Free Beneath a Silent Moon by Tracy Grant Page A

sickly stench of blood, sense the chill of dying flesh. If the gunmen had been a few inches off with any of their shots, it might have been Mélanie who bled to death in his arms. He set his whisky down before he could smash yet another glass.
    Mélanie pulled Francisco's papers from her bodice and set them on the table. Charles took a step toward the table, but at the same moment David returned to the room, a medical supply box in his hands.
    Mélanie set down her glass. "Take off your coat, Charles."
    He complied, because it took less time than arguing with her. While she cut away his shirtsleeve and cleaned and bound the wound, he gave David and Simon an account of the evening's events. When he finished, David stared at him as though he had just announced foreign troops had invaded English soil. "Charles, you have to go to Bow Street with this."
    "With what? A story about mysterious warnings and coded papers and secret organizations that sounds as though it's straight out of a gothic novel? Any Bow Street Runner worth his salt would laugh in our faces. And assuming a runner did take it seriously and began asking questions, how far do you think he'd get among the polite world?"
    "This isn't a game, Charles. