual exposure since the quarantine began.
“I’m waiting,” she says.
“For what?”
“The right moment. The right leverage.” She looks at him directly. “One person burning down a house is mad. But if the right people knew what was in these ledgers, what’s documented in that study,”
“You’d need proof,” he says slowly. “Copies. Documents that could survive scrutiny.”
“Yes.”
“Documents that would need to be… expertly rendered. Unimpeachably authentic.”
Their eyes meet across the desk, across the careful distance they’ve maintained, across the chasm of their opposed philosophies. Something shifts in the air between them: not agreement, not yet, but the dangerous architecture of possibility.
“I don’t do charity work,” Lex says.
“I wasn’t offering charity.”
“You read Latin,” he says the next morning, not a question. She’s been translating labels on specimen jars from the colonial expeditions, trying not to think too carefully about what the specimens represent. Tissue samples, preserved parasites, documentation of suffering rendered scientific.
“I read,” she answers carefully, setting down a jar labelled Plasmodium falciparum, Congo Basin, 1904. “Latin, French, enough German to manage. Does that surprise you?”
“Nothing about you surprises me anymore.” But his tone has shifted. The mockery’s edge is dulled, replaced by something more careful. He’s watching her with that amber gaze that seems to catalogue everything. “Where did a housemaid learn,”
“The same place a bookbinder learned to recognize forgery-quality vellum at twenty paces.” She meets his eyes steadily. “We both have inconvenient educations, Mr. Thorne.”
A pause. Then: “Touché.”
She returns to the jars, aware of his continued scrutiny. The silence feels different now: not hostile, but weighted with reassessment. She’s shown him something he can’t unknow, crossed some invisible threshold. Whether that makes her more dangerous to him or he to her, she hasn’t yet determined.
Their arguments become a language of their own. He tests her with hypotheticals, watching her reactions like a cardsharp reading tells. “What would you do with these documents if you could?” he asks one afternoon, his tone studiedly casual, but she hears the calculation beneath.
“Publish them,” she answers without hesitation. “Every newspaper in London. Let the comfortable classes see what their rubber tyres and waterproof coats actually cost.”
“Noble.” He doesn’t look up from the ledger he’s examining. “Suicidal, but noble.”
“And you’d sell them to the highest bidder.”
“I’d sell them to whoever would use them most effectively.” Now he does look at her, amber eyes steady. “Perhaps that’s the same thing.”
“It’s not.”
“Isn’t it?”
The argument coils between them like smoke, familiar now, almost comfortable in its ritual antagonism.
She discovers him motionless before the desk, a photograph held loose between ink-stained fingers. Plantation workers, skeletal, arranged in rows like inventory. His face, unguarded: not the calculating mask he wears, but something raw beneath. Grief, perhaps. Recognition of complicity.
He senses her gaze. The shutters fall instantly, but she’s already seen.
“Don’t,” he says, voice low.
“Don’t what?”
“Look at me as though I possess a soul worth salvaging.”
The words are weapons, meant to wound, to restore distance. Yet they tremble between them differently than intended.
“Too late,” she whispers, uncertain whether she’s damned him or herself.
They work in silence after that, but it’s different now, charged, aware. When she reads aloud, his pen stills mid-stroke. When he explains a document’s provenance, his voice drops lower, as though sharing confidence rather than instruction. The afternoon light slants golden through dust motes suspended between them.
“Miss Barlow,” he says finally, her surname suddenly intimate. “You should see this.”
He extends a letter. An offer. Trust, or its dangerous beginning.
She reaches for a volume on colonial trade routes, stretching on her toes. The ladder would be more sensible, but it stands three yards away, and moving it would mean acknowledging the difficulty, admitting limitation. Her fingertips brush the spine, almost,
He shifts behind her. Not closer. Away. She hears the deliberate scrape of his chair, the rustle of papers being unnecessarily shuffled. A gentleman would offer assistance. A tradesman might ignore her struggle entirely. But this careful turning away, this studied attention to his catalogue whilst she strains upward: it speaks a third language entirely. One that makes her aware of the curve of her spine, the rise of her heels from worn boots, the way her uniform pulls taut across her shoulders.
She secures the volume and descends, cheeks warm for no reason she’ll acknowledge. The book feels heavier than it should. When she turns, he’s bent over his work with theatrical concentration, pen moving across the page in steady strokes that don’t quite mask the tension in his wrist.
“Chapter headings,” she says, her voice level.
He clears his throat. “Yes. If you would.”
There’s something in his tone: not quite roughness, but texture where smoothness had been. As though the words catch slightly before emerging. She opens the book, finds the contents page, and begins.
“Chapter One: Cultivation Methods in Equatorial Regions.” Each word emerges with deliberate clarity, her accent carefully neutral: neither mimicking the family upstairs nor retreating into village vowels. “Chapter Two: Labour Acquisition and Management Practices.”
She watches his pen still for half a breath before resuming.
“Chapter Three: Yield Optimization Through Incentive Structures.” The euphemism tastes of ash. “Chapter Four: Mortality Rates and Replacement Protocols.”
His pen stops entirely now. In the silence, she hears her own breathing, and his, no longer quite synchronised with the pretence of indifference.
Her voice catches on “three hundred and forty-seven casualties, wet season of 1906.” The figure sits naked on the page, stripped of the Latin that might have granted it dignity.
The scratch of his pen ceases. She expects dismissal, or worse: the performance of sympathy that would confirm the distance between them. Instead, he speaks to the ledger before him rather than to her.
“The price of rubber rose fourteen percent that year.” His tone is flat, archival. “Investors saw returns of nine pounds per share. The mathematics are quite elegant, if one removes the human coefficient.”
She looks up sharply. He’s still bent over his catalogue, but his jaw is tight.
“And if one doesn’t remove it?”
“Then the equation becomes untenable.” He sets down his pen with deliberate care. “The system requires that certain costs remain invisible. Externalized, the economists term it.”
“Murdered, I’d term it.”
His eyes lift to hers then. “Yes,” he says quietly. “That would be the more accurate nomenclature.”
The admission hangs between them like a held breath. She finds her voice steadier when she continues reading.
She stumbles over “mortalitas ex contagione,” the syllables catching in her throat like stones.
“Mor-tal-i-tas,” he says, softer than she’s heard him speak. “Mortality from contagion.” Then his mouth tightens, as though the correction itself were a confession.
Their eyes meet. She sees him seeing her: not the uniform, not the deference, but the person who reads stolen books by candlelight, who hungers for words the way he once must have. The recognition passes between them like a current.
His mask slips. For a breath, she glimpses the exhaustion beneath his careful performance: someone who’s been so many people he’s lost the original.
She doesn’t thank him. She simply nods, understanding meeting understanding.
They both turn away, but the air has changed. The three feet between them might as well be three inches.
She hands him the ledger, but his fingers don’t close immediately. They hover near hers. A hesitation that speaks louder than words. He’s offering her retreat, she realizes. Showing her this threshold before they cross it together.
Her hand steadies. Doesn’t withdraw.
His fingers brush hers as he takes the weight, the contact lasting a fraction longer than necessity demands. Acknowledgment. Agreement. When he opens the ledger, his jaw tightens with something rawer than calculation.
He sets the ledger aside with the care of a man handling evidence. The blank sheet appears beneath his ink-stained fingers: not forgery this time, but documentation. Names. Dates. The mathematics of murder rendered in his precise hand.
He slides it toward her. No explanation offered.
She reads his accounting of atrocity, sees he’s built a scaffold of proof. When she looks up, his amber eyes are unreadable.
“You write a fair hand yourself, I’d wager.”
The words settle between them like a contract unsigned.
The silence between them calculates like an abacus. Tess remains in the doorway, one hand still on the frame, escape route mapped in her peripheral vision. Three steps back, turn left, lose herself in the servants’ passages before he could raise an alarm. But she doesn’t move.
She watches him weigh her presence, watches the minute adjustments in his posture. He’s prepared for discovery, she realizes. Has probably rehearsed this moment, planned his responses. Yet something in his stillness suggests he hadn’t expected her specifically. Hadn’t calculated what it would mean to be caught by someone who understands exactly what he’s doing and why.
The forged medical certificate lies between them on the desk, ink still wet enough to smear. Dr. Pemberton’s signature rendered so perfectly she can almost smell the whisky on the old man’s breath. Authorization for morphine sulfate, dosage appropriate for terminal cases. Mary’s name isn’t on it, too specific, too traceable, but the vague language would cover a multitude of mercies.
Tess’s throat tightens. Three nights she’s held Mary’s hand while the girl convulsed, fever burning through her like wildfire. Three nights she’s listened to promises that the doctor would come, that relief would be sent, that suffering mattered even when it happened in the servants’ wing. All lies, of course. Comfortable lies that cost the family nothing.
She looks at Lex properly then, seeing past the tradesman’s clothes and careful deference. Seeing the criminal, yes. But also the physician he might have been in a different life, with different birth. The forger whose skill serves the dying better than any legitimate authority has done.
“The housekeeper checks the medicine cabinet every morning at seven,” she says, voice steady despite her racing pulse. “She takes tea in the kitchen until half-past.”
His eyes widen fractionally. Not gratitude: not yet. Calculation matching her own, measuring the weight of this alliance.
The weight of the decision settles in her chest like stone. Report him: secure her position, perhaps earn the reference that could lift her from this half-life of deference and exhaustion. She’s worked too hard, risked too much, to throw away advantage on sentiment.
But Mary’s screams thread through her thoughts, three nights of raw-throated pleading that no one upstairs acknowledged. The girl is nineteen. Was nineteen. Will be a corpse by week’s end without relief, and Lord Ashford won’t spare morphine for servants. Tess has already asked. Has been told, with aristocratic distaste, that laudanum should suffice for that sort.
She looks at the forged certificate again, at the perfect rendering of Dr. Pemberton’s shaking hand. At Lex’s fingers, still poised above the parchment, waiting for her verdict.
The calculation completes itself.
“The housekeeper checks the medicine cabinet every morning at seven,” Tess says, hearing her voice as if from a distance. “She takes tea in the kitchen until half-past. The key hangs inside her office door, left side, third hook.”
She’s crossed a line. They both know it.
Something shifts behind his eyes. Surprise giving way to calculation that mirrors her own perpetual arithmetic of risk and necessity. He sets down the pen with deliberate care, studying her as though the maid’s uniform has suddenly become transparent, revealing the architecture of thought beneath.
“You’re taking a considerable risk.” His voice is low, meant only for her. The unspoken question hangs between them: why?
She thinks of Thomas, her brother’s body broken on the factory floor because safety rails cost more than workers’ lives. “Some laws serve power, not justice.”
His expression sharpens with recognition. He reaches past her (close enough that she smells ink and something else, tobacco perhaps) and pulls a slim volume from the shelf. Not randomly. With intent.
Mutual Aid. Kropotkin. Banned. Seditious. Dangerous.
He places it on the table between them like a chess piece.
She doesn’t touch the book, not yet. Her hands remain clasped before her, servant-still, though desire pulls at her fingers like gravity.
“The master’s study,” she says instead. “Locked desk, second drawer. False bottom beneath the ledgers.”
She watches comprehension kindle in his eyes. The quick mathematics of opportunity.
“His colonial correspondence. Everything.”
“Why?” The word is barely breath.
“Because you’re not the only one who needs what’s hidden in that room.”
She unfolds his contagion notes by candlelight, the paper still warm from where he carried it. His handwriting is precise, stripped of medical pretension, droplet transmission, incubation period, colonial origin suppressed by authorities. He’s given her ammunition disguised as education. Her throat tightens. Tomorrow she’ll sketch the passages: every hidden artery through Ashford’s walls, every route the powerful believe belongs only to them. Trust, she realizes, is its own kind of theft.
The theft unfolds with the precision of a dance they’ve choreographed without speaking. Tess positions herself at the servants’ stair junction where three corridors converge: the anatomy of the house laid bare in her mind like the maps she’s studied in stolen moments. Her heart hammers against her ribs, each beat a small betrayal. The starched collar of her uniform cuts into her throat.
When the housekeeper’s footsteps fade toward the kitchen. Albright’s distinctive shuffle, favoring her left hip. Three soft knocks, the wood grain cool and familiar beneath her skin. The sound travels through the walls’ hollow spaces, through the passages that honeycomb this house like secrets through a family.
She watches Lex emerge from the shadows of the portrait gallery, moving with that unsettling confidence that first marked him as wrong, as dangerous. Her hands twist in her apron, the rough fabric anchoring her to this moment, this choice. Two minutes pass. The grandfather clock in the main hall ticks like a countdown. Three minutes. Somewhere upstairs, Lady Ashford’s bell rings. The lock clicks open with a sound that seems to shatter the house’s held breath. Tess’s mouth goes dry. She counts his movements by memory, by the intelligence she’s traded like currency: third shelf, blue bottles, the morphine marked with physician’s Latin. Morphinae hydrochloridum. Words she taught herself from the medical texts in the library, sounding them out in the dark.
He’s efficient, careful. Takes only what he claimed to need, nothing more. A thief with principles, she thinks, and doesn’t know whether that makes him more dangerous or less. The cabinet closes with a whisper. Four minutes total. He meets her eyes across the dim corridor, and something passes between them that feels like complicity, like falling.
She shouldn’t follow him. Their transaction is complete, she’s taken her risk, held up her end of this devil’s bargain. But her feet carry her into the servants’ passages anyway, into those dim arteries between walls that she’s known since she was seven and small enough to slip through unnoticed. Places where sound travels strangely, where the house reveals its secrets to those who know how to listen.
He moves through the darkness like he’s memorized the blueprint, turning at the junction near the chimney breast without hesitation, ducking beneath the low beam that’s caught countless newcomers. No tradesman should navigate these spaces with such certainty. Her pulse quickens with something beyond fear. Or recognition.
Through the spy-hole, the one Cook uses to ensure the family’s dining alone before clearing, she watches him kneel beside Mary’s cot. His hands are steady, measuring drops with a precision that speaks of practice, of training. “Two drops now,” he murmurs, his voice stripped of its usual careful neutrality. “Three tonight if the pain worsens. No more, or you’ll stop breathing.”
Not mercy. Medicine.
Her breath catches. Everything she thought she understood shifts like sand beneath her feet.
The passage is barely wide enough for one person. She doesn’t step aside. His hand has stilled at his coat pocket, but he makes no move to push past her. In this narrow space, she can smell ink and something medicinal. “You’re not what you claim,” she says, keeping her voice level despite the adrenaline singing through her veins.
The silence stretches between them like a drawn blade. She watches calculations flicker behind his eyes. How much she’s seen, what she might do with it, whether the risk of her knowledge outweighs its potential value.
Then his shoulders drop fractionally. A decision made.
“Neither are you,” he replies, his gaze dropping to her ink-stained fingers. “Maids don’t read medical labels in Latin. Or move through walls like ghosts.”
He leans against the whitewashed wall, and she sees exhaustion beneath his careful composure: the kind that comes from carrying knowledge no one wants to hear.
“I was a medical student,” he says quietly. “Before other circumstances intervened.”
The passive construction doesn’t hide the weight of whatever drove him from that life. She waits, letting the silence work.
“The plague, what they’re saying upstairs about miasmas and moral weakness, it’s lies.” His voice drops lower, urgent now. “I’ve seen how it spreads in the colonial territories. Seen what they do with that knowledge.” His jaw tightens. “Seen what they’ve done deliberately.”
The words hang between them, seditious and enormous.
Tess thinks of her brother, crushed in machinery that should have been replaced. Of her mother, dismissed without pension after thirty years. Of all the careful lies that keep the machinery of empire grinding forward over bodies like theirs.
She steps back, giving him room to pass in the narrow corridor, but doesn’t retreat entirely. “Mary has two days, perhaps three,” she says, matching his clinical tone. “Thomas might last longer if the fever breaks.”
He nods, understanding she’s offering intelligence, partnership. “The morphine will help. But there’s not enough for everyone who’ll need it.”
The admission costs him something: she can see it in the tightness around his eyes, the way his fingers curl briefly into fists.
“Then we’ll need more,” she says simply. Not a question of whether, but how.
His expression shifts, surprise giving way to something that might be respect, might be the beginning of trust. “We,” he repeats, testing the word’s weight.
She meets his gaze steadily. “We.”
The library at half-past nine is a study in controlled chaos. Tess enters with her cleaning basket. Legitimate cover, though her hands tremble slightly as she grips the handle. Lex stands before the open shelves, his back to her, but she can read the tension in his shoulders, the unnatural stillness of someone forcing calm.
“South wall,” she says quietly, not looking at him. “Behind the medical texts. The binding’s loose on the Galen. There’s space.”
He turns, and for a moment something passes between them that has no name yet. Not gratitude, precisely. Recognition, perhaps. An acknowledgment that they’ve crossed some invisible threshold.
