Page 13 of Empire of Shadows

That weaselly little man wasnotabout to toss her to a violent ruffian who walked on historical records. Surely, not even Mr. Henbury could sink that low.

“What woman?” Jacobs calmly pressed.

Ellie took a quiet, instinctive step back from the door as a quick blade of fear mingled with the fury roiling under her skin.

“Miss Mallory,” Mr. Henbury replied to the obviously dangerous man currently assaulting him. “It was Miss Eleanora Mallory.”

?

Three

Ellie had calculatedthat taking off her boots would allow her to slip away from Mr. Henbury’s office both quickly and quietly, gaining herself a brief head start over any pursuit. Her woolen stockings slipped across the floor as she sprinted around the corner into the archivists’ room.

Most of her fellow employees ignored her, still absorbed in their discussion of the latest cricket scores as they lumped over their tea.

Only Mr. Barker glanced up from his desk. He blinked owlishly at the walking boots that Ellie held in her hand.

The tea service cohort paid slightly more attention when Ellie plopped down in her chair and set her foot on the desk. She yanked her boots back on with breathless urgency, exposing a scandalous amount of ankle in the process.

“Good God!” one of the tea drinkers mumbled.

Ellie thumped her feet to the ground, snatching up her briefcase and neatly plucking the fern from the windowsill.

Mr. Barker rose from his desk, furrowing his brow with nervous concern.

“Miss Mallory,” he began, “is everything quite—”

“Just jolly!” Ellie called back as she dashed from the room.

She thundered down the stairs to the ground floor, then burst through a cluster of fellows from the publishing department. Scholars scattered like a flock of alarmed pigeons as she pushed out the door to Chancery Lane.

The gray London drizzle assaulted her, instantly dampening her hair and clothing. Ellie shuffled the fern into the crook of her arm in order to free a hand and yank her umbrella from the straps of the briefcase. She unfurled it with a practiced snap of her wrist.

No villainous clamor rose behind her as she moved quickly into the rain-drenched flow of pedestrians. Slowly, her pulse began to settle. Mr. Henbury had never paid a very great deal of attention to Ellie, and had most likely directed Jacobs to the archivists’ room—which she had escaped—or the biscuit tray in the canteen.

Jacobs would not find Ellie at the biscuit tray.

But where was she to go now?

She needed to sort out what she ought to do with the very important historical objects still squirreled away in her skirt pocket. After all, it wasn’t as though she hadn’t any job to return to—even if there wasn’t a violent criminal hunting about the place for her, thanks to her wretched supervisor.

The bells of the nearby Temple Church rang out the hour. The time was exactly three o’clock—and suddenly, Ellie knew exactly where she wanted to be.

If she hurried, she would just make it to her destination just in time.

Ellie splashed heedlessly through the growing puddles in the street on her way to Charing Cross Road, and stopped outside a nondescript blue door sandwiched between a chip shop and a cobbler. She juggled the fern and her briefcase until she managed to get her umbrella closed, then pushed her way inside.

The blue door opened onto a dim, narrow stairwell. As Ellie climbed, familiar noises drifted down to her from above—the forcefulhuhof a dozen bodies exhaling together in sequence and the squeak of bare feet on the floorboards.

On the upper landing, she gratefully deposited her things on one of the shelves placed there for that purpose. She slipped into the room, forcing herself to stop at the threshold despite the urgency surging through her veins.

The space was broad, high-ceilinged, and entirely empty of furniture. Twelve women in comfortable attire were arrayed before an elegant young Japanese man with a dashing mustache who held a solidly built schoolteacher in his arms.

“Elbow,” he said in careful, strongly accented English as he took a firm grip on the schoolteacher’s arm. “Pull close. Tuck the hip.” He twisted at the waist to slip his rear against the woman’s pelvis. “Hold and bend.”

He turned neatly, folding the woman over his hip and flipping her onto her back on the floormats.

“No arms! Pull from the belly.” He indicated the sides of his abdomen. “Yes?”

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