He leaned over to watch her, planting a kiss upon her head. “That is my girl. You know what it looked like. You never need more than a glance to duplicate something. Let it come.”
She looked down at her hand with a wide-eyed gaze. As he watched, realization dawned. And if for a moment he feared that conscious thought would make her freeze, he needn’t have worried. That light of recognition caused only a pause, and then she bent over the paper and increased her speed. Within seconds she had drawn a complete mask, and even the slightly off-center rectangle around it that must indicate the size of the paper. It looked right to him, the same size as the letter in his desk.
“I need a blade.”
He pulled out his knife and set it beside her. “I will fetch the letter.” He ran out, ducking through the door and down the hall to his study. It took him only seconds to grab the key from its place on the lintel and insert it in the drawer, to pull out the letter from Fairchild, and then to retrace his steps. By the time he arrived at Gwyneth’s elbow, she was putting his knife back down.
He handed her the letter and she put it behind the mask. And together they read.
I know
I can trust you
to do what is right with
this bit of news.
I have always been against
this war but now I have
disturbing
information about my
Julienne’s brother
Gates
and his son
there in America.
They are stealing
seized
goods from your north
bound for England
selling them and using
funds to purchase
slaves
“Good heavens.” Thad shook his head while she flipped the letter over and reapplied the mask. Before they continued reading, he said, “They are using the war to fund the slave trade. Stealing from the North to sell to the South.”
“And stealing from England too.” She rested her head in her hand, her breath coming out tremulously. “With a son. He and Aunt Gates have never had children, which means he…he has an American son. One in the slave trade.”
Her thoughts galloped across her face, her question obvious. Thad shook his head. “It couldn’t be him. Mercer may not be our favorite person, but—”
“When I first saw him, I thought he was Uncle Gates. Not because they looked so much alike, but because of the way he moved, his demeanor. Something about him.” Her gaze went vulnerable. “Tell me it is impossible, Thad. Tell me you know his father, and he is the very image of him.”
Would that he could. “From what I have gleaned, they moved to Maryland from one of the Carolinas when Mercer was very small. I did not meet him until I moved to Baltimore. His mother is a widow.” Or, if Gwyneth’s suspicions were right, she merely claimed to be.
She forced out a shaky smile. “Well. I imagine Papa knew this son’s name and will mention it somewhere.”
At that cue, they kept reading. About Fairchild’s fear of the lengths Gates would go to for his greed, fear that Gwyneth was in danger. That the general would be sending his daughter to Thad with all his evidence of Gates’s crime, and that it began in a code using as key the book Ben had sent him.
“What book?” He straightened, looking around as if the answer would be written upon the walls. He could ask his father, of course, and no doubt he would remember without a single hesitation—books being top priority, after all. But who knew when he and Mother would be home?
Gwyneth shuffled through the papers on her desk, the stack of drawings that had grown so deep. She went all the way to the bottom, to that first one she had drawn her first night here, of her father’s study with its lines of shelves.
Her breath came out in a startled huff, and she tapped that strange shadow at the bottom, the one with the scalloped edge. The edge that now looked so familiar. “It is the mask. I must have seen it, must have known…oh.” Her eyes slid shut as her fingers fisted. “The night before Papa told me I must go. It was out on his desk, and we heard Uncle come in. He put it away so very quickly, when usually he had not bothered with such things around Uncle Gates. A book had been out too. This one.” Her finger moved to the drawn shelf and tapped a tome that looked to be sitting an inch farther out than the others.
Thad breathed a laugh as he read the French title. “Of course it is. What but Lavoisier would my father ever send to his dear friend? One moment.” He dashed out to his library cum laboratory and quickly located the volume of Méthode de Nomenclature Chimique that Father had made certain he had on his shelves. When he spotted a second, identical-if-well-worn copy on the table, he grabbed that one too.