“The floorboard near the window seat,” he offers in return, his voice barely above a whisper. “Already compromised. Don’t step there during inspection.”
She nods, moving to dust the mantelpiece with unnecessary thoroughness. Her mind catalogs the room’s vulnerabilities: sight lines from the corridor, the creak of the third shelf, how long it takes to cross from desk to door. Information she’s always possessed but never thought to weaponize until now.
“Why?” The question escapes him despite what must be better judgment.
She pauses, cloth in hand, considering. Because Mary deserves to die without agony. Because the morphine theft was mercy, not profit. Because she’s spent twenty-three years watching her betters hoard resources while people like her brother bled out on factory floors. Because Lex Thorne, criminal and forger, has shown more humanity in three days than Lord Ashford has demonstrated in a lifetime of benevolent paternalism.
“Because,” she says finally, meeting his amber eyes with her grey ones, “they’d burn your documents and let Mary scream.”
His throat works. “Yes.”
“Thirty minutes now,” she adds, turning back to her dusting. “Best hurry.”
She hears him move with sudden purpose, and doesn’t let herself smile.
The breakfast room hums with morning ritual: silver on china, murmured requests for marmalade. Tess enters with the fresh tea service, her presence a functional ghost among the living. Lady Ashford discusses the garden’s decline. The eldest son reads yesterday’s Times, two days late from London. No one looks at her.
The paper burns against her palm, folded tight as a bullet. One hour. Hide everything. Six words that make her complicit in crimes she can only half-imagine. Forgery. Theft. Whatever else Lex Thorne truly is beneath the bookbinder’s respectable surface.
She moves between chairs, collecting plates with practiced efficiency. Her pulse hammers but her hands remain steady. Years of service have taught her that much control. As she reaches his setting, her fingers brush the edge of his saucer. The note slides beneath the rim of his plate, invisible unless you’re looking.
She doesn’t look. Neither does he. But she feels the moment he registers its presence, a subtle shift in the quality of his stillness.
By the time she reaches the doorway, the paper has disappeared. The stone in her chest grows heavier.
The larder emergency consumes ninety minutes: a jar of preserves overturned, amber chaos bleeding across three shelves. Tess volunteers for every detail, scrubbing with deliberate thoroughness while the housekeeper supervises, tutting about waste and carelessness. Each minute stretches taut as wire. She scours sticky residue from corners that haven’t seen attention in months, invents complications, discovers additional jars requiring inspection.
When the housekeeper finally declares the crisis managed and turns toward the library, Tess remains on her knees among the gleaming shelves. She doesn’t follow. Doesn’t verify whether Lex has hidden his tools, his forgeries, his dangerous truths.
Either he’s managed it or he hasn’t. Either she’s saved him or condemned herself for nothing.
The uncertainty lodges beneath her ribs like a stone, growing heavier with each breath.
He finds her in the scullery that evening, arms submerged to the elbows in grey water. The other servants have dispersed. Supper cleared, corridors darkening. He approaches as though inquiring about leather treatment or binding glue, but his movements carry a precision that makes her pulse quicken.
The dish towel settles beside her basin. Beneath the linen, an unmistakable rectangular weight.
“Why?” His voice barely reaches her, pitched below the slosh of water.
She doesn’t lift her gaze from the soap-clouded surface. “Mary needed that morphine more than I needed answers about your business.”
Not entirely honest. Not entirely false.
She draws the book from her pocket slowly, as though it might burn. The leather is warm from her body, the spine cracked with use. When she lifts the towel away completely, candlelight catches gold lettering nearly worn to nothing.
Her fingers trace the title. Someone has read this until the pages softened like cloth. Someone has argued with it in margins, underlined passages with such force the pen tore through.
She tucks it against her ribs beneath the apron, heartbeat loud against revolutionary words.
She waits until the house settles into its uneasy midnight silence, counting the chimes of the hall clock. Eleven. Midnight. Half-past. Only then does she light the stub of candle, cupping the flame until it steadies.
The book falls open as though it knows where she needs to read. A passage about natural rights, the inherent dignity of labour. Pretty words, the kind that sound well in lecture halls. But there in the margin, his handwriting, angular, precise, furious: Tell this to the children with their hands cut off for missing rubber quotas.
Her breath stops in her throat.
Below, a list. Names and numbers in that same savage script: Kinshasa, 1904. Twelve dead. Leopoldville, 1906. Forty-three. The names continue down the margin and onto the facing page, cramped and relentless, a litany of the murdered. Dates. Places. Ages when he has them. Maria, 7 years. Joseph, 9 years.
This isn’t philosophy to him. It’s a ledger. It’s evidence. It’s testimony written in ink that might as well be blood.
She traces one entry with her fingertip, feeling the slight depression where his pen pressed hard with rage or grief or both. Stanleyville, 1907. Nineteen dead, twelve maimed. Foreman promoted.
The candle gutters. She should sleep (she’s due in the kitchen before dawn) but she turns the page and finds more. Rubber production figures beside mortality rates. Profit margins calculated in severed limbs. He’s built a case, meticulous as any barrister, against men who will never see the inside of a courtroom.
She understands now why he needs those documents from the study. This isn’t blackmail for money alone. He’s building something larger. Something that might actually matter.
Her hands are steadier when she finally closes the book. She knows exactly which pages she’ll leave for him tomorrow.
She’s written it on cheap paper, the kind servants use for shopping lists, because good stationery would have been noticed missing. The ink is uneven where she diluted it to make it last. But the words themselves. Those are precision instruments.
On the Valuation of Human Labor: A Case Study. She’s laid out Thomas’s death like a mathematical proof. Hours worked versus safety measures neglected. Cost of stopping machinery versus cost of a child’s life (calculated, bitterly, at the compensation offered: three pounds). She’s included the foreman’s testimony, the owner’s statement, the magistrate’s ruling. Then systematically dismantled each lie.
The final paragraph pivots from Thomas to the universal: When profit requires death, the system itself is murderous. When law protects killers, law becomes accomplice. We are told this is the natural order. I say nature never demanded we feed our children to machines.
Her hand hovers over the estate ledger before sliding the pages inside. They sit there, damning and vulnerable, her brother’s death and her own sedition offered up for judgment.
When she enters the library the next morning, her pamphlet lies open on the desk like an accusation. He stands at the window, back rigid, one hand pressed flat against the glass.
“Thomas Barlow.” His voice is stripped of its usual careful neutrality. “The inquest ruled accidental death. The foreman testified the boy was careless with the machinery.”
She sets her basket down too hard. Rags and brushes scatter. “My brother was twelve years old. Sixteen-hour shift. His fingers were too small for the safety lever.”
He turns then, and something in those amber eyes has fundamentally altered. “I know. I read the full testimony. I’m sorry.”
The apology isn’t performative sympathy. It’s acknowledgment between people who understand that sorry changes nothing. But bearing witness matters.
She traces the connections with one finger, following the ink lines between names, dates, sums. Her brother’s death reduced to a ledger entry. “How long have you been gathering this?”
“Eighteen months.” He doesn’t look at her. “Started as simple blackmail research. But the deeper I went…” His jaw tightens. “Some things you can’t unknow.”
“Some things you shouldn’t profit from.”
“No.” The word comes quiet, almost surprised. “No, you shouldn’t.”
She’s mid-sentence about household accounts, payments to silence families of dead workers, when the door handle turns. They both freeze. Lord Ashford’s voice in the corridor, approaching. Lex moves without thought: three strides, his body shielding the desk, already droning about leather deterioration. She sweeps papers into her basket as Ashford enters, dismissing the maid with barely a glance. After he leaves, silence. Lex’s breath comes quick. “You protected me,” she says. He meets her eyes. “We protect each other now.”
The transformation begins the morning after the floor plan exchange. Tess enters the library to find Lex already at work, but his usual careful distance has contracted. He’s positioned himself at the large table rather than the desk, documents spread in deliberate display. She recognizes the gesture: an invitation, though his eyes never leave the page before him.
She begins with the mantelpiece, working her cloth along the marble with studied concentration. But her gaze keeps sliding to the papers, catching fragments: rubber quotas, disciplinary measures, acceptable losses. The clinical language makes her stomach turn.
“They write it all down,” she says, not quite a question.
“Men like that always do.” Lex’s voice is carefully neutral. “They need to justify the mathematics of atrocity to their shareholders.”
She moves closer, cloth forgotten in her hand. One document shows a photograph. Workers lined up, their backs marked with scars. The caption reads Productivity Enhancement Protocol.
“Enhancement,” she breathes, and the word tastes like ash.
Lex slides another page toward her, this one covered in his own neat annotations. “The shipments correlate with death rates in three villages. See here.”They’re not even hiding it. Just coding it as ‘wastage.’”
Tess leans over his shoulder, close enough to smell the chemical tang of his forgery inks. Her brother had been wastage too, crushed between factory gears and written off in some ledger she’d never see.
“I need copies,” she says. “For the pamphlets.”
“Too dangerous. If they’re found,”
“Then we make them impossible to trace.” She meets his eyes, seeing her own calculation reflected back. “You can do that, can’t you? Make documents that lead nowhere?”
His pause stretches between them, weighted with implications neither names. Finally: “Yes. I can do that.”
She’s copying a passage about labor organizing, her hand cramping around the stolen pencil, when his shadow falls across the page. She doesn’t startle. She’s learned to track his movements by the whisper of his boots on carpet, the particular quality of silence he carries.
“Your handwriting.” His voice comes from just behind her shoulder, close enough that she feels the words as much as hears them. “It’s better than most gentlemen’s I’ve forged for.”
Her spine goes rigid. The compliment feels like a trap, or worse. Mockery dressed in observation. But when she risks a glance upward, his expression holds only that clinical assessment she’s come to recognize, the way he looks at documents he’s evaluating for authenticity.
“Who taught you?”
The question lands like a stone in still water. She thinks of midnight hours, stolen candles, her mother’s horrified discovery. The answer stays locked behind her teeth.
He doesn’t press. Instead, he returns to his desk with that economical grace, then slides a slim volume across the polished wood toward her. “The Condition of the Working Class in England. Engels. Chapter seven addresses factory discipline. Relevant to your arguments about colonial labor.”
She stares at the book as though it might bite. “You’ve read this?”
“I’ve forged correspondence for half the radicals in London, Miss Barlow.” His smile carries no humor, only a grim recognition. “One acquires an education.”
That evening, her cloth lies abandoned on the windowsill. His catalogue pages sit untouched. They lean across the library table like generals over a map, voices low and urgent, dissecting capitalism’s machinery with surgical precision. He challenges her assumptions about spontaneous uprising; she counters his cynicism about workers’ consciousness with examples from the textile mills. When she quotes Kropotkin, his eyebrows rise. When he references colonial extraction rates, she adds details from her master’s own dinner conversations, overheard while serving wine.
The fire burns low. Neither moves to tend it. Outside, the quarantine guards change shift with a distant shout.
“You’re wasted in service,” he says finally.
“I’m exactly where I need to be.” Her grey eyes hold his amber ones without flinching. “I see everything you people make invisible.”
You people. The words settle between them like a blade. But he doesn’t retreat into offense or deflection. Instead, something shifts in his expression, acknowledgment, perhaps. Or the beginning of shame.
“Then teach me,” he says quietly. “What I’m too privileged to see.”
The documents spread between them like accusations. She reads over his shoulder, her breath catching at the inventory lists: tonnage of rubber, names reduced to numbers, children’s ages marked in margins like livestock records. Her hand hovers above one page, not quite touching, as though the paper itself carries contagion.
“How long have you known?” Her voice barely rises above the fire’s whisper.
“Three weeks.” He runs ink-stained fingers through his hair. “Since before the quarantine. I thought.”I thought I’d use it for leverage. Money. Escape.”
“And now?”
He looks at her then, really looks, and she sees something crumbling behind those calculating amber eyes. “Now I think some things shouldn’t be bought and sold.”
She understands what this confession costs him. What it means.
She finds him slumped at the desk, dawn grey through the windows. Documents scatter like fallen leaves. Plantation manifests, shipping records, names that end in numbers.
“You never left.”
He doesn’t startle. “Neither did you.”
She should go. Instead, she reads over his shoulder, her pulse quickening at the evidence laid bare. His hand trembles slightly as he turns a page.
“Help me,” he says quietly. “I can’t carry this alone.”
She pulls up a chair.
When she brings him tea that morning, a gesture that’s become routine, though neither names it, he’s examining a forged medical certificate with the focused intensity she’s learned means doubt.
“Is it good enough?” The question escapes before she remembers deference.
He looks up, and something shifts in the air between them. “For the authorities? Yes.” His fingers trace the seal. “For my conscience? Nothing is.”
She sets the cup down, studying him properly: ink-stained hands that could have held power if birth had been kinder, the intelligence burning behind careful walls.
“Why do it? The forgeries for the servants. There’s no profit in mercy.”
Long silence. Then: “Perhaps I’m tired of serving only myself.” His gaze finds hers, steady and undefended. “Or perhaps I wanted to be someone you wouldn’t despise.”
The honesty winds her. She should leave, preserve distance, remember danger.
Instead: “I don’t. Haven’t for some time.”
The admission costs everything. He knows it.
“Then we’re both in trouble,” he says softly.
She finds him slumped over the desk, dawn light cutting through the gap in the curtains to illuminate the scattered volumes. Latin, German, French: medical texts she’s dusted a hundred times without comprehending. Now they lie open like dissected bodies, their secrets exposed under his ink-stained fingers.
He startles when the floorboard creaks, then stills when he sees her face.
“The physician won’t come down.” Her voice carries no inflection, though rage burns beneath. Dr. Weatherby had stood at the top of the servants’ stairs, bag in hand, and simply refused. Too dangerous. The contagion. As though their deaths mattered less than his comfort.
Lex closes the nearest volume with careful precision. “Thomas?”
“Worse. The fever. Thomas, who’d taught her to read kitchen French, who’d covered for her when she’d been caught with pamphlets. Thomas, who had three children in the village he’d not seen in a month.
“I know.” Lex’s voice is rough with exhaustion. “I heard the coughing through the walls all night.”
He hesitates, and she watches something resolve behind his eyes. Decision made. Trust offered.
“There’s a treatment described here.” His hand hovers over a German text. “Willow bark tea, cold compresses, elevation of the head to ease the breathing. It’s not much, but the Prussian hospitals reported some success with respiratory. She’s staring at him as though the floor has shifted beneath her feet.
“You’ve been researching treatments.” The words emerge slowly, testing their weight. “For the servants.”
Not a question. An accusation of unexpected mercy.
He meets her gaze without flinching, without the careful performance he wears like armor. “Someone should.”
The simplicity of it breaks something in her chest. Someone should. As though it were obvious. As though their lives held equal measure.
She doesn’t ask permission, just begins gathering what he’s described. Her hands know the house’s hidden stores. Willow bark kept for Lady Ashford’s headaches, linen from the good cupboard they’re forbidden to touch. When she returns, he’s copying instructions in clear handwriting, translating the German into plain English. Medical terms become simple directions: temperature, timing, dosage.
“The fever has to break within twelve hours,” he says, not looking up, “or the convulsions begin again.”
She takes the paper. Their fingers brush. Ink-stained and work-roughened, neither pair belonging to the world upstairs.
“Come with me.”
His pen stills. “To the servants’ wing?”
The transgression is absolute. A tradesman entering their private quarters, crossing every boundary the house’s architecture exists to maintain. She watches him calculate the risk, the exposure, the violation of every unspoken rule.
“You’ve read the books,” she says quietly. “I need someone who understands what they mean.”
He stands without hesitation, gathering the basin and supplies. Following her into the narrow passage behind the morning room, he moves like a man who’s already chosen his side.
In the cramped servants’ hall, beneath the low ceiling that smells of carbolic and fear, they work without speaking. She steadies Thomas’s thrashing shoulders while Lex measures the willow bark tincture with a forger’s precision. The other servants press against the walls, watching this impossible collaboration. “Keep the compress cool,” he murmurs, and she responds with a nod stripped of all deference.
Hours blur. Thomas’s breathing rattles, eases, deteriorates again. Somewhere past midnight, Lex’s hand covers hers on the boy’s burning forehead, ostensibly checking temperature. Neither withdraws.
“You learned this from books,” she says finally.
“You learned this from necessity.” His voice is low. “I think your education might be worth more than mine.”
When Thomas’s fever breaks near dawn, they’re shoulder to shoulder against the wall, too exhausted for propriety. She turns. The gratitude in her eyes carries something more dangerous beneath.
The silence stretches between them, taut as wire. She can see the exhaustion carved into his face, the ink stains like bruises on his fingers. When he says damn the scheme, something fractures in her chest. The careful architecture of contempt she’s built around him.
“You’re a fool,” she whispers, but her voice catches on something that might be tenderness. “A reckless, impossible fool.”
His laugh is bitter, brief. “I’ve been called worse by better people.”
