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“Can I help?”

Hezekiah starts. The chain swings from his fingers. Clearly he had not noticed she was there.

“Dora.” He slides a look to Lottie, lowering his voice to an undertone. “She was meant to be gone.”

Lottie shuffles under his weight. “She was.”

So this is why Lottie wanted rid of her!

“Uncle,” Dora says now, impatience tipped. “What is this thing? What have you bought?” and she can see Hezekiah’s thoughts flipping over themselves like fish in a creel.

“Get inside,” he snaps.

“Why?”

There is panic in his face, but before Dora can press him on the matter the white-haired man intervenes on Hezekiah’s behalf.

“Miss Blake, your uncle is in pain and it is cold on the street. Perhaps,” he says, indicating the growing crowd with a small nod of his head, “it would be best to continue this conversation inside?”

Dora opens her mouth then closes it again, and before she can make a second attempt Hezekiah—who refuses to look at her now—is being maneuvered into the shop. Behind her there is a groan, a creak of wood. Dora turns to watch the three men haul the crate between them.

She steps aside and lets them pass, her eyes narrowed into slits.

Chapter Eight

It is the attention to detail he likes, the concentration it requires. It helps him forget.

The bookbindery is tucked at the far end of Russel Street, right on the corner where the road bends sharply onto Drury Lane, and Edward’s private workroom backs onto the alley just behind the shop itself. The pocket-sized window is set high up in the wall which affords him little light for his work, but this way he is not disturbed by people tapping on the glass, strangers rudely looking in. So, when he works, he fills the room with candles. An expense the overseer, Tobias Fingle, deems wholly unnecessary.

And it is, Edward concedes. He could get by with half as many; the patterns he works into leather are not done by the delicacy of his fingers but by mere stamps—all he needs do is press them into the right place.

But Edward does not like the dark.

Fingle understands though. He holds his tongue. He and Edward are the only ones left of the original workers, the only ones who know what it was like before. Before, when there was no time to rest, no room to breathe. No time to heal.

Edward presses the fillet into the calfskin, draws the hot metal disk over the binding, leaves a neat double-edged line across its face. His role is reserved for the last stages of book production. It is his task to stain the covers of the books once the pages have been sewn into them, to mark the leather with delicate patterns and grooves. It is an easy job, requiring only a steady hand, an eye for detail. An “amateur” artist he may be, but producing beautiful book covers... in this respect he could outmatch anyone in the trade. Carrow had seen to it.

Setting his jaw Edward lifts the fillet, lays it aside. He picks up a small pallet from the little stove tucked into the corner and used to warm the tools. He turns the pallet to check the pattern—coiling ivy, filigree spindles—and applies himself now to detailing the borders of the book.

Concentrate. Forget.

Thanks to Cornelius, Edward is now free to do what he likes here. He could have left, of course. But what, Edward demanded when Cornelius suggested it, could he possibly do? Where could he go? He—unlike Cornelius who has money to spend and freedom to spare—has to make a living. He is not trained for anything else. And so Edward stayed, doing what he was taught to do best, in comfortable near-silence within a room filled with bright candles that kept the darkness out.

Odd, Edward thinks, that in a place he once feared he now feels entirely safe.

The other workers, of course, have no notion. Cornelius brought them in when he took over the place, new blood from Staffordshire, country stock sent to the city to make their trade, as Edward had been once. But they resent him, Edward knows. They resent what they deem to be his privilege, the protection he receives from Ashmole coffers. They resent his frequent absences, the purpose of which they know nothing about. After his sojourn to Shugborough they could scarce believe it when Edward was reinstated to the back room as if nothing had happened at all.

They also hold their tongues. They are paid too handsomely to say a thing (Cornelius has always been far too generous with his money) and Fingle keeps them quiet, he makes damn sure of that, but Edward cares very little what they think. To him the bindery is a stopping point only, a place to bide his time. Admittance to the Society is all he cares about. It would be his pass to travel the world, to spend time doing what he loves—what a mighty thing, to be paid to immerse himself in study, to actually see and touch the things he spent so many years only reading about in book after book after book...

There is a knock. Edward lifts the pallet from the leather, looks up at the door. On the other side of the mottled glass panes he sees the distorted shape of a man whom he recognizes to be Fingle. He looks down again, turns the book at a quarter angle, presses the pallet into the calfskin.

The door opens. Fingle leans on the handle, squinting into the candlelight.

“We’re off to the tavern after we shut for the day. Care to join us?”

Fingle always asks. Edward always answers the same.

“No, thank you,” he says without looking up, but his usual dismissive reply does not succeed in getting rid of the man; Fingle hovers still at the door.