Page 50 of The Seaside Homecoming
“I cannot ask you to keep secrets from your husband, but please ask him not to share what I told you about Mr. Hammond. I would not want the man to get into any trouble over my silly suspicions. There is no doubt some other explanation.”
At least Claire hoped so.
The next day it rained hard, and Claire guessed it would curtail Mr. Hammond’s regular jaunt out of doors.
She entered the morning room with a duster, planning to tidy the desk with its cluttered stacks of correspondence, pen knives, and quills that needed mending. She lifted the registration book to dust beneath it, and a scrap of paper fell to the floor. Had Mr. Hammond been using it to mark his place?
She picked it up and glanced at it. On the small sheet of note paper was a handwritten series of numbers.
834 1151 4479 2667 2742 3067 788....
She frowned down at them. What did the numbers refer to? Amounts due? Debts owed? Something else?
Emily’s conjecture that Mr. Hammond might be a spy returned to her. Was it some sort of code? She tried to thrust the outrageous thought from her mind. Even so, Claire hesitated to throw the paper away. She considered tucking it into the desk drawer as she had the foreign letter and coin. Instead she decided to present it to Mr. Hammond and see how he reacted.
Despite his obvious displeasure at her previous intrusion, Claire again crossed the passage and pushed through the outer door into his apartment, ready to confront him. She stepped onto the landing and found the door to his bedchamber open. Peeking in, she saw the room was surprisingly neat, especially considering he cleaned it himself.
Next she knocked on the closed door of his study. No answer.
She tried the latch. Not locked. She lifted the latch and tentatively inched the door open. The room was empty. The desk ... crowded indeed.
Nervously, she tiptoed inside and looked at the papers spread atop the desk: correspondence with foreign postalmarkings. A Russian newspaper. Maps. A journal opened to a page of his handwriting, the wordsConstantinopleandciphercoming into view.
A floorboard creaked nearby, and Claire gasped and looked up, hand to her chest, frozen above his desk.
William Hammond stood there, anger sketched on his face. “What are you doing in here? Have I not made it clear this is myprivatestudy?”
Indignation flared. “You have made it clear. Suspiciously so. Yet have I not a right to wonder about the man I’ve entered into a partnership with? A man who won’t talk about his past or previous profession? Who—”
“You have your own secrets,” he interrupted. “I don’t pry into your private history.”
“Well, I don’t leave odd codes lying around.”
“What codes?”
She thrust the paper toward him.
He glanced at it dismissively. “It’s just a list. Nothing that concerns you.”
“Nothing that concerns me? You hide up here doing who knows what and go off somewhere almost daily....”
“I simply like to climb the surrounding hills. For the exercise.”
Undeterred, she went on, “You meet privately with strangers and have foreign guests to stay but don’t explain how you met them—and that’s only what I know about. Very well, I shall just come out and ask. Are you a spy?”
“Am I a...?” He gave a bark of laughter. “No, Miss Summers, I am not a spy. Not now, not ever.”
“Then how do you explain all ... this?” She gestured around his study, at the letters, journal, and maps spread about.
He huffed. “You will find the explanation a disappointment, I fear. There’s little intrigue to the truth.”
“Go on.”
“If you really must know, before coming here I was a diplomat. In various capacities in various places: Austria, Russia, the Ottoman Empire...”
“Truly?”
“Yes, truly.”