“I’m not better.” The admission costs her. “I’m just angrier.”
She should leave. Restore the careful distance that has kept them both alive, kept the roles clear. Instead, Tess remains in the chair, her servant’s posture abandoned entirely.
“Thomas,” she says, voice low and deliberate. “The man you sat with tonight. Third son of a factory worker in Sheffield. Came here at twelve because it was service or the mines that killed his uncle.”
She watches Lex’s face, searching for calculation, for the blackmailer’s cold assessment of useful information.
“These books surrounding us?” Her gesture takes in the leather-bound wealth. “Purchased with money extracted from men like his father. Like my mother, before the estate dismissed her without pension.” Her grey eyes hold his amber ones. “So when you speak of being damned and right, of weaponizing your skills against the system itself, I need certainty. Not performance. Not another scheme dressed in righteous language.”
The challenge settles between them like a blade on a table.
Lex straightens. Something in his expression shifts, clarifies: the calculating mask falling away to reveal the architecture beneath. Resolution, cold and clean.
“Then bear witness,” he says quietly. “When I obtain those documents, watch what I do with them. Not blackmail for personal profit. Evidence for public exposure.” He moves closer, not touching, but near enough that she can see the silver scar along his jaw catch the firelight. “Revolution, Tess. Not merely survival.”
His voice drops further. “You’ve already altered everything. You simply haven’t recognized it yet.”
The library floor is harder than she expected, cold seeping through her uniform where she’s collapsed against the shelves. Her breath won’t come right. She presses her palm against the carpet, feeling the weave bite into her skin, and thinks absurdly of the housemaid who’ll have to clean the salt tracks her tears are leaving. Another task. Another invisible labor.
Thomas’s eyes won’t leave her. Not the glazed, fevered stare from the end, but earlier, this morning, was it only this morning?, when he’d asked her if it hurt to die. Sixteen years old and already knowing the question mattered. She’d lied to him, said it would be quick, painless. Said the fever would take him gently. But there’d been nothing gentle in the way his spine arched, the sounds he’d made. Nothing gentle in the physician’s refusal to descend the stairs, as though class distinctions could be maintained even in the face of death.
Her laugh scrapes out raw and ugly. She’s kneeling in a library worth more than her entire family will earn in three generations, surrounded by leather-bound justifications for the machinery that devoured her brother, that’s devouring Thomas even now as his body cools in the servants’ hall. Philosophy and economics and natural law, all of it explaining why some people matter and others are simply… expendable.
The word breaks something loose in her chest. She folds forward, forehead against the carpet that smells of beeswax and privilege, and the sound that comes out isn’t crying anymore: it’s deeper, older, the accumulated weight of every swallowed scream, every yes ma’am and of course sir and I understand my place. Her shoulders shake with it. Her fingers claw at nothing.
She doesn’t hear the door. Doesn’t hear footsteps. Only realizes she’s not alone when shadow falls across her hands.
When Lex’s shadow falls across her, she flinches. Instinct older than thought. Her hands move to smooth her apron, to tuck the wild strands of hair back, already assembling the mask. The deference. The blankness. The careful nothing that keeps servants breathing.
But her face won’t cooperate. Won’t smooth into the neutral expression she’s perfected since childhood. The tears are still wet on her cheeks, her breath still hitching, and she realizes with distant, creeping horror that she’s utterly exposed. Vulnerable. She’s given him ammunition, shown weakness to someone who trades in leverage the way other men trade in wool or rubber.
She waits for it. The calculation. The subtle shift in his expression that means he’s cataloguing this moment, filing it away for future use. The way his eyes will sharpen with interest, seeing the crack in her armor, the place to press when he needs her compliant.
Her throat closes. She can’t even summon the energy to hate him for it. She’s simply too tired, too emptied out, to care what he does with her breaking.
Instead, he lowers himself to the floor beside her: not with the fluid grace she’s seen him use when he wants to charm or deflect, but with something heavier. Deliberate. The way a man might sit vigil. His back settles against the same shelf, his shoulder a hand’s breadth from hers. Not touching. The distance is precise, almost formal, yet somehow more intimate than contact would be.
He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t ask the questions that would force her to explain, to justify, to perform coherence when she has none left. Doesn’t offer the platitudes that would require her grateful acceptance, another transaction, another debt.
He simply exists beside her in the wreckage of her composure.
The silence he offers isn’t empty or awkward. It’s patient. Deliberate as his sitting. When her breathing finally steadies, when the shaking subsides to tremors, he’s still there, gaze fixed on the cold fireplace as if he has nowhere else to be, nothing more urgent than bearing witness.
Her breath catches. She turns her head just enough to see his profile in the dim light: the sharp line of his jaw, the way he’s staring at nothing, or perhaps at something only he can see. “They killed him for trying to survive,” she says, and it’s not a question. It’s recognition. The system has a thousand methods, but only one purpose: to grind them down until there’s nothing left but ash and warning.
His fingers curl against the floorboards, knuckles whitening. “The magistrate called it justice. Said examples must be made of those who’d undermine the natural order.” A bitter sound escapes him, not quite laughter. “Natural. As if starving was natural. As if watching your mother choose between rent and food was the proper order of things.” He exhales slowly, deliberately. “I learned forgery from Daniel’s mistakes. How to be better at the crime they killed him for.”
The silence stretches between them, filled only by the settling of coals in the grate and the distant sound of rain against windows. Tess’s shoulders curve inward, her spine pressed against the bookshelf as though the weight of accumulated grief might crush her into the floorboards. She’s aware of Lex beside her, the careful distance he maintains, the way his breathing has gone quiet and controlled, but she cannot lift her head, cannot meet whatever expression might be waiting there.
Her brother’s face surfaces unbidden: Thomas at fourteen, gap-toothed and laughing; Thomas at fifteen, already grey with factory dust; Thomas at sixteen, carried home on a door because they had no stretcher, his leg crushed to pulp beneath machinery that should have been shut down months ago for repairs. The foreman had shrugged. Accidents happen. The cost of doing business. Her mother had scrubbed blood from the floorboards for three days afterward, methodical and silent, while Tess had stolen paper from the manor house and begun teaching herself to read the pamphlets she’d found hidden in Thomas’s mattress.
The maid this morning, Sarah, nineteen, who’d sung while she worked, had died the same way, really. Different mechanism, same calculus. The plague had taken her, yes, but it was the family’s refusal to isolate properly, their insistence on maintaining dinner parties even as fever spread through the servants’ quarters, that had sealed her fate. Lady Ashford had stood in the doorway of the sickroom for precisely four seconds before retreating, handkerchief pressed to her nose. Such a pity, she’d murmured, as though Sarah were a broken vase.
Tess’s hands curl into fists against her closed eyes, nails biting crescents into her palms. The pain is clarifying, almost welcome. Something sharp and immediate to anchor her against the vast, churning darkness of it all.
“They wouldn’t even send for a doctor,” she says finally, the words scraping out like rust from an old hinge. “Sixteen years old. They said it would cost too much to stop the machines, that the other workers needed to see,”
The sentence fractures. She cannot finish it, cannot speak aloud the calculation she’d overheard the factory owner make: that Thomas’s death would serve as useful reminder of the cost of inattention, that productivity had actually improved in the weeks following. The efficiency of it. The clean mathematics of bodies converted to profit margins and cautionary tales.
Her palms press against her eyes, and she hates the dampness there, hates that even here, in this room thick with the accumulated knowledge of empires built on precisely such calculations, she cannot maintain the armor that’s kept her alive. The defiance that’s sustained her through seven years of Yes, ma’am and Right away, sir while her hands itched to overturn their tea services, to set fire to their account books, to make them see.
But they never see. That’s the point. That’s the entire architecture of it.
His fingers curl against the floorboards, knuckles whitening. “The magistrate called it a ‘corruption of trust.’ As if the landlord who’d raised our rent three times in two years while children starved in the street embodied some sacred principle Daniel had violated.”
The bitterness in his voice is surgical, precise. Not the hot rage that burns in Tess’s chest but something colder, more dangerous. The anger of someone who’s learned to convert grief into methodology, who’s made a career of exploiting the very systems that devoured his brother.
“They hanged him on a Tuesday,” Lex says quietly. “I was fourteen. I remember thinking the sky shouldn’t be that blue on a day like that.”
His voice drops to something barely audible. “He practiced for weeks. Showed me the strokes, how to match the slant and pressure. I still remember his hands (steady, so steady) while mine shook holding the lamp.” Lex’s throat works. “He made me promise I’d use it to survive, not to save anyone. I’ve kept half that promise.”
Tess watches the firelight trace his scar, and understanding strikes with terrible clarity: this man has spent thirteen years fleeing that noose, every calculated deception another mile from Newgate’s shadow. Daniel’s execution didn’t end; it metastasized into his brother’s life, driving every risk, every compromise. “He was trying to save you,” she says, her voice gentler than she knew it could be. Lex’s eyes close, a flinch of acknowledgment that strips away his careful defenses.
The words hang between them like smoke, and Tess feels something shift in her chest. A recognition so profound it’s almost painful. She’s spent five years reading stolen books by candlelight, memorizing arguments about labor and capital, teaching herself the vocabulary of her own oppression. But she’s never named it quite like this: theft as survival, education as weapon-forging.
“They write the world in their favor,” she says slowly, testing the weight of it. “Every contract, every deed, every law. The words that say my mother had no right to compensation. The documents that transfer plantation profits while the workers die of fever.” Her voice gains strength. “I thought if I could just read well enough, argue cleverly enough, I could prove them wrong. But you can’t win a debate when your opponent writes the dictionary.”
Lex nods, something like respect flickering across his features. “Exactly. So you stop arguing and start rewriting.” He gestures at the books surrounding them. “Every volume in this library is a justification. Natural hierarchy. Civilizing mission. The white man’s burden.” The last phrase drips with contempt. “Pretty words for theft and murder. They teach their children to recite it like scripture.”
“While our children die reciting nothing,” Tess finishes. The fire pops, sending shadows dancing across the leather spines. “My brother couldn’t read. Didn’t matter. The factory ate him just the same. Your brother could forge beautifully, and they hanged him for using their own tricks.”
“The game is rigged,” Lex says quietly.
“So we learn to cheat.” Tess meets his eyes, and something passes between them: not quite alliance, not yet trust, but a mutual recognition of the battlefield. They are both forgers in their way, both thieves of knowledge that was supposed to remain locked away. Both refusing to be disposable.
Lex takes the pamphlet carefully, as though it might burn. His eyes scan the dense text. Arguments about labor value, colonial extraction, the mathematics of exploitation rendered in Tess’s precise hand. “You wrote this?” Not disbelief, but something closer to recognition.
“Every word.” She watches him read, her pulse quickening. This is more dangerous than their conversations, more intimate than touch. These are her thoughts made permanent, evidence that could see her transported or worse. “I copy them out at night. Distribute them in the village on my half-days. The owners think we’re too stupid to understand our own conditions, too exhausted to articulate them.” Her smile is sharp. “So I articulate it for them.”
He looks up, and she sees it: the same fever that drives her, reflected back. “You’re forging consciousness,” he says softly. “Teaching people to read the theft being committed against them.”
“While you forge the documents that prove it.” Tess leans forward. “Different methods. Same war.”
The fire crackles between them, illuminating two minds sharpened on the same whetstone of injustice.
The silence between them shifts, becomes charged with recognition. Lex sets the pamphlet down with unexpected reverence, his forger’s fingers, so accustomed to deception, treating her words as something sacred. “How many have you distributed?”
“Forty-three copies.” Tess’s voice is steady despite the danger of this confession. “Kitchen maids, stable boys, tenant farmers. People who’ve been told they can’t think.” She watches firelight play across his scarred jaw. “The estate manager found one last month. They interrogated everyone. I watched them question Mary until she wept, knowing it was my work that put her there.”
“But you didn’t stop.”
“No.” Her grey eyes are flint. “I wrote two more that night.”
Lex studies the pamphlet, his forger’s eye appreciating the precision of her arguments as much as her penmanship. “You’re more dangerous than I am,” he says, and there’s genuine admiration beneath the words. “I trade in individual leverage: one document, one scheme. But this,” He taps the paper. “You’re forging consciousness itself.”
“We’re the same,” Tess counters. “You prove their authority is just ink. I prove their ideology is just words.” She leans forward, firelight catching in her eyes. “Both of us showing the machinery can be dismantled.”
“And we’re supposed to be grateful,” Lex says, his jaw tightening. “For the scraps, the chance to polish their silver whilst they debate our inferiority over brandy.” He touches the leather spines nearest him, almost tender. “I’ve read their justifications in Latin and French. The words change. The theft remains constant.” His amber eyes find hers. “They’ve made questioning itself a crime against nature.”
She presses her palms against her eyes, as if she could push the knowledge back inside, unknow what she’s learned. “My mother believed it,” she says, voice muffled. “Forty years in service and she believed it. That they were better. That their comfort mattered more than our exhaustion.” When she drops her hands, her grey eyes are fierce with unshed tears. “She died apologizing for being ill, for the inconvenience of her body failing.”
The words taste like ash. Tess rises, moving restlessly between the shelves, fingers trailing over spines she’s dusted a hundred times but never dared read until recently. “I taught myself letters from their discarded newspapers. Stole books from this very room: just for a night, just to copy passages by candlelight.” She pulls a volume at random: Principles of Colonial Administration. Opens it to an engraved illustration of orderly plantations, smiling workers. “They write it down. Make it official. Print it in leather and gold leaf so it looks like truth instead of theft.”
Her hands shake as she shelves the book with excessive care, the maid’s habit of precision warring with the urge to hurl it into the fire. “And we’re meant to be the criminals. You for forging their documents. Me for reading their books without permission.” The laugh that escapes her is bitter, broken. “They steal continents and call it destiny. We steal knowledge and they’d hang us for it.”
She turns back to him, and something in her expression has shifted. Past grief into a colder fury. “The aberration isn’t that we refuse to accept it, Lex. The aberration is that so few of us do. That they’ve convinced millions to build their own cages and call it natural order.”
He shifts closer, the movement unconscious, drawn by the recognition in her words. “They taught us their rhetoric so we could parrot it back, justify their systems.” His ink-stained fingers curl into a fist. “Instead I learned to forge their signatures, mimic their authority. Turned their own language into a blade.”
The fire pops, sending shadows dancing across the leather spines surrounding them. Lex’s voice drops lower, intimate in the quiet. “Every document I’ve falsified, every seal I’ve copied: it’s not just profit. It’s proof that their power is performance. Paper and wax and the collective agreement to believe.”
He looks at her with something raw in his expression. “You read their books and saw through them. I studied their methods and learned to counterfeit them. We’re both doing the same thing, Tess. We’re calling their bluff. Showing that everything they claim is natural and inevitable is just…” He gestures at the library surrounding them, thousands of volumes of accumulated justification. “…elaborate theatre. And we’ve learned to write our own scripts.”
She thinks of her mother’s hands, roughened by lye and labor, turning pages by candlelight after sixteen-hour days. Of her own fingers learning letters in stolen moments, transforming from tools of scrubbing into instruments of sedition. “They wanted us literate enough to read their orders,” she says, voice hardening. “To understand the contracts that bind us, the laws that keep us in place. Instead I read Paine. Wollstonecraft. The pamphlets that circulate through factory towns.”
Her grey eyes hold his amber ones, unflinching. “Every word I’ve written, every pamphlet I’ve hidden in these pockets: it’s the same theft you practice. We’ve stolen their authority. Learned to speak in voices that aren’t supposed to be ours.”
“And now we’re here,” Lex says, leaning forward, firelight catching the sharp planes of his face. “Trapped in their monument to empire whilst plague devours it from within.” His voice drops, intimate and fierce. “All their accumulated wealth, their bloodlines and breeding. Useless against fever. But our sort of knowledge? The intelligence that learns systems from below, that sees the mechanisms they believe invisible?” His eyes hold hers. “That’s what survives.”
Lex’s expression fractures, calculation giving way to something raw. “Grateful,” he repeats, the word bitter on his tongue. “As though survival were generosity. As though they didn’t build their comfort on your exhaustion.” His hand moves without permission, fingers almost brushing hers on the armrest between them. “You’re not angry about nothing, Tess. You’re angry about everything. And you’re right to be.”
The silence stretches between them, weighted with all the accusations she’s rehearsed in her mind during sleepless nights in her narrow bed. She’s imagined this confrontation a dozen ways: her righteous fury, his smirking deflection, the satisfaction of naming him for what he is. But the reality is nothing like her imaginings. His hand remains steady beneath hers, accepting her judgment without flinching, and somehow that makes it worse.
“I watched you,” she continues, her voice dropping to barely above a whisper. “Cataloguing the books, so careful and methodical, and all the while you were hunting. Looking for leverage, for weapons. Making notes about which family member gambles, who keeps a mistress, where the money’s really gone.” The fire pops, sending shadows dancing across the leather spines surrounding them. “You’re clever enough to see how rotten it all is, and instead of fighting it, you’ve made yourself into another parasite feeding on the corruption.”
Her thumb moves against his knuckles. She doesn’t mean it to, but the gesture happens anyway, a small betrayal of her body against her principles. The ink stains on his fingers are dark in the firelight, evidence of his craft, his deceptions. She should pull away. She should stand up, smooth her apron, remember her place and her purpose and the careful distance she’s maintained from everyone in this cursed house.
“I wanted it to be simple,” she admits, and hears the exhaustion bleeding through her anger. “You were supposed to be easy to dismiss. Just another man who’d sell his grandmother for a sovereign, another proof that the whole system’s diseased beyond saving.” Her grey eyes meet his amber ones, searching. “But you’re not simple at all, are you?”
“I wanted to hate you,” she says, and the words come raw, unguarded, stripped of the careful control she’s maintained for three weeks of proximity and suspicion. “When I realized what you were doing, the blackmail, the forgeries, profiting from their secrets like some carrion bird picking over corpses, I thought you were just another predator.” Her grip tightens on his hand, fingers pressing against his palm as if she might pull away, but the movement stops there, incomplete. “You’re everything I’ve taught myself to despise. Another person who looks at the world and sees only what can be extracted from it, who turns suffering into currency.”
The accusation hangs between them, but she doesn’t release his hand. The contradiction makes her throat tight. “You have the intelligence to understand how the system works, all its mechanisms of cruelty, and instead of dismantling it you’ve made yourself into another cog. A particularly clever cog, perhaps, but still part of the machine that grinds people like me, like us, into dust and profit.”
His confession settles between them like a physical thing, heavy with all the compromises he’s made, all the idealism he’s buried beneath pragmatism and survival. The firelight catches the scar along his jaw, and Tess realizes she’s memorized it without meaning to, the way she’s memorized the particular angle of his shoulders when he bends over his work, the ink perpetually staining his right forefinger.
“I thought cynicism was wisdom,” he says, and his voice carries a weight she hasn’t heard before: not the calculated charm he uses with the family, not the careful neutrality he maintains with the other servants. This is something unguarded, perhaps even ashamed. “I thought people like you were fools marching toward martyrdom, too stubborn to see that the world doesn’t reward principle, it punishes it.”
She feels something crack open in her chest. Not the familiar anger that sustains her, but something rawer. He sees her clearly: not the deferential maid, not the foolish agitator the family would name her, but the truth of what she is. Dangerous. Believing. His words strip away every protective layer she’s built, leaving her exposed in the firelight, and she finds she doesn’t want to hide from him anymore.
The careful distance they’ve maintained, through weeks of circling each other in doorways, of loaded glances over books, of conversations that stopped just short of truth, collapses like a wall finally breached. “Maybe we can,” she whispers, and her voice transforms: no longer the sharp blade of defiance but something trembling and fierce at once. Hope, dangerous as any weapon. “Maybe together we’re dangerous enough.”
The silence stretches between them, heavy with everything they’ve just admitted. Tess watches the firelight catch in his eyes: amber turned to gold, then shadow, then gold again. Her heart hammers against her ribs like something caged and desperate. She should pull her hand away. Should stand, smooth her apron, rebuild the careful architecture of servant and tradesman that’s kept them both safe.
She doesn’t move.
“I’ve spent three years learning to be alone,” she says instead, the words scraping out of her. “Learning that wanting help, wanting… anything from anyone, was just another way to be hurt.” Her throat tightens. “My mother taught me that. The estate taught me that. Every door closed in my face taught me that.”
Lex shifts closer, just an inch, but she feels it like a tremor through stone. “And now?”
“Now you’re here, with your dangerous knowledge and your forger’s hands and your.”Your bloody inconvenient principles that you keep pretending you don’t have.”
His laugh is startled, almost painful. “I’ve built a career on not having principles.”
“Liar.” The word is soft, almost fond. “You could have left me to my pamphlets and my rage. Could have taken what you needed and disappeared into whatever criminal network would hide you. Instead you’re sitting here, holding my hand, talking about making their deaths mean something.”
“Perhaps you’ve corrupted me.” But his voice wavers, and she knows he feels it too. This terrifying shift, this recognition that they’ve become something more dangerous than either of them alone. Two people who’ve learned to survive by being solitary, suddenly discovering the devastating possibility of alliance.
Of partnership.
Of something neither of them has words for yet, but which hums between their joined hands like electricity through wire.
The words hang between them, weighted with everything they’re not saying. Tess watches his throat work as he swallows, watches the careful mask of the forger slip just enough to show the raw want beneath. Not just desire, though she feels that too, a heat low in her belly that has nothing to do with the dying fire, but something more dangerous. The want to be known. To be seen without flinching.
“You terrify me,” he admits, and his voice has gone rough as unfinished wood. “Not because of what you want to do, but because you make me want to help you do it. Because when you talk about burning it all down, I don’t think about escape routes anymore. I think about where to light the match.”
The confession lands between them like something combustible. Tess feels her carefully constructed walls, the ones that kept her safe, kept her focused, kept her from wanting anything beyond survival and revenge, beginning to crack. Fractures spreading through stone she’d thought permanent.
“Good,” she whispers, and her hand tightens in his. “I need someone terrifying.”
The silence stretches, charged with everything they’ve just acknowledged. Tess feels the weight of decision settling over them both. Not the impulsive fury that’s driven her until now, but something colder, more deliberate. More dangerous for its calculation.
“A partnership,” she repeats, testing the word. Her fingers slip from his, and the loss of contact steadies her somehow, lets her think past the heat of proximity. She crosses to the window, puts the length of the room between them. “You get your documents for blackmail. I get them distributed where they’ll do real damage.”
“More than blackmail.” Lex’s voice follows her through the darkness. “Evidence. Testimony. The kind that topples empires if it reaches the right hands.”
She turns, studies his face in the ember-light. “And more,” she echoes quietly. A statement, not a question.
“And more,” he confirms.
The sealed compact: They stand together in the ember-glow, and without discussion begin to plan. His knowledge of the house’s vulnerabilities, her understanding of servants’ movements: the overlapping circles of their separate missions suddenly revealing a shared center. She sketches hidden passages on scrap paper; he adds notations about the study’s locks, the master’s schedule. Their heads bend close. She catches ink-scent, wool, his particular warmth. “If we do this,” she murmurs, not looking up, “there’s no going back.” His hand covers hers on the pen. “We crossed that line when we started being honest.”
The clock’s fourth chime fractures the moment. Tess rolls the map with trembling fingers, tucks it into her bodice’s hidden seam. At the threshold she turns: sees him silhouetted against dying embers, ink-stained, unguarded.
“Tess.” Her name shaped like confession.
She cannot answer. One nod, then darkness swallows her. Through familiar passages she moves blind, seeing only his face behind her eyelids: open, afraid, irrevocably hers.
No longer alone. The precipice yawns.
The basket slips from her grip, landing with a soft thud on the Persian carpet. Neither moves to retrieve it. Tess finds herself frozen mid-step, her body refusing the simple instruction to continue forward. The morning light has shifted, casting Lex’s workspace in amber, and she watches dust motes drift through the beam between them like a visible barrier she cannot bring herself to cross.
“I thought,” she begins, then stops. What had she thought? That confession could be contained? That acknowledging this pull would somehow diminish it?
Lex sets down his pen with deliberate care, the small click of metal against wood unnaturally loud. “I haven’t slept,” he says, and the admission costs him something. His fingers spread flat against the desk’s surface as though anchoring himself. “I kept thinking about what you said. About courage.”
Her throat tightens. She’d called him a coward, standing in this very room just hours ago, her anger a flimsy shield against wanting. “I shouldn’t have. He rises, and the movement sends her heart into her throat. But he doesn’t approach. Instead he turns toward the window, presenting her with the line of his shoulders, the vulnerable curve of his neck above his collar.”I’ve spent years perfecting the art of self-preservation. And then you. “You make me want to be reckless.”
The confession hangs between them, raw and dangerous. Tess’s fingers curl into her apron, fabric bunching in her fists. Every instinct screams contradiction. The library’s familiar geography has become foreign territory, each piece of furniture a landmark in this new, treacherous landscape where proximity means something it never has before.
“I should go,” she whispers, knowing she won’t.
Tess forces herself through the motions. Cloth against leather spines, methodical strokes along each shelf. But her body has become a traitor. The simple act of reaching overhead makes her conscious of how the fabric pulls across her shoulders, how her breath quickens with the stretch. Behind her, the scratch of his pen stops. Starts. Stops again.
She moves to the next section, closer to his workbench. The floorboard creaks beneath her weight, and she freezes, absurdly certain he can hear her heartbeat in the sudden silence.
“You’ve dusted that same volume three times.”
His voice, low and rough, makes her hand still against the binding. She doesn’t turn. “Have I?”
“Yes.” A pause, weighted with everything unsaid. “I’ve been counting.”
The admission undoes something in her chest. She risks a glance over her shoulder and finds him watching her with an intensity that steals her breath. His hands are clenched on the desk edge, knuckles white with restraint.
“Perhaps,” she manages, voice unsteady, “you should attend to your work instead of watching me.”
“I’ve tried.” The words sound like confession. “I can’t.”
Lex stands to retrieve a volume, and suddenly the space between bookcase and desk contracts to nothing. Tess finds herself trapped. Not by him, but by her own unwillingness to retreat. She can count his breaths, see where his collar has come loose at the throat.
“Excuse me,” she whispers, the words mere formality.
He doesn’t move. His hand rises, trembling, hovering a breath from her shoulder. The restraint costs him. She sees it in the rigid line of his jaw, the tendons standing out in his neck.
“We can’t.”I know.”
But neither retreats. The air between them grows thick, charged. Her fingers ache to touch the ink stain on his cuff. His eyes drop to her mouth.
The wanting might kill her before the plague does.
The atlas spine cracks beneath her white-knuckled grip. His thumb traces the curve of her waist through starched cotton. A cartographer mapping forbidden territory. She feels the tremor in his fingers, the war between restraint and surrender.
“Tess.” Her name in his mouth sounds like confession, like damnation.
The leather binding digs into her ribs. She doesn’t care. His breath ghosts across her cheekbone, and she’s drowning, burning, alive with want that makes plague-fear seem distant and small.
The atlas thuds to the floor. His hands burn through fabric. She gasps against his mouth, fingers twisted in his collar, pulling him down into recklessness. He tastes of tea and ink and desperation. When he lifts her slightly, her feet leave the ground, and she’s weightless, anchored only by his grip and the shelf-edge pressing her spine.
His breath ghosts across her lips, uneven and warm. The footsteps recede down the corridor, Lady Ashford’s measured tread, she recognizes distantly, and fade into the house’s muffled silence. But neither of them moves.
Tess’s spine presses into the shelf behind her, leather bindings digging through her uniform. Her heart hammers so violently she’s certain he can feel it where his chest nearly touches hers. His arms bracket her shoulders, palms flat against volumes of imperial history, trapping her in a cage she has no desire to escape.
“We can’t,” Lex whispers, but the words hold no conviction. His eyes are dark with want, searching her face as though memorizing it. As though she might vanish.
“I know,” Tess manages, her voice scraped raw.
His thumb finds her cheekbone, traces the arc of bone with such devastating gentleness that her eyes flutter closed. The contrast undoes her. This careful tenderness from hands that forge and deceive, that have done God knows what in service of survival. She knows what he is. She knows what she risks.
She kisses him anyway.
This time it’s softer, deliberate rather than desperate. She tastes his surrender in the way his mouth yields to hers, in the quiet sound he makes low in his throat. His hand slides into her hair, scattering pins that tick against the floorboards like seconds falling away. Her fingers uncurl from his collar to spread across his chest, feeling his heart match the frantic rhythm of her own.
When she parts her lips, inviting him deeper, he shudders. The kiss turns searching, questioning. A conversation in a language they’re inventing between them, syntax built from loneliness and recognition and the terrible relief of being truly seen.
Outside, the plague waits. The house holds its breath. But here, for this stolen moment, they are simply two people claiming something that belongs to no one but themselves.
When they finally separate, Tess’s legs threaten mutiny. She slides down to sit on the floor, the atlas forgotten beside her, its colonial borders suddenly meaningless. Lex drops to his knees before her, close enough that their breaths still mingle in the dust-moted air.
“I’ve done terrible things,” he says, and the rawness in his voice demands she understand. Not forgive. Understanding is more dangerous than absolution.
“So have I.” She thinks of the forged letters she’s sent in servants’ names, the small acts of sabotage, the violence she’s imagined in exquisite detail against those who’ve ground her family to nothing. “So will we both, before this ends.”
His laugh comes out broken, sharp-edged. “Revolutionary and criminal.” He shakes his head, something like wonder crossing his features. “Perhaps we’re not so different after all.”
“Perhaps we never were.” The words taste like confession. Like treason against every boundary she’s been taught to maintain. “Perhaps that’s what frightens me most.”
The admission hangs between them, more intimate than any kiss. The acknowledgment that they recognize in each other something the world has tried to beat out of them both.
He reaches for her hand, turns it palm-up, traces the calluses there with ink-stained fingers. The ridge at the base of her thumb from scrubbing, the roughness across her knuckles from lye soap. The intimacy of the gesture steals her breath more thoroughly than the kiss did. No one has ever touched her hands as though they mattered, as though they told a story worth reading.
“These hands,” he murmurs, his voice low and wondering. “Everything you’ve survived written here.”
She should pull away, rebuild her defenses before they crumble entirely. Instead she reaches up, trembling, and touches the scar along his jaw: a pale line against stubble. “Who hurt you?”
The question surprises them both. His eyes close, jaw tightening beneath her fingertips. “Someone who thought I’d stolen something I’d actually earned.” Bitterness edges each word. “Turns out the law doesn’t distinguish between theft and reclamation.”
The weight of their respective wounds settles between them. Not burden, but recognition. Two people carved by the same blade.
Tess forces herself to stand, smoothing her skirts with shaking hands. The atlas lies splayed open on the floor between them ” Her voice catches. She cannot name what they should do when every should has just been incinerated.
Lex rises slowly, putting careful distance between them, though the separation costs him. “The documents,” he says finally, retreating into purpose like armor.
“Yes.” She bends to retrieve the atlas. Their fingers brush again. The current hasn’t diminished at all.
They work side by side, the silence between them taut as piano wire. Each document passed becomes an exercise in restraint. Fingers carefully positioned to avoid contact, breath held when proximity becomes unavoidable. The library’s familiar geography has been remapped by desire; the space between desk and shelves now measures the distance between surrender and survival. Every rustle of paper echoes too loud. Every stolen glance burns.
The morning light through the library windows felt accusatory, exposing every dust mote, every imperfection. Tess attacked the bookshelves with her cloth as though the leather spines had personally offended her, working from the eastern wall with grim determination. She’d braided her hair so tightly her scalp ached. A small, sharp pain to anchor her.
Behind her, Lex’s pen scratched against paper. Cataloguing. Always cataloguing, as though this were truly why he’d come, as though his fingers hadn’t trembled against her jaw yesterday, as though he hadn’t whispered her name like a prayer or a curse.
She would not think about it.
The Shakespeare folios needed attention. She climbed the ladder, keeping her movements brisk, professional. A maid performing her duties. Nothing more.
“Tess.” His voice, low and careful. “About yesterday. She didn’t turn, didn’t pause in her work. The words came out clipped, final.”The plague makes people irrational. Proximity. Fear. Nothing more.”
The scratching of his pen stopped. In the silence, she heard him draw breath to respond, then release it unspoken. When the pen resumed, the strokes were harder, angrier.
Good, she thought savagely, scrubbing at a nonexistent mark on the binding before her. Better he understand now. Better this clean break than the slow poison of hope.
She descended the ladder, moved to the next section. Kept her eyes on the books, the familiar titles blurring together. Her throat felt tight.
Behind her, she heard him stand, heard his footsteps approach. Every muscle in her body tensed. But he only reached past her, carefully, so carefully, to retrieve a volume from the lower shelf. His sleeve brushed her skirt. The brief contact felt like a brand.
“Of course,” he said quietly, returning to his desk. “Quite right. Irrational.”
The word hung between them like smoke.
Her body, traitorous thing, refuses the discipline of her mind. Each time she reaches upward her awareness maps his position like magnetic north. There, at the desk. There, by the window. There, breathing the same stale air she breathes.
When he passes behind her to reach the philosophy section, the displacement of air against her neck might as well be his fingers. She grips the shelf edge until her knuckles pale.
The duster trembles in her hand. A fine tremor, but visible. His eyes track the movement; she feels his gaze like heat.
At midday, tucked between pages of Kropotkin (her dangerous prince of anarchists) she finds folded paper. His script, each letter formed with the precision of his craft: You’re right to protect yourself. I’m not worth the risk.
