Page 71 of The Number of Love
She drew in a long, slow breath. At work she was fine. Her mind worked more or less as it always had. But at home ... all she could do was notice howemptythe flat felt. Her mother wasn’t there to chide her for thinking about nothing but work. Every time she went to the kitchenette, there seemed no point in cooking anything just for her.
Maman would have liked Holmes. And Drake. And this unconventional duchess and her father.
I could stand to be alone if I could still hear you, Lord.She directed the silent words upward. But even to her ears, they sounded more accusatory than inviting. Because she shouldn’tbealone. And yet, she ought to be capable of it. She could be. Shewouldbe.
Once out of Westminster and back in her own neighborhood, Margot instructed the driver to drop her at the park. As he puttered away again, she hurried over to see if the Go board was set up.
It was. She took a moment to study the play and identify Williams’s latest move, smiling at the slip of damp paper anchored to it this time, proving it had been waiting for hours.Yosu-miru. A probing move. She answered it with a move that took one of his stones but no doubt revealed to him a bit of her strategy. She’d been making each move with the eye towardsabaki—a flexible position that wouldn’t easily be attacked.
She looked around, half expecting to see Holmes there simply because she had the card to give to him. But no one lingered in the night, and as the first needles of a cold rain stung her face, she had to grant the wisdom of that. Opening the umbrella she’d long ago learned never to leave home without, she hurried to her building, gathered her post from the box, and jogged up the stairs.
Once inside, she tossed everything into its proper place and flipped through the three envelopes. One was a bill for funeral expenses—she’d check their numbers and then split it with Lukas. But the other two were odd. They were both in the same handwriting, to her, but with no return address. Heart thudding almost painfully, she noted that they each had a number in the place where the sender’s direction ought to have gone. 1 and 2.
She opened 1 first. Inside rested a small slip of paper, no bigger than one inch by three.Les Heures Claireswas written upon it.
Her chest eased. What had she thought? That this was something from whoever had killed her mother? It could be, she supposed. But if so, it was rather odd that he’d reference the book of poetry thatLukas had given her for her birthday. The one that Drake Elton had also been reading.
She ripped open the second envelope and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. When she flattened it and angled it toward the low gaslights, her lips twitched up. Numbers. Whole paragraphs of beautiful numbers.
Rather obvious of him. But ... clever too. He knew she couldn’t turn down a puzzle, apparently. Bypassing that imposing stack of newsprint that wouldn’t speak to her no matter how hard she searched for hidden meaning, she turned to her room with its tiny little desk. With its volume of poetry. With its fresh paper and ready pen.
The code was simple, using the poetry book as the key. Like a breath of spring air compared to the work she did at OB 40 every day. And fun because of it. It took her only a few minutes to work it out, flipping back and forth and back again in the book and then writing down the word that corresponded to each three-part number. Page, line, word on the line.
Only once she’d finished did she bother to really read what he’d written her. And even then, it wasn’t the words that struck her—they were flattering nonsense, praising her dark eyes and her wit—it was the fact that he’d written them. Like this. That somehow, though he’d barely known her for a few weeks, he knew her so well.
What was she to do with this? With a man who’d apparently decided that yes, he would pursue her? He’d already said if he did so, it wouldn’t be casually. This, then, was his declaration. He was courting her.
She pressed her hand against the page as too many thoughts swirled, a jumble of words and impressions and feelings where orderly numbers should have been. He was mixing her up. And for some reason, she liked it even as she hated it.
This wasn’t the path she’d set out upon. Get through the war, go to university, conquer academia—that was her future. That was it. She had no intentions of letting a man pursue her when she wasonly eighteen. There was time enough for such thoughts later. In a decade, perhaps. Or two.
And yet ... she didn’t know who some future man in a decade or two might be, or how well she’d like him. But she knew who Drake Elton was. And shedidlike him.
“No. I’m not doing this.” She wouldn’t give up her dreams just because a field agent with a broken nose asked her the right questions and sent her puzzles in the post. She wouldn’t be the sort of girl she justwasn’t, concerned with finding a husband and holding his attention. She didn’t know how to be that girl.
When I close my eyes, you are there. When I turn my heart to prayer, you arethere.The words, penned in French, jumped off the page at her.
She leaned back in her chair, straightening her spine, and stared at the wall. There were a hundred and sixty gaudy orange flowers on this wall, faded to a shade nearly not-glaring. Three hundred and twenty once-green leaves. Twenty-two vertical stripes behind them. Four inches between each row.
When I turn my heart to prayer...
She hadn’t been able to pray since she lost Maman. Not really. She hadn’t really tried. Because before, she’d neverhadto try. God had always been there, waiting, directing. She’d never had to do more than reach out to Him, and there He was. Filling her mind with numbers. With the assurance that He’d set the world in order, and so it wasn’t chaotic. There were equations. There were formulas. There werereasons.
She didn’t know how to reach Him now, when it wasn’t easy anymore. She didn’t know how to find Him when He wasn’t just right there. She didn’t know how to know Him when the numbers were silent.
Her eyes dropped back down to the encoded letter. She didn’t know how to do this either. She didn’t know how to deal with someone who could pinpoint her so easily and yet who envisioned such a different future.
Cold rain hissed at the window. The kitchen sat empty and aroma-lesswith no supper upon the stove. The newspapers towered on the table, unsolved and uncaring. She should cook something. Or read something. Or try to find a pattern in the ice on the window.
Instead, she took the decoded letter in hand and sprawled on her bed to read it again, brushing away a wave of hair that fell against her cheek in the process. It was nonsense, most of it.
But it was beautiful nonsense nonetheless.
22
The days had been rather mild for November in London, even given the rain. But Drake had nothing but the rain to blame for the absence of the man in the doorway across the street. He hadn’t been there since the day Drake had gone down to get a look at him—two days ago.
It was the rain. He hoped. Because if it wasn’t the rain, then it was most likely that whoever he was had spotted Drake after all.
