“So?” inquired the gnome, not altering his posture in the slightest degree.
“I’ve come to deliver a message to your daughter, sir. From His Grace, the Duke of Pardloe.”
“Pah,” said Cowden.
“Did you say ‘Pah’？” William inquired, incredulous.
“I did, and I propose to go on saying it until you remove yourself from my premises.”
“I decline to leave until I’ve spoken with … um … well, whatever the bloody hell she’s calling herself these days. The Viscountess Grey? Mrs. General Bleeker? Or has she gone all the way back to Miss Cowden?”
Mr. Cowden’s cane swiped within an inch of William’s knee, missing only because William’s reflexes had carried him backward by a yard. Before the man could swing again, William bent and snatched the cane from his hand. He resisted the urge to break it—it was a fine piece, with a heavy bronze head in the shape of a raven—and instead placed it on the top of the nearest bookshelf, well out of Cowden’s reach.
“Now … why do you not wish me to speak to your daughter?” he asked, keeping his tone as reasonable as possible.
“Because she doesn’t wish to speak to you,” Mr. Cowden replied, his tone slightly less reasonable than William’s, but not enraged, either. “She said so.”
“Ah.”
The lack of aggression in William’s reply seemed to calm the bookseller slightly. His hair had risen like the crest of a cockatoo, and he made an attempt to smooth it with the palm of his hand. William coughed.
“If she won’t talk to me at present, perhaps I could leave her a note?” he suggested, gesturing toward an inkwell on the desk.
“Hm.” Cowden seemed dubious. “I doubt she’d read it.”
“I’ll lay you five to one she does.”
Mr. Cowden’s tongue poked into the side of his cheek, considering.
“Shillings?” he inquired.
“Guineas.”
“Done.” He moved behind the desk, drew out a sheet of paper, and handed William a slender glass pen with a swirling thread of dark blue running up its stem. “Don’t press too hard,” he advised. “It’s Murano glass and pretty strong, but it is glass, and you’re a ham-handed fellow. In terms of size,” he amended. “I don’t impugn your dexterity, necessarily.”
William nodded, and dipped the pen gently. Presumably one used it like a quill … one did, and it wrote beautifully, smooth as silk and holding its ink very well. No blots, either.
He wrote briefly, What are you afraid of? Whatever it is, it isn’t me. Your most humble and obedient Servant, William, then sanded the sheet and waved it gently to make sure it was dry. He didn’t see any sealing wax, but his father had shown him some years ago how to fold a letter like a Chinese puzzle, in a way that would make it nearly impossible to open and refold the same way. He pressed the creases with his thumbnail, to make sure they would show, should the letter be opened before reaching its intended recipient.
The bookseller accepted the folded square and raised a thick gray brow.
“Tell her I’ll come back tomorrow at three o’clock, without manacles,” William said, and bowed. “Your servant, sir.”
“Never have daughters,” Mr. Cowden advised him, tucking the note into a breast pocket. “They don’t listen worth a damn.”
WILLIAM SPENT A wakeful night, between bedbugs, inquisitive moths who seemed intent upon exploring his nostrils, despite these orifices lacking any light whatsoever, and his thoughts, which were undefined but active.
“You go into a situation with an expectation,” his uncle Hal had told him once, during a discussion of military tactics. “You should know what you want to happen, even if what you want is no more than your own survival. That expectation will dictate your actions.”
“Since,” his father had neatly interposed, “you might do something different, if you only wanted to get out alive, than you would if your primary desire was to keep a majority of your troops alive. And something else again, if what you wanted was to defeat an opposing commander and damn the cost.”
William scratched his middle, meditating.
Well, so … what do I want to happen?
On the face of it, he’d already achieved the stated purpose of his expedition, that being to discover where Amaranthus was and her circumstances and general well-being. Well, fine. She was with her father, which is where she’d said she was going, and was plainly neither ill nor injured, judging by the speed with which she’d left the premises.