Relief should flood her. Instead, something fractures beneath her ribs, sharp and spreading.
She crushes the note, then smooths it flat again. Once. Twice. Three times she reads it before secreting it in her apron’s deepest pocket, pressed against her hip like a brand.
That evening, alone in her cold room, Tess spreads the note flat on her thin blanket and forces herself to examine the truth she’s been avoiding.
Criminal, yes: but so is she, with her stolen books and seditious pamphlets hidden behind the loose panel. He works for profit: yet he could have sold those colonial documents to any number of interested parties instead of showing them to her, voice breaking with genuine horror at the recorded atrocities.
Her brother died because men like Lord Ashford valued rubber profits over human lives. What separates her crimes from Lex’s except the accident of which laws they’ve chosen to break, which masters they’ve refused to serve?
She thinks of his ink-stained hands, capable of such precise deception. The scar along his jaw. The way he’d looked at her in that charged moment before their kiss. As though she were something both precious and terrifying, a flame he couldn’t help but reach toward despite the burn.
The next morning, she enters the library to find Lex methodically wrapping his tools in oilcloth, his movements precise and final. The sight strikes her like a blow.
“What are you doing?”
The question escapes before she can stop it, raw with something she refuses to name. He doesn’t turn around, doesn’t pause in his careful folding.
“Requesting to work in the study instead. Mrs. Brennan was right. We’re drawing attention.”
His voice is carefully neutral, the educated diction stripped of all warmth. But his shoulders are rigid with tension, the line of his back speaking what his words won’t. She can see the cost of this retreat in the white-knuckled grip on the leather case, the too-deliberate placement of each instrument.
Tess should feel relieved. She should let him go, rebuild the walls between servant and tradesman, between her principles and this dangerous wanting. Instead, she finds herself crossing the room, her footsteps loud in the book-hushed silence.
She places her hand over his, stilling his movements. His skin is warm, alive beneath her palm.
“I was afraid,” she says quietly, forcing the admission past the tightness in her throat. “I’m still afraid. But not of you.”
When he finally looks at her, his amber eyes are blazing with something between hope and anguish, all his careful guardedness burned away.
“You should be,” he whispers, and his voice breaks on the words. “I’ll ruin you.”
“Perhaps,” she agrees, and doesn’t let go. “Or perhaps we’ll ruin them instead.”
They don’t kiss again: not yet. But something fundamental shifts between them, like tectonic plates finding new alignment. They return to work, and now when their hands brush over opened volumes, neither flinches away. The contact becomes deliberate, necessary.
Tess asks him about the forgery that earned him Scotland Yard’s attention. He tells her about the factory owner whose ledgers he altered, exposing wage theft and unsafe conditions. The workers he tried to save, the magistrate who took bribes instead of testimony. Justice, he learned, bends toward money.
She tells him about her brother. About the machine that crushed him, the foreman who blamed his carelessness, the compensation her mother never received. About the rage that keeps her upright when deference tries to break her spine. About the revolution she dreams in her sleepless hours. Not distant and theoretical, but immediate, necessary, built from moments exactly like this one.
Their voices stay low, urgent, weaving confession and conviction into something stronger than either brought alone. When she finally rises to leave, his fingers catch hers briefly: not quite holding, not quite releasing. A promise. A question mark made flesh.
Tomorrow, they’ll face Mrs. Brennan’s suspicion and whatever consequences follow. Tonight, she returns to her narrow bed and tucks his hastily scrawled note (You’re not alone in this) beneath her pillow. For once, sleep comes easier.
The morning after Lord Ashford’s intrusion into the servants’ wing, Tess moved through her duties with mechanical precision. Her hands knew the work, polish, sweep, arrange, while her mind catalogued the fractures spreading through the household’s foundation.
She felt them watching. Not just Mrs. Brennan’s sharp-eyed surveillance, but the collective withdrawal of the other servants. When she entered the scullery, conversation died. When she reached for the tea caddy, hands pulled back as though her touch carried contagion worse than plague.
Only in the library did the air feel breathable, but even that sanctuary had been compromised. She dusted shelves she’d cleaned yesterday, hyperaware of the corridor beyond, of footsteps that might herald another accusation.
The afternoon light slanted through the curtained windows when she heard voices from the study, Lord Ashford’s clipped authority and Lex’s careful responses. She shouldn’t listen. She pressed closer to the hidden door anyway, cloth stilled in her hand.
“. Authorities have been most persistent in their inquiries.”
“I cannot account for what authorities do, my lord.” Lex’s voice carried no inflection, professionally neutral.
“No? Yet here you are, conveniently trapped by quarantine. Conveniently positioned near documents of considerable… sensitivity.”
Tess’s chest tightened. She imagined Lex’s face, that careful blankness he wore like armour.
“I catalogue books, Lord Ashford. Nothing more.”
“See that it remains so. And I trust you understand: fraternization with the staff reflects poorly on this household’s discipline. Mrs. Brennan has expressed concerns.”
A pause. Tess held her breath.
“I understand perfectly, my lord.”
“Good. You may go.”
Tess retreated before the study door opened, but not before she heard Ashford’s final words, soft and venomous: “One misstep, Mr. Thorne, and I’ll see you hang for whatever you’re really here to do.”
The study’s mahogany walls seemed to contract around Lex as Ashford circled the desk, predator assessing prey. The letter lay between them like evidence at trial: cream paper, official seal catching lamplight.
“A forger,” Ashford repeated, savouring the word. “Wanted in connection with fraudulent colonial contracts. Rather specific charges.”
Lex’s hands remained steady on his knees, though his mind raced through exit routes, alibis, the distance to the door. “I cannot speak to what criminals do, my lord.”
“No?” Ashford lifted the letter, angling it so Lex could see the Home Office crest. “Yet here you are. A tradesman with educated diction. A bookbinder who reads Latin.” He set the letter down with deliberate care. “I wonder what Scotland Yard would pay for information about a man matching your description.”
The threat hung crystalline in the air between them.
“I work with my hands, Lord Ashford. Nothing more.” The lie settled in Lex’s throat like ground glass.
Ashford’s smile was all teeth. “Then remember your place, Mr. Thorne. And stay away from my servants. They’re talking, and I won’t have disorder in my house.”
Tess scrubs the servants’ corridor with violence in every stroke, the brush bristling against stone until her knuckles ache. She’s jeopardized everything. The fragile trust of women who share her narrow beds and thin soup, her freedom to move through the house gathering evidence, her purpose. For what? A man whose very trade is deception, who’ll vanish like smoke when the gates finally open.
In the library, Lex’s hands move through their cataloguing with mechanical precision, but he sees nothing. No titles register. He’s survived a decade by needing no one, trusting nothing beyond his own skill. Now there’s a woman with defiant eyes and revolutionary fire who makes him want to be someone worth her principles. That wanting is more dangerous than any warrant.
The library settles into evening shadow. Tess’s cleaning basket sits forgotten by the door. Her excuse for being here, though they both know she’s finished the dusting. Lex traces the window frame with one finger, not looking at her.
“Mrs. Brennan asked if you’d been reading the books,” Tess says. “While you work.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That I can’t read.” The lie tastes bitter. “That I wouldn’t know.”
Now he does turn. His expression, something breaks across it, quickly shuttered. “Tess,”
“Don’t.” She grips her apron. “Don’t apologize. Don’t explain what this is.”
The clock ticks. Somewhere above, Lady Ashford’s bell rings, imperious. Neither moves.
“Four days,” he says finally. “There’s a boat.”
She nods once. Already knew. Already dying from it.
“Come with me.”
The words land like stones in still water. Tess closes her eyes.
“You know I can’t.”
“I know you won’t.” His voice roughens. “There’s a difference.”
“Is there?” She looks at him now, letting him see everything. The wanting, the refusal, the grief already settling into her bones. “You’re asking me to choose myself. I’ve never had that luxury.”
“Neither have I.” He takes one step toward her. Stops. “Until now.”
The space between them hums with impossible futures. Tess thinks of Mary’s fever, the pamphlets, her brother’s broken body carried home from the factory. All the people who never got to choose.
“They’re listening,” she whispers. “Always listening.”
Lex’s hand flexes at his side: wanting to reach, not reaching. “Then let them hear silence.”
They stand suspended, not touching, the three feet between them vast as oceans. In the corridor, the floorboard creaks its warning. Tess picks up her basket with steady hands.
“Four days,” she says. Not a question. Not an answer.
She leaves him standing in the gathering dark.
The silence stretches taut as wire. Tess’s finger hovers above the magistrate’s name, not quite touching. “Did you kill him?”
“Does it matter?” His voice carries no defense, no plea.
She looks up. Sees him watching her with that terrible stillness: waiting for her verdict, her revulsion. Instead she feels the weight of her own hidden crimes: the forged reference letter, the stolen silver she gave to striking workers.
“No,” she says finally. “It doesn’t.”
The letter’s paper is fine quality, expensive. The kind that speaks of serious money behind serious arrangements. Tess watches Lex’s fingers smooth its edges with the unconscious care of his trade. Four days. The words seem to pulse in the firelight.
She sets the clipping beside it deliberately, aligning the corners as though presentation matters. The younger face staring up from the newsprint still carries those sharp cheekbones, but the eyes are different, harder, hungrier. Wanted for questioning. The euphemism makes her mouth twist.
“You kept it,” Lex observes. Not quite accusation, not quite surprise.
“You kept that.” She nods toward the letter.
His hand stills on the paper. “Insurance. Proof the arrangement’s real.”
“Evidence,” she corrects. “Same as this.” Her fingertip hovers over the magistrate’s name again, not touching. The ink has faded to brown with age, but the words remain sharp: suspicious circumstances, substantial debts, witness testimony unreliable.
They might be scholars examining historical documents rather than the architecture of their own damnation. The library’s shadows press close, intimate as confession. Outside, someone coughs. The plague doesn’t care about their revelations.
Lex reaches across the desk. For a moment she thinks he’ll take the clipping, destroy it. Instead his fingers brush hers where they rest beside the evidence of his crimes. The touch carries its own voltage, different from desire. Complicity.
“We could burn them,” he says quietly. “Both. Pretend we never saw.”
But they’re not people who pretend, not anymore. Tess turns her hand palm-up, lets his fingers settle against hers. The letter and the clipping lie between them like a bridge built of broken rules and dangerous truths.
“No,” she says. “We look at what we are.”
The fire shifts. Neither moves to feed it.
“Tell me I’m wrong about you,” Tess says, and the words emerge harder than she intends. Not quite a question. Not quite a plea.
Lex’s laugh scrapes out, bitter as the carbolic that stains her hands. “You’re not.” He doesn’t look away, and she wishes he would. “I’ve sold information that got men killed. Forged documents that destroyed families. Wives left destitute, children sent to workhouses.” His fingers tighten on the desk’s edge. “I came here to bleed your employers dry and vanish like smoke.”
The firelight catches the scar along his jaw. She’s traced that line with her fingertips, tasted the history of violence it represents.
“Your turn,” he says quietly.
Her throat closes. Then: “I’ve stolen. Lied. Let others take blame for my thefts when it suited me.” The words taste like ash. “Those pamphlets could get everyone in the servants’ wing hanged, and I hid them there anyway. Used them as shields without asking.”
The truth sits between them like a third presence, ugly and undeniable. The owl calls again, closer now.
“So why haven’t you turned me in?” Lex asks, and the question emerges raw, stripped of his usual careful control.
Tess’s hands fist in her apron, the fabric bunching between whitened knuckles. “Why haven’t you taken what you came for and found a way out?”
The silence stretches taut as wire. Outside, an owl calls through the quarantine-stillness. She thinks of his fingers teaching her to read Latin declensions, his voice steady when Mary took fever and no one else would enter the room. He thinks of her fury at injustice (clean and uncomplicated as flame) her hands gentle with the dying, her absolute refusal to make herself small even when smallness meant survival.
“Because,” she finally says, the word barely audible, “you’re not just what you’ve done.”
He closes his eyes as though she’s struck him. “Neither are you.”
The admission costs them both everything.
“I don’t know how to be someone who stays,” Lex says, his voice fracturing on the admission. “I don’t know how to be someone who trusts,” Tess whispers back.
They’re standing now, the desk between them like a barrier they’ve forgotten how to maintain. The firelight catches the silver scar along his jaw, the exhaustion bruising her eyes.
“My brother died because men like your employers valued profit over safety,” she says, each word deliberate. “I learned to hate before I learned to read.”
He nods slowly. “I learned the world was a con before I learned it could be anything else. That mercy was weakness. That caring was the fastest way to lose.”
Past tense. They both hear it: the grammar of transformation, of selves already abandoned.
Lex reaches across the desk. Tess takes his hand. Their fingers interlock. Ink-stained and callused, forger and revolutionary, two people who’ve survived by being alone. “Four days,” he says, but the words catch in his throat. “Four days,” she echoes, and neither can say what those days should contain. They don’t speak of love. That word belongs to people with futures. But holding on, they acknowledge the impossible: they’ve become people who might choose each other over escape.
The silence stretches between them, weighted with everything they’ve become to each other. Lex’s thumb traces the ridge of her knuckles, a touch so gentle it undoes her more than any kiss.
“I watched a man hang once,” he says, his voice barely audible. “In Newgate. I’d forged the bill of sale that convicted him. A theft he never committed. I stood in the crowd and told myself it wasn’t my hand on the rope.” His eyes close. “But I pulled it tight as surely as the executioner. I took the money and I walked away and I never even learned his name.”
Tess feels the tremor run through him. Her free hand rises to cup his jaw, feeling the scar tissue beneath her fingertips.
“After my brother died,” she whispers, “they gave my mother a week to clear out of the cottage. Thirty years she’d worked in their kitchens.” The memory burns like acid. “I helped her pack. I curtsied to Lady Ashford and said ‘Yes, ma’am’ and ‘Thank you, ma’am’ while my mother wept.” Her throat constricts. “I could have spit in her face. Could have stolen enough silver to keep us fed for months. But I was so afraid, so desperately afraid, that I did nothing. Just helped carry the boxes down the road.”
Lex draws her hand to his lips, pressing them against her scarred palm. “We were children,” he says. “Trying to survive in a world designed to devour us.”
“We’re not children anymore.”
“No.” His gaze holds hers, unflinching. “We’re people who’ve done terrible things. Who’ve failed everyone, including ourselves.”
“And now?”
“Now we’re people who might fail differently.” His smile is crooked, painful. “Together. If we’re brave enough.”
The fire crackles. Outside, the quarantine flags snap in the wind. Inside, two people hold each other’s broken pieces and call it hope.
She turns to face him fully, her grey eyes searching his features in the firelight. The sharp cheekbones, the scar along his jaw, the ink stains that never quite fade from his fingers.
“You’ve made me weak,” she says, and the words emerge without the bitterness she expects. “I had one purpose. Expose them, burn it all down, die if necessary. It was clean. Simple.” Her hand tightens on his. “Now I want impossible things. Tomorrow. A future that isn’t just ash and martyrdom.”
Lex’s expression fractures with something like pain. “You’ve made me want to be someone I’ve never been.” He gestures toward the shelves surrounding them, volumes of justified atrocity and imperial certainty. “I could forge us both new identities by morning. We could disappear into London’s crowds, become anyone, anywhere.” His voice drops. “But you’ve made me want to stay. To fight for something that isn’t just my own survival.” He brings her scarred palm to his cheek. “You’ve made me want to deserve you. And I don’t know if that’s salvation or damnation.”
They sink into the chairs by the dying fire, bodies angled toward each other like conspirators. Tess’s voice emerges steady, analytical. The same tone she uses when calculating household accounts or rationing medicine. “If you stay, you risk the noose for forgery. For treason, if they discover what you carry.” Her fingers tighten around his. “If I come with you, I abandon Mary and Thomas and everyone I’ve spent months organizing. They’ll face the consequences alone.”
Lex traces slow circles on her palm with his thumb, the gesture both comfort and distraction. “If we expose the documents together (bring everything into the light) we might actually change something. Force accountability.” He pauses, amber eyes reflecting firelight. “But we’ll both be destroyed in the process. The family has lawyers, connections, the weight of empire behind them. They’ll crush us like insects.”
“If we take your contact’s offer and disappear into new names, new lives…” She trails off.
“We save ourselves,” he finishes quietly. “But leave the machinery grinding on. Other maids’ brothers will die in factories. Other colonies will burn.”
The fire pops in the silence, settling into ash. Neither equation balances. Every path requires them to surrender something essential. Each other, their principles, or their lives. There is no mathematics that allows them to remain whole.
Tess rises, drawing him up with her. At the window, she parts the heavy curtain. Outside, quarantine fires consume what remains of the dead, orange flames against September darkness. “Look at what surrounds us,” she says. “Plague. Power. People discarded like refuse.” She turns, grey eyes luminous. “We’re not storybook lovers. We’re two damaged souls who collided in catastrophe.” Lex cups her face, thumbs brushing tears. “Then let’s be damaged together. Whatever follows.” This kiss tastes of salt and choice. When they separate, both are weeping.
They work through the night, shoulders touching as they sort documents. When Tess’s hand trembles from exhaustion, Lex steadies it with his own. The gesture becomes a caress. She turns. Their mouths meet over scattered evidence of empire’s cruelties, desperate, searching, tasting of ink and rebellion. His fingers tangle in her loosened hair. She pulls him closer, claiming this moment of defiance. Outside, the quarantine fires burn. Inside, they choose each other, consequences be damned.
Tess stood in the servants’ corridor, her back pressed against the cold whitewashed wall, and felt the architecture of solidarity collapse around her. The silence was worse than shouting would have been: a silence thick with judgment, with the particular weight of working-class betrayal.
Cook’s knife struck the cutting board in sharp, accusatory rhythms. Each chop seemed to say: traitor, traitor, traitor. The woman who’d slipped Tess extra bread during lean months now arranged breakfast kippers with her broad back deliberately turned, her shoulders rigid with disappointment.
In the scullery, Annie’s whisper carried perfectly through the doorway. “Thought she was different. Thought she cared about us.” The girl’s voice cracked on the last word. Tess had taught her to read by candlelight, using the very pamphlets that now lay scattered across her narrow bed, moved from their hiding place. Examined. Judged. Found wanting.
The footman, Thomas, who’d risked his position to bring her The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists wrapped in butcher paper, now occupied himself with polishing silver that needed no polishing. His silence felt like a door closing.
She tried to catch Martha’s eye as the head housemaid passed with fresh linens. “Martha, please. Let me explain,”
“Save your words for him.” Martha’s voice was flat, drained of the warmth that had sustained Tess through her mother’s dismissal, her brother’s death. “You’ve made your choice clear enough. While we’re dying, while we’re organizing, you’re sneaking off to spread your legs for a man we know nothing about.” She paused at the linen closet, her hand on the doorframe. “We thought you were leading us toward something. Turns out you were just leading yourself toward a man.”
The words landed like blows. Tess tasted copper, realized she’d bitten her lip hard enough to bleed.
The kitchen garden wall stood in shadow, autumn-bare vines clinging to brick like skeletal fingers. Petrie drew on his cigarette, the ember flaring orange in the dark. A small, dangerous star.
“Papers are good for twelve hours,” he said, his voice carrying the flat vowels of London’s docks. “Coach leaves from the village crossroads at dawn. Your name’s on them, Thorne. Not hers.”
Lex felt the weight of the forged documents inside his coat, pressed against his ribs like a second heartbeat. Rotterdam. Freedom. Everything he’d survived three years of running to reach.
Petrie’s gaze shifted to the window where lamplight silhouetted Tess’s profile. “Girl’s pretty enough, I’ll grant you. But she’s a liability.” He spat into the dead roses. “Servants talk under questioning. They always do. She’ll hang you before Christmas.”
The documents seemed to grow heavier. Lex’s hands remembered other things: the surprising strength of Tess’s grip when they’d shaken on their alliance, ink-stained and binding. The revolutionary’s pact sealed in the library’s shadows, her grey eyes fierce with principle.
“Twelve hours,” Petrie repeated. “Choose wisely.”
The washing room door stood closed, but Tess heard everything through walls grown thin with her attention. Martha’s voice, steady and unforgiving: “She’s jeopardized us all for a man who’ll vanish the moment those gates open.”
Someone else (young Annie, perhaps) murmured dissent, quickly silenced.
“We’ve followed her because she understood what we are. What we must be together.” Martha again, relentless. “But she’s chosen him over us. Over everything we’ve risked.”
The floorboards creaked. Footsteps approached. Tess straightened against the corridor wall, forcing her spine rigid, her face blank. The old servant’s mask she’d thought she’d abandoned.
Martha emerged, eyes red-rimmed but resolute. Behind her, pale faces watched from the doorway like a tribunal.
“Send him away,” Martha said. “Tonight. Or you’re no longer one of us.”
He found her where she’d known he would. Among the books that had first made them conspirators. The fire had burned to embers. Tess stood with her back to the door, hands pressed flat against the desk’s surface as though holding herself upright through will alone.
“I heard what they demanded.” His voice came soft from the shadows. “They’re not wrong to distrust me. I’ve earned that.”
She didn’t turn. Couldn’t bear to see his face just yet.
The whisper of paper on wood: he’d placed something on the desk beside her rigid fingers. The travel documents, she knew without looking. One passage out. One life purchased.
“But there’s another option.” Closer now. She felt the warmth of him at her shoulder, careful not to touch. “Petrie can get documents out of England even if we can’t leave. We give him everything. My colonial evidence, your pamphlets, the proof of what’s happening here. It reaches London papers, radical presses, people who’ll actually use it.”
Tess finally turned. His amber eyes held steady, unflinching.
“We stay,” Lex said. “We face what comes. But the truth escapes, even if we don’t.”
The bell’s shrill summons cut through the servants’ wing like a blade. Tess’s heart lurched. Never.
They assembled in the main hall, a ragged line of exhaustion and fever-bright eyes. His lordship stood before the cold fireplace, Lady Ashford a pale ghost at his elbow. The adult children flanked them like sentries.
“The quarantine ends in four days.” His voice cracked with something, fear, perhaps, or rage. “Health investigators will come. Questions about the plague’s source, about our… business arrangements overseas.”
His gaze swept them, lingering on Tess. She felt Martha stiffen beside her.
“Tomorrow I burn certain correspondence. Sensitive materials that might be… misinterpreted.” A pause, heavy with calculation. “Your continued employment depends on discretion. Cooperation brings rewards. But disloyalty,”
He left the threat unfinished. Unnecessary.
Every servant’s attention turned to Tess like compass needles finding north. Waiting. Watching to see what their would-be revolutionary would do when principle met survival.
The words hung between them like smoke. Tess’s throat constricted, her vision narrowing to those trembling papers: escape rendered in careful forgery, freedom written in another man’s hand.
“Don’t.” Her voice emerged raw. “Don’t make this about winning.”
Behind them, the library stretched into shadow. How many hours had they spent here, heads bent together over stolen documents, his breath warm against her temple as he translated Latin atrocities into English? She’d thought herself immune to sentiment, had believed her rage pure enough to burn away softer feelings.
She’d been catastrophically wrong.
“What would you call it, then?” Lex’s amber eyes caught the firelight. That scar along his jaw seemed deeper in the half-dark, a reminder that he’d survived worse than this. “Martha’s watching from the servants’ stairs. I can feel her contempt from here.”
Tess glanced toward the corridor. Martha’s silhouette was just visible, arms crossed, waiting for confirmation of every suspicion. Behind her, the others. Their faces blurred by distance but their judgment sharp as glass.
“She called me a whore.” The word tasted of ash. “Not because I’ve bedded you. Because I’ve complicated their narrative.” Her hands clenched. “They need me to be Joan of Arc, not,”
“Not a woman who wants something for herself?”
The gentleness in his voice nearly broke her. She forced herself to look at the study window, where Lord Ashford’s shadow continued its methodical destruction of evidence. How many deaths documented in those papers? How many mutilated hands, fever-wracked villages, children orphaned by imperial efficiency?
“If those documents burn,” she said slowly, “there’s no proof. No justice. Just more silence, more bodies buried in colonial soil while England pretends its hands are clean.”
“And if we die trying to save them?” Lex stepped closer. “What justice then?”
Tess’s fingers traced the false name on the papers. Elizabeth Thorne. A bitter irony. She’d take his surname in forgery but never in fact. The ink was still faintly warm from his pocket.
“You’re good at this,” she said. “The handwriting’s perfect. Even the watermark.”
“I’ve had practice running.”
She looked up sharply. His face was unreadable, but something in his stillness told her this was confession. How many names had he worn? How many times had he chosen survival over witness?
“I can’t be you,” she said, not unkindly. “I’ve spent my whole life being told I don’t matter. That girls like me are replaceable, disposable. That our deaths are just… the cost of empire running smoothly.” Her voice hardened. “If I run now, I prove them right.”
“If you stay, you prove nothing. You’ll just be dead.”
“Maybe.” She folded the papers carefully, creased them along the false official seal. “But Martha and the others will see someone chose to stay. Chose them over escape.” She met his eyes. “That matters. Even if we lose.”
The papers felt heavier than they should. Tess smoothed them against her apron, watching firelight from the library grate catch the forged seal. Her mother’s voice, fever-weak in that last winter: Promise me you’ll get out. Promise me it won’t all be for nothing.
“I can forge a second set,” Lex said quietly. “For you. After.”
“There won’t be an after. Not for me.” The certainty settled in her chest, cold and clarifying. “But there could be for the truth.” She looked at the shelves surrounding them. Leather spines stamped with gold, knowledge hoarded and weaponized. “Those documents prove what empire actually costs. Not in pounds sterling. In bodies. In villages burned. In children worked to death on rubber plantations so ladies can have motor car tires.”
Tess crossed to him, close enough to see the ink stains on his collar, the exhaustion carved beneath his eyes. “I’m not asking you to let me do anything. I’m asking you to trust that I know what I’m choosing.” Her voice dropped. “You’ve been alone so long you’ve forgotten what it means when someone stands with you. Not for you. With you.” She pressed the forged papers into his hands. “So stand with me now. Take the truth out.”
Lex’s hand closes over the document, crumpling it. “You think I don’t understand?” His voice is raw. “I’ve spent a decade watching powerful men erase their crimes. I know exactly what you’re refusing.” He crosses to the desk where his forgery tools lie scattered. The instruments of his survival, his damnation. “But staying means we both burn with those papers. Is that your justice? Two more bodies for a cause that won’t remember our names?”
Lex’s jaw tightens at her words, a muscle jumping beneath the scar. “You think principle keeps you warm when you’re dead?” He pulls a folded document from his coat: the escape papers, already prepared with her name in his careful script. The ink is fresh enough that she can smell it, acrid and promising. “I’ve killed men for less valuable forgeries than this. Do you know what it costs me to offer it?”
His voice fractures on the last word, and Tess sees the calculation behind his eyes. The years of survival, the careful weighing of every risk. This is a man who has made himself into an equation, balancing profit against danger, always solving for his own preservation. Until now.
She stares at the paper, seeing her freedom written in another man’s hand. The letters are perfect, each stroke a small act of criminal artistry. She could be anyone with this document. Could walk past the guards, board a train, disappear into London’s anonymous crowds. The life she’s imagined in her angriest moments, reading stolen pamphlets by candlelight. It’s here, tangible as the parchment between them.
“And the documents proving the plantation murders?” Her voice is steadier than her hands. “Lord Ashford’s orders to ship contaminated rubber despite the warnings? The letters about workers dying by the dozen?”
Lex’s silence is answer enough. She watches him look away, toward the window where autumn darkness presses against glass. He’s already made his calculations, already knows what survival costs.
“You’re asking me to choose my life over justice for hundreds.” The words taste like ash. She thinks of her brother, crushed between factory machinery while the owner paid his fine and reopened the next week. Her mother, dismissed without pension, dying of cold in a tenement room. Every servant in this house who’s died unnamed, unmourned except by their own kind.
She pushes the paper back toward him. “I can’t. I won’t.”
“Then we’re both fools,” Lex says, but he doesn’t move toward the door. Instead he crosses to the desk where his bookbinding tools lie scattered. Awls and bone folders catching lamplight like surgical instruments. His hands, steady now with purpose, begin sorting through papers: the real documents, his forgeries, his notes on plague transmission written in three different ciphers.
“If we’re staying, we do it properly.” His voice has changed, taken on the crisp efficiency of a man committing to a dangerous plan. “I can create duplicates, hide originals in three locations. The binding shop, the conservatory pipes, behind the loose brick in the cellar.” He’s already calculating, fingers moving through possibilities. “But Tess,”
He looks up, and she sees fear naked in his face, stripped of all the careful masks he wears. The amber eyes are wide, almost pleading.
“This isn’t romantic rebellion. If we fail, they’ll hang me and disappear you into some asylum or workhouse. No trial. No mercy. No record you ever existed.”
She thinks of every servant who died nameless, every worker crushed in colonial machinery, her brother’s body returned in pieces.
“Then we don’t fail.”
They move as one organism through the hidden door, no longer maid and criminal but something forged new in conspiracy’s heat. Tess’s heart hammers against her ribs as they step into firelight, into Lord Ashford’s startled recognition.
“What” His hand moves toward the bell-pull.
“I wouldn’t,” Lex says, his voice carrying an authority that makes the nobleman freeze. “We’ve already copied everything. Three sets. Hidden where you’ll never find them.”
Tess steps forward, feeling centuries of deference crack and fall away like dead skin. “And if anything happens to us, they go to the newspapers. Every plantation death. Every covered-up atrocity.”
Lord Ashford’s face purples with rage and something else. “You’re a servant,” he spits.
“Not anymore,” Tess says.
Through the crack they watch him kneel before the safe, his hands trembling with purpose. Document after document emerges: evidence of rubber quotas enforced by mutilation, of villages burned, of deaths recorded then erased. Lord Ashford’s jaw is set, righteous in his determination to erase history.
Lex’s fingers tighten around hers in the darkness. “We could slip away now. Let it burn. Save ourselves.”
The first page catches flame. Someone’s testimony, someone’s truth, blackening to nothing.
“No.” The word comes from somewhere deeper than fear. “We stop this.”
Lex’s voice cuts through the study’s smoke-thick air, shedding its careful working-class cadence. “My lord, I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
Lord Ashford whirls, papers pressed against his waistcoat. His eyes narrow at the bookbinder’s presumption, then widen as Tess steps from shadow into firelight behind Lex.
“Good God.” The lord’s face cycles through comprehension, the hours unaccounted for, the servant grown bold. “You’ve been,” He cannot finish, disgust choking the words.
The silence stretches taut as wire. Tess feels the fracture opening beneath her feet. Not the clean break between upstairs and downstairs she’s always known, but something more treacherous: a chasm within her own world.
“Meeting?” Lady Ashford’s voice climbs toward hysteria. “Meeting?” She turns to her husband, seeking confirmation of something too sordid to name directly. “In our library? Under our roof?”
Edmund’s hand has not lowered, though it trembles now with something beyond mere anger. “How long?” he demands. “How many times did you,” He stops, propriety warring with prurient curiosity.
Tess forces herself to meet his gaze. “We were working, sir. On documents. The word drips with insinuation. Mrs. Hartwell’s wounded sound becomes a sharp intake of breath. The housekeeper has gone grey, one hand pressed to her chest as though Tess has struck her physically.
“All those evenings,” Mrs. Hartwell whispers. “When you volunteered to clean the library. When you said you’d bank the fires.” Her voice hardens. “I trusted you, girl. I vouched for you when her ladyship complained about your manner.”
Tess feels each word like a stone. Behind the family, she can see the other servants: Martha’s face closed and furious; Sarah’s tears; the footmen’s careful blankness. But there: old William’s eyes flick from her to the papers Lord Ashford still clutches, then back. And young Tom, the hall boy, watches Lex with something that might be fascination rather than horror.
“Intimate association,” Lord Ashford pronounces, “between a servant and a tradesman. In my house. During quarantine.” He makes it sound like compound sins. “Sneaking about like animals. Corrupting the moral atmosphere.”
Lex shifts slightly, and Tess feels the warmth of his shoulder near hers. Not touching but close enough that the gesture reads clearly to every watching eye.
Martha’s accusation lands like a slap. Tess watches her friend step forward with betrayal written across her features.
“You think this is about him?” Tess keeps her voice level though her throat burns. “This is about proof. Evidence of what they’ve done,”
“Evidence that’ll see us all dismissed without references!” Martha’s hands twist in her apron. “Or worse, if they decide we knew. We’re expendable, Tess. We’ve always been expendable. And you’ve just made us accomplices to whatever sedition you’ve been plotting.”
Sarah’s sobs punctuate the words. The younger maid had looked up to Tess, had asked her to teach her letters. Now she weeps into her hands while Mrs. Hartwell’s arm encircles her shoulders. A pointed gesture of protection from contamination.
But the footmen remain motionless. And William’s weathered face holds something Tess recognizes: the same careful weighing she’s seen in the mirror. Not everyone has chosen their side yet.
The room holds its breath, waiting.
Lex’s hand moves to his jacket pocket where the forged travel papers wait: his escape route, purchased with blackmail money, valid for one person. He could still salvage this. The weight of the documents feels suddenly obscene against his ribs. Grab what remains unburned, slip through the servants’ passage during this chaos, disappear into London’s networks as he’s done before. Every instinct honed by years of survival screams at him to move.
Lord Ashford sees the gesture, reads it correctly, and laughs: a bitter, knowing sound. “The criminal has an exit planned, I’m certain. Will you take your servant whore with you, or leave her to hang for sedition?”
The crude words make Lex’s jaw tighten. He looks at Tess, her spine straight, her grey eyes blazing, her absolute refusal to bow even now, and feels something shift in his chest. Dangerous. Irrevocable.
The papers seem to burn in his pocket.
Through the study doorway, smoke coils thick and acrid. Lord Ashford lunges again, but Lex catches his arm, fingers digging into expensive wool. “Those papers prove you knowingly imported plague-contaminated rubber from Singapore. Falsified health certificates. Workers died by the hundreds while you reported ‘acceptable losses’ to shareholders.”
The lord’s face contorts, veins standing out against flushed skin. “Colonial business is not your concern! The empire requires sacrifice,”
“Murder.” Tess’s voice cuts clean through his bluster. “You mean murder, my lord. And you brought it home to us.”
Lady Ashford’s shriek pierces the room: “Someone ring for the guards! The quarantine patrol: tell them we have agitators!”
The guards’ boots thunder closer: ten seconds, perhaps less. Lex’s fingers tighten on hers, and in that pressure she feels everything: the forger’s calculated survival instinct warring with something newer, more dangerous. His amber eyes search her face as if memorizing it. “Then we burn together or not at all,” he says, and pulls her not toward escape, but back toward the smoke-filled study where empire’s sins wait to be saved or lost forever.
The moment fractures into violence with the sound of splitting wood, Lord Ashford’s roar of “GUARDS! SEDITION!” still echoing as his body crashes against the corridor wall. Lex’s shoulder had caught him square in the chest, and the older man’s breath leaves him in a wheeze of outrage and shock. Tess doesn’t look back. Her boots pound against floorboards as she bolts for the study door, the smoke already visible beneath it, curling like grey fingers reaching for escape.
Behind her, the household erupts into chaos. Servants scatter in opposite directions. Some toward the safety of their quarters, others frozen in the corridor’s narrow confines. She hears Mrs. Hewitt’s voice crack with betrayal: “What have you done to us?” and Martha’s sharper cry of warning, but the words blur into noise. Her focus narrows to the brass door handle, tarnished and warm under her palm as she wrenches it down.
The door swings inward and smoke billows out, acrid with burning paper and leather bindings. Her eyes water instantly. Through the grey haze she sees the fireplace blazing with deliberate destruction. The ledgers. The correspondence. Everything they’d risked exposure to find.
“No,” The word tears from her throat as she lunges forward, but Lex is already past her, moving with the fluid urgency of a man who’s fled burning buildings before. His hands fly across the shelves, pulling down volumes and folders, assessing weight and value in split-second calculations.
Tess doesn’t think. She plunges her arm directly into the fireplace, fingers closing around half-consumed pages. The heat sears through her sleeve. She yanks back, clutching singed correspondence as flames lick up the fabric of her uniform. Pain registers distantly, secondary to the words she can still read through char and ember.
Lex’s hand strikes her shoulder, once, twice, smothering flames with brutal efficiency. She doesn’t register the pain. Only the ledger he thrusts into her arms, leather binding still warm. “Pockets,” he snaps, already turning back to the shelves, his movements precise despite the smoke thickening around them.
Her fingers work automatically, cramming correspondence into the hidden seams of her uniform. Pages crackle, edges still glowing. The modified pockets bulge obscenely. Through the window, she catches movement. Lantern light bobbing across the lawn, multiple points converging on the house.
“They’ve called the guards.” Her voice sounds distant to her own ears.
Lex doesn’t pause, stuffing folded documents inside his shirt, against his ribs. “Dangerous radicals breaching containment,” he mutters, bitter. “Creative.”
She reaches for another ledger but he catches her wrist. “Enough. We have to move.”
The smoke has grown dense enough to taste, coating her throat. Behind them, Lord Ashford’s voice rises in the corridor, hoarse with rage and authority, directing the hunt. Lex’s hand finds the small of her back, propelling her toward the servants’ passage. They run.
The silence stretches. Martha’s jaw works, fury and fear warring across her weathered face. Behind her, young Annie clutches the doorframe, knuckles white. These people didn’t read forbidden pamphlets by candlelight, didn’t teach themselves about empire’s machinery of violence. They simply survived, day by day, in the only way the world permitted.
Tess feels the weight of the ledgers against her ribs, still warm through the fabric. Evidence of atrocities that could topple fortunes, end careers. Or disappear forever into convenient flames.
“We send it out,” she says, voice steadier than her hands. “Every page. To newspapers, solicitors, anyone who’ll listen.” She meets Martha’s glare. “And we stay. We testify to what we’ve seen.”
Lex’s sharp intake of breath cuts the air. The escape papers crackle in his grip.
The ledgers seem to pulse against her chest. Plantation death counts rendered in neat columns, falsified reports signed with flourishes, orders for “disciplinary measures” that meant machetes and mass graves. Around her: Martha’s lined face, Annie’s youth, people who’ve scrubbed floors for decades, who have children waiting in the village, who could swing for harboring seditionists.
Lex’s whisper cuts through. “They’ll come for all of us now.”
Her brother’s broken body. Every silent injustice these pages could finally scream.
“No.” The word drops like a stone into water. Tess’s voice steadies as eight pairs of eyes fix on her. “We send everything out. Every page. And we stay to testify.”
Martha’s sharp intake of breath. Annie’s whispered protest. But Tess is already moving to the table, spreading documents with hands that no longer shake.
Lex watches the escape route dissolve. Watches her choose witness over flight. Something breaks open behind his amber eyes: not defeat, but recognition.
He sits. Pulls out his forger’s tools. Not for false papers now, but for truth that will hang them both.
“Then we do it right,” he says quietly. “Together.”
The library has become a scriptorium of damnation. Four candles burn low in their holders, wax pooling like accusations. Tess’s third page fills with careful letters that indict not just Lord Ashford but the entire apparatus that made his fortune possible: the shipping companies that asked no questions, the banks that financed expansion, the government offices that approved contracts while men died thousands of miles from parliamentary oversight.
Her penmanship wavers only once: when she writes her brother’s name. Thomas Barlow, aged sixteen, crushed in machinery while processing rubber shipped from estates identical to Ashford’s holdings. She’d never connected those dots before. Never let herself see the line that ran from this very house to that factory floor.
Across the table, Lex works with the peculiar intensity of a man performing his final masterpiece. Three different administrative hands, each perfect, each damning. He’s replicating correspondence between Lord Ashford and colonial overseers, matching not just the handwriting but the paper stock, the ink oxidation, the fold patterns. Making forgery indistinguishable from original sin.
“They’ll hang you for this,” Tess says. Not a question.
“They’d hang me anyway.” His amber eyes don’t leave the page. “At least this means something.”
The ink on his fingers is the same shade as the bruises under his eyes. He’s been awake thirty hours, maybe more, and still his hand moves with surgical precision. Each stroke of the pen is an act of translation. Taking his criminal expertise and bending it toward something he’d spent a lifetime avoiding.
Testimony. Accountability. Truth.
“I never thought I’d die for anyone’s principles,” he says quietly. “Certainly not my own.”
Tess reaches across the documents between them. Their ink-stained fingers touch, hold.
“We’re not dying,” she says. “We’re choosing what we live for.”
Martha’s fingers trace the edge of the testimony pages, her chapped hands reverent as if touching something sacred. “They’ll know we helped. All of us who remain.”
“Yes.” Tess doesn’t soften it. The cost must be named clearly.
“Good.” Martha’s jaw sets with the same defiance Tess has felt building in her own chest for months. “Let them know. My sister.”She’s fourteen. Works the looms at Pendleton Mill, breathing cotton dust twelve hours daily. No windows, no water breaks. The overlooker…” She doesn’t finish, doesn’t need to.
Lex looks up from his careful forgery, seeing Martha truly for the first time. Not servant, not obstacle. Comrade.
“The morning post leaves from the village at half-six,” Martha continues, her voice steadying. “Before the family wakes. I can reach the gap in the patrol at quarter past.” She meets Lex’s eyes. “You’ll need three copies. Different papers, different routes.”
He nods slowly, understanding shifting behind his amber gaze. Not escape. Distribution. Not survival. Witness.
“Then we’d best work quickly,” he says, reaching for fresh paper.
Lex’s hands remain steady as he pens the cover letter, though each word dismantles a decade of careful self-preservation. He writes in his own hand and the nakedness of it feels like stepping from shadow into harsh light. To the Editors of The Manchester Guardian, The Daily News, and Reynolds’s Newspaper, he begins, and what follows is both indictment and confession: the documents he stole, the forgeries he created, the blackmail he intended. Then the evidence itself, methodically catalogued.
Tess reads over his shoulder, her fingers tightening on his arm. “Your name,”
“Needs to be there.” He doesn’t look up. “Anonymous accusations are dismissed. This requires a body they can hang.”
He signs: Alexander James Thorne, also known as…: and lists every alias, every city, every warrant. The wax seal bears his father’s crest, never before used honestly.
The household divides along fault lines of courage and fear. Cook arrives first, jaw set, carrying a ledger of falsified accounts. The footman follows with letters proving blackmail of village families. By the scullery maid’s testimony, her sister dead in a rubber camp, the conspiracy has weight enough to crush them all.
Upstairs, Lord Ashford bellows about the study fire. Below, Tess marshals testimonies like ammunition, and Lex recognizes his transformation: from solitary survivor to willing soldier in her impossible war.
The servants’ hall holds its breath. Tess’s fingers tighten around Lex’s. Both their hands trembling now, ink-stained and calloused together. Through the window, the guard turns his back. Martha’s hand hovers at the latch.
“Once we do this,” Lex begins.
“I know,” Tess whispers. “No going back.”
The packet weighs nothing. Everything.
They step toward the door as one body, one choice, still unmade but inevitable as dawn.
The forged papers are still warm from his hands when Lex holds them up to the firelight. Perfect work: the seal alone took him twenty minutes, each impression of the Health Ministry’s stamp calibrated to match the wear pattern of documents he’d studied weeks ago. The signatures flow with the exact pressure and hesitation of men signing dozens of forms in succession. Inspector credentials that would see them through the quarantine cordon, onto a train, into London’s anonymous crowds.
Gone by morning. Safe by nightfall.
Tess stands three feet away, but the distance feels continental. She’s looking past him to where the servants cluster in the doorway, Martha with her bandaged hands, Cook leaning heavily on young Thomas, Mrs. Hewitt clutching the oilcloth packet of documents as though it might evaporate. Their faces catch the orange glow from the study, where flames are eating through decades of carefully maintained lies.
“I’ve run my whole life,” Lex hears himself say. The words taste foreign, like confession in a language he’s only read, never spoken. “Every time, I survived. Every time, nothing changed.”
He looks down at the papers again. Two lives purchased with ink and nerve. The escape he’s been calculating since the quarantine bells first rang.
“If we disappear, the documents are just stolen goods,” he continues, and his voice has gone strange, steady in a way that has nothing to do with control and everything to do with surrender. “If we stay,”
“We’re witnesses,” Tess finishes.
The word settles between them with the weight of an anchor. Not the thing that drags you down, but the thing that holds you fast when every current screams to run. Her grey eyes meet his, and he sees she’s already made this choice. Has perhaps been making it all along.
Now she’s waiting to see if he will too.
The papers catch quickly, their edges browning before bursting into bright consumption. Lex feeds each piece to the flames with steady fingers, watching months of careful preparation become ash. The Health Ministry seal, twenty minutes of exacting work, blackens and curls. The signatures he’d practiced until his hand cramped dissolve into carbon.
Each scrap represents a different future: the Dover crossing, the Paris boarding house, the new name waiting in a forger’s shop in Marseille. All of it burning.
“You’re sure?” Tess asks, and the question carries no judgment, only witness.
He laughs, the sound scraping out of him like something broken loose. “No. But I’m staying.”
Behind them, Martha’s sharp intake of breath. She understands what he’s just destroyed. Understands it better than Tess, perhaps, because Martha knows what men like him value most. Not love. Not principle. But options. Escape routes. The ability to vanish when the walls close in.
The criminal who trusts no one has just burned his last bridge for a cause he doesn’t fully believe in and a woman who makes him want to.
The room reorganizes itself around her certainty. Martha straightens, wiping her hands on her apron as though preparing for testimony rather than flight. Cook’s jaw sets with the stubbornness of someone who’s endured forty years of orders and has finally found one worth following.
“I kept the shipping manifests,” Martha says. “Hidden them when I was meant to burn them.”
Tess’s eyes flash to Lex, and he feels the weight of it. Not just her trust, but her expectation that he’ll rise to this. That his criminal expertise can serve something beyond his own survival.
“We’ll need multiple copies,” he says, the forger’s precision steadying him. “Different routes to London. Insurance against interception.”
His hands have stopped shaking entirely now.
Through the window, whistles pierce the smoke. Guards converging, the perimeter contracting. Lex’s mind calculates with criminal precision: each hour compounds his risk. He’s wanted in three counties. Staying means facing those nooses too.
Tess watches the arithmetic play across his features. “You can still go,” she says, though her fingers tighten around his. “I won’t blame you.”
But he’s already turning back toward the others, toward consequence.
“No,” he says, and the terror in it sounds remarkably like freedom. “I really can’t.”
The packet lies between them like a bridge. His fingers hover over it, trembling. Not from fear of the noose, though that’s real enough. From the staggering unfamiliarity of choosing something beyond his own skin.
“We,” he says, testing the word. Foreign. Dangerous. True.
Tess’s hand covers his. “We.”
The torn papers flutter from his fingers to the desk. Lex watches them fall: two halves of his careful forgery, the seal he’d spent three hours perfecting now bisected, meaningless. His throat constricts. Every lesson he’s learned in twelve years of survival shrieks that this is madness, that principles are luxuries purchased with other people’s lives, that he’ll hang for this choice.
But Tess is already moving past sentiment into action. She crosses to the loose floorboard where he’s hidden the oilcloth packet, kneeling with the practiced efficiency of someone who’s spent her life making herself useful. When she draws out the documents (proof of colonial atrocities, of plague-contaminated rubber shipped home for profit, of deaths both here and overseas) her hands don’t shake.
“We’ll need at least six copies,” she says, and her voice has shifted into something crystalline, strategic. “Different routes, different recipients, so they can’t suppress them all. The Manchester Guardian, certainly. The Labour papers. That journalist in London you mentioned. The one who exposed the Congo atrocities.”
He stares at her. This isn’t desperation speaking. This is someone who’s been preparing for revolution her entire life, who’s read theory by candlelight and memorized the names of sympathetic editors and understood, in ways his cynicism never allowed, that witness could be a form of warfare.
“You’ve thought about this,” he says slowly. “How to distribute seditious material. How to ensure it reaches the right hands.”
“I’ve thought about little else for three years.” She looks up at him, grey eyes fierce. “I just never had anything worth dying for. Not until now.”
The packet lies between them. Not just evidence. A manifesto. A declaration. A point of no return.
He’s spent a decade running from exactly this kind of commitment.
His knees bend. He kneels beside her on the dusty library floor.
“I need to know you’re certain,” Tess says, and her voice doesn’t waver though her hands have stilled on the oilcloth. She turns to face him fully, and in the firelight he can see the cost of this moment written in the tension of her jaw. “Once we start this, there’s no halfway. No pretending we were coerced or ignorant. They’ll come for both of us with everything the law allows.”
The library seems to contract around them, intimate and suffocating at once.
Lex thinks of every border he’s crossed with false papers and borrowed names. Every identity he’s shed like a snake’s skin. Every person he’s left behind without a backward glance. This should feel like a trap closing. The walls narrowing. The noose tightening.
Instead, it feels like the first honest thing he’s done in a decade. Like setting down a weight he’s carried so long he’d forgotten it wasn’t part of his bones.
“I’ve been certain of very little in my life,” he tells her, and his voice comes out rougher than intended. “But I’m certain of this.”
The air between them shifts, charged with something more binding than any forged document.
The servants’ wing has never held such dangerous cargo. Tess watches Lex arrange the stolen documents with a forger’s precision, creating an assembly line on the table where she’s eaten a thousand silent meals. The intimacy of it strikes her: this man who belongs to no world now anchored in hers, teaching her the criminal’s craft as though it were embroidery.
“The pressure matters more than the speed,” he murmurs, demonstrating the angle of the nib. His shoulder brushes hers, and neither moves away.
Martha appears with more lamp oil, her grief temporarily displaced by purpose. “How many copies?”
“Enough that they can’t suppress them all,” Tess says.
Lex meets her eyes across the documents that could hang them both. “Enough to matter.”
Lex’s workshop transforms the servants’ table into something seditious. His hands move with practiced efficiency, blotting, folding, sealing, while Tess learns the forger’s economy of motion. When he corrects her grip on the pen, his fingers linger. Around them, the household staff becomes conspirators: Martha mixing ink, William timing patrol routes, Mrs. Davies providing alibi and sustenance. For the first time in his calculating life, Lex feels the dangerous pull of belonging. And doesn’t flee from it.
Three hours before dawn, ink-stained and exhausted, they sit alone by embers. The others have gone to prepare for what morning brings.
“I’d mapped passage to Rotterdam,” Lex says. “New name. Clean start.”
“I’d have watched this house burn.” Tess’s voice is steady. “Didn’t care if I burned too.”
The silence holds two people who lived as if expendable. When her fingers find his, it isn’t desire: not yet. It’s recognition: they’ve chosen witness over escape, accountability over survival. Together.
The fourth copy is where Tess’s hand cramps, ink smudging beneath her smallest finger. Lex reaches across without asking, takes her wrist, and works his thumbs into the tight muscles of her palm. The gesture is practical (they need her able to write) but neither acknowledges the way her breath catches, or how his fingers linger against her pulse point.
“You’ve beautiful handwriting,” he says quietly. “When did you learn?”
“Taught myself from the master’s discarded correspondence.” She doesn’t pull away. “Practiced on the backs of his bills and invoices. Seemed fitting, somehow. Using his waste to educate his property.”
His mouth quirks. Not quite a smile, but close. “I learned in prison. A forger named Michaels took pity on a stupid boy who’d been caught with amateur work. Said if I was going to hang eventually, I might as well hang for art.”
The confession sits between them like an offering. Tess turns her hand in his, so their palms meet. His skin is warm, marked with old chemical burns and the permanent stain of ink that no soap can lift. Her own hands are rough from lye and labor, nails broken short.
“We’re quite a pair,” she murmurs. “The thief and the revolutionary.”
“The forger and the firebrand.” His thumb traces the callus at the base of her thumb. “Though I think those might be the same thing, in the end.”
When they return to the documents, something has shifted in the quality of their proximity. Their shoulders press together as they work. When he reaches for the seal, his arm brackets hers. When she leans forward to check a signature, her hair brushes his jaw and neither moves away.
Martha, returning with more tea, takes one look and retreats silently, a knowing smile playing at her lips.
“My real name is Alexander Thornbury,” he says suddenly, between the second and third copy. His voice is stripped of its usual careful modulation. “My father was a clerk who drank himself to death after my mother died in childbirth with my sister. She died too. Three days later. I was seven.”
Tess’s hand stills on the page, ink pooling where her nib rests too long. She’s never heard him speak without calculation before, without the performance of whichever man he’s chosen to be that day.
“My brother was James,” she offers back, matching his raw honesty with her own. “He was sixteen when the machine took his arm at the mill. Bled out on the factory floor while the foreman argued about who’d pay for the doctor. They docked my mother’s wages for the blood he got on the cotton.”
They don’t touch, but the space between them hums with recognition: two people who’ve spent years armoring themselves against a world that ground their families into dust. They’re giving each other something more valuable than strategy now: the truth of who they were before survival made them into weapons, before grief taught them to trust nothing but their own cunning.
Their hands collide above the crimson wax, fingers tangling in the small space between intention and contact. The shock of it, skin against skin, deliberate and unguarded, stops Tess’s breath. She should pull away. Every rule of her existence demands it.
She doesn’t.
“I’m not going to leave,” Lex says, and his voice has shed every layer of performance. This is the truth beneath the forgeries.
“I know.” Her fingers tighten around his. “I wouldn’t let you.”
The words reshape everything: the plan, the risk, the careful distance they’ve maintained. Thomas coughs from his corner, pointed and amused. “If you two are finished, we’ve eight more packets before dawn.”
But Lex’s palm burns against hers like a vow neither intended, neither can recant.
Martha’s voice cuts through the scratch of quills and rustle of paper. “You love her.” Not a question. A statement flat as the floorboards beneath them.
Tess has gone for more wax. Lex’s hands still, suspended above half-finished seals. He should laugh, deflect, perform the cynicism that’s kept him alive.
Instead: “I don’t know what that means.” The admission costs him. “I’ve never,” His gesture encompasses everything, documents, sleeping servants, the impossible choice to stay.
“You’re staying,” Martha says. “For her. That’s what it means.”
When Tess returns, she finds them silent. But Lex’s face has cracked open, raw and unguarded and terrified in the candlelight.
She sets down the wax. Takes the chair beside him, close enough their shoulders touch.
Neither moves away.
The wax bears the imprint of both their thumbs, a seal within the seal. In the moment before release, Tess feels the calluses on his palm. Ink and chemical burns mapping a life of necessary deceptions. His fingers tighten once, briefly, around hers. No words for what they’re choosing: not safety, not escape, but each other and the reckoning to come. When their hands part, the cooling wax holds their shared heat.
The packet feels heavier than paper should, as though truth itself has weight. Thomas’s fingers close around it. Seventeen years old, still soft-handed despite a year in service, still young enough to believe the world might be just. Tess watches his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows.
“They’ll question you,” Lex says, dropping to one knee so their eyes meet level. His voice carries the particular gentleness of someone who knows exactly what interrogation entails. “Say you found them in the library, tucked behind the folios. Say you were frightened by what you read and ran to the village.”
“But I.”What about you both? Miss Barlow, they’ll know you. Tess reaches up, adjusts his collar with fingers that have straightened a thousand such collars, tucked in a thousand errant shirt-tails. The gesture steadies them both. Her hands remember this maternal motion though she’s never had children, will likely never have the chance now. “You’re a good lad, Thomas. That’s why it has to be you.”
His eyes shine with tears he’s too proud to shed. “I don’t understand.”
“You will.” She steps back, releases him. “Go now. The river path. Mind the loose stones near the bend. And Thomas?” She waits until he looks at her fully. “When they ask what kind of woman I was, tell them I kept my word.”
He nods once, sharp, then turns and disappears down the servants’ stairs, his footsteps quick and light. Fading. Gone.
The silence he leaves behind feels vast. Tess stares at the empty doorway, at the space where their evidence just vanished into the grey morning. Her hands are empty. The house groans around them, old wood settling, or perhaps just the weight of what comes next pressing down on every beam.
The thunder of Lord Ashford’s rage penetrates even here, his voice cracking with the particular hysteria of a man whose authority has been exposed as fiction. Thief! Liar! I’ll see you hanged! The words distort through floorboards and plaster, becoming almost inhuman. Lady Ashford’s shrieking punctuates each pause, the constable, get the constable, chains, make an example, her fear of scandal sharper than any concern for truth.
Lex’s body angles toward the hidden passage before his mind fully decides, muscle memory of a hundred escapes. His fingers find the panel’s edge, that particular groove worn smooth by previous flights. “The carriage I arranged will wait another hour.” His voice stays level, professional, as though discussing bookbinding techniques. “We could make Dover by nightfall.”
But his eyes haven’t left Tess.
She stands in the room’s exact center, weight distributed like a woman preparing to hold ground against a storm. Around her, the surviving servants drift closer. Crawford whose loyalty to the family has been gospel for thirty years. They’re gathering. Waiting.
Tess’s feet don’t move toward the door.
Tess’s words cut through the chaos overhead, each syllable precise as a blade. “You’ve spent years becoming invisible.” She turns to face him fully, and the movement costs her: he can see the tremor in her hands, the way her jaw sets against fear. “You could still disappear. They don’t know your real name yet. Only what’s on the forgery you’re carrying.”
The escape route yawns behind him, familiar as breathing. How many times has he slipped through such passages, leaving consequences for others?
Lex laughs, the sound bitter and bright as burnt sugar. “And you’ve spent your whole life being told you don’t matter. You could claim coercion, say I forced you.” The offer tastes like ash even as he speaks it.
Outside, horses. Official business arriving with the weight of law and nooses.
Neither moves toward salvation.
“I’m tired of being invisible,” he says.
“I’m tired of not mattering,” she answers.
The hidden panel swings shut with a soft click.
Mrs. Brennan moves first, her broad frame solid as the kitchen hearth she’s tended twenty years. “I’ll testify.” Her voice doesn’t waver. Davies nods, jaw set beneath his grey beard. “Aye. The warehouses. They gather close, these survivors, forming a wall of witness around the table. Sarah’s thin hand finds Tess’s shoulder. Lex watches this architecture of trust, this thing he’s never built: solidarity. When Tess’s fingers lace through his, he doesn’t pull away.
The knock comes. Three sharp raps that silence even breathing. Tess’s hand tightens in Lex’s as boots shift on the threshold. He meets her eyes, amber catching grey, and something passes between them that has no name yet: not quite absolution, more than defiance. Together they turn toward the door. “Come in,” Tess calls, her voice steady as stone. “We’ve been expecting you.”
The room holds its breath as Tess crosses from the window, her shadow stretching long across the worn floorboards. The servants part for her. Not with the automatic deference of months past, but with something harder won. Recognition between equals.
She stops beside the table where their testimonies lie stacked like ammunition. Her fingers brush the topmost page, feeling the grain of paper that will either vindicate them or condemn them. Perhaps both. The words swim before her eyes: systematic exploitation, deliberate concealment, bodies counted as acceptable losses. Her handwriting, usually kept small and apologetic in the household ledgers, sprawls bold across the page.
“I keep thinking,” she says, voice low enough that the others lean closer, “about my brother. How the factory owner called it an accident. How my mother believed him because what choice did she have?” She looks up, finds Lex watching her with that intensity that still catches her unprepared. “We’re giving them a choice now. Everyone who reads this.”
Mrs. Davies moves to stand beside her, arthritic fingers settling on Tess’s shoulder. “My girl died thinking she’d done something wrong. Thinking the fever was punishment.” The old woman’s voice cracks but doesn’t break. “Let them read what really killed her.”
One by one, the others step forward. Young Thomas, barely sixteen. Sarah with her burn-scarred hands. Each adding their presence to the testimony, their bodies a chorus of assent.
Lex gathers the documents with careful precision, his forger’s touch now devoted to preservation rather than deception. He catches Tess’s eye as he ties the bundle with string. “No more hiding,” he murmurs.
“No more hiding,” she echoes.
Outside, the crunch of gravel announces arrival. Inside, eight servants and two conspirators stand witness to each other’s courage, bound by what they’ve dared to speak aloud.
The documents lie between them like a bridge they’ve already crossed. Tess watches Lex’s hand hover over the final page, the one that will unmake him. Alexander Thorne. She’s heard him called a dozen names in whispered servant gossip: the quiet bookbinder, the man who asks too many questions. But this name, written in his precise hand, carries the weight of wanted posters and court records.
“They’ll trace everything back,” he says. Not a question. His amber eyes meet hers with that terrible clarity she’s come to recognize as honesty. “The forgeries. The blackmail. All of it.”
She picks up her own statement, feels its heft. Her testimony names not just the Ashfords but the system that made them possible. Every stolen hour of reading, every pamphlet she’s distributed, every servant she’s taught to question their station. All of it documented in her own hand.
“I wrote my politics down,” she says. “Every word they could hang me for.”
His fingers find hers among the papers. “We’re signing our names to revolution.”
“Or ruin.”
“Perhaps they’re the same thing.”
The ink is already drying. Too late for second thoughts.
The mathematics shift as they stand. Lex’s Amsterdam, fog-wrapped anonymity, a quiet shop, safety purchased with other people’s secrets, dissolves like morning mist. He sees it clearly: the man he would have become, competent and hollow, trading information in back rooms until even his real name felt like another forgery.
Tess’s rage, that carefully tended fire, transforms. Not extinguished but redirected. She’d imagined dying for the cause, a martyr’s clarity. Never this: living for it, complicated and compromised and utterly present.
“I would have been safe,” he says.
“I would have been righteous,” she answers.
Their fingers tighten. Safe and righteous, those solitary virtues, pale against this dangerous, witnessed truth. They have chosen the messy arithmetic of together.
The crunch of wheels on gravel shatters the morning quiet. Through the window, three carriages. The magistrate’s crest, men in dark coats carrying empire’s authority. Tess’s heart hammers, but her hand in Lex’s remains steady. Around them, the servants draw closer. Not protecting, but standing with. Mrs. Davies straightens her spine. Young Tom lifts his chin. They are witnesses now, not servants. “Ready?” Lex asks. Not for punishment, but to matter, to be counted, to exist in history’s record instead of its margins.
The knock reverberates through the narrow corridor. Three sharp raps that sound like judgment itself. Tess’s breath catches. Around them, the servants press closer, a constellation of witnesses. The documents are already scattered across London like seeds on wind, impossible to gather back. Lex’s amber eyes find hers, and in them she sees wonder mixed with terror. “No going back,” he whispers. She squeezes his hand. Ink-stained fingers against her calloused palm, two different worlds choosing to become one. “Only forward.” The door begins to open.
The constables move forward, but uncertainly now, their authority complicated by the magistrate’s hesitation. Tess watches calculations flicker across official faces: this is no longer a simple matter of stolen property and trespass. The servants behind her represent something more dangerous than theft: they represent testimony, corroboration, a chorus of voices the law cannot easily silence.
“Testimony regarding what, precisely?” the magistrate asks, though his tone suggests he already knows. His eyes linger on the documents, on the neat rows of signatures, on the wax seals that Lex has forged with such damning accuracy they’ll hold up to scrutiny.
Tess releases Lex’s hand. Not in retreat, but to step forward. Her maid’s uniform is rumpled, stained with ink and smoke from the burning study, but she stands as though she’s wearing armor. “Regarding the importation of contaminated rubber from colonial territories. Regarding the suppression of plague reports to protect profit margins. Regarding the deaths of four people in this house and dozens more in the villages.” Her voice doesn’t waver. Every word is a stone she’s placing in a foundation that cannot be dismantled. “Regarding Lord Ashford’s knowledge of biological contagion and his willful endangerment of his own household and tenants.”
The silence that follows is absolute. Even Lord Ashford seems momentarily struck speechless, his rage colliding with the sudden recognition of genuine danger. This isn’t a servant’s word against a lord’s anymore. Not with documents, not with multiple witnesses, not with London journalists already circling like ravens.
Lex moves to stand beside her, not behind, not in front. Equal. His voice, when he speaks, carries the educated precision that marks him as something other than what he’s pretended to be. “I can authenticate every document. I can explain the forgery techniques used in the original colonial reports. I can testify to the chemical composition of the disinfectants that were deliberately withheld from workers.”
Lord Ashford surges forward, his face mottled purple with rage, one trembling finger pointed at Tess like a weapon. “That woman is a thief and a seditionist. He’s a known forger. Wanted by Scotland Yard. Arrest them both immediately.”
But the magistrate raises one hand, a gesture that stops the constables mid-step. His gaze travels slowly from the unified line of servants to the documents spread across the library table. Copies of copies, each page signed and witnessed, each seal pressed with damning precision. The silence stretches taut as wire.
“There are already journalists at my office,” he says finally, each word measured and deliberate. “From three London papers. They arrived this morning with documents matching these.” He touches one page, then withdraws his fingers as though the paper burns. “The story is already being set in type.”
Tess feels something fundamental shift in the room’s atmosphere, like air pressure changing before a storm breaks. They’ve won something already, though the cost remains to be tallied. Beside her, Lex’s thumb traces a small, secret circle against her wrist, solidarity, wonder, fear, all compressed into that tiny gesture of connection.
The constables move forward with iron restraints. Tess extends her hands, wrists together, and feels the cold metal close around them: heavier than she’d imagined, the weight of consequence made tangible. Beside her, Lex does the same, his face pale but composed, ink-stained fingers steady even as the iron locks click shut.
“Theft of property, seditious libel, and conspiracy,” the magistrate intones, but his voice lacks conviction. He’s reading the room. The servants’ unified stance, the evidence already beyond suppression, the story that’s already being written in London’s pressrooms.
When the constable tries to separate them, pulling Lex toward the door, Tess plants her feet. The chains rattle. “We testify together or not at all.”
Eight voices echo behind her, strong and certain: “We testify together.”
The constable’s hand falls away.
As they’re led through the house, Tess sees it transformed. The grand staircase she’s scrubbed on her knees, the corridors she’s navigated invisibly. Now she walks them in chains but with her head high, Lex beside her matching her stride. Lady Ashford watches from the landing, face carved from marble. In the entrance hall, the remaining family members cluster like shipwreck survivors. Tess catches Lex’s eye, sees in his amber gaze the same recognition: they’re walking toward prison, toward trial, toward consequences neither can fully imagine. But they’re walking together, and behind them comes testimony that can’t be stopped.
The wagon’s iron step is cold beneath her boot. Lex climbs in after her, their chains clinking against wood. Through the barred window, she watches Ashford Hall recede. That grey monument to empire and exploitation. His shoulder presses against hers in the cramped space. Not comfort, exactly. Confirmation. They’ve made themselves visible, chosen consequence over shadow. The wagon lurches forward. Neither looks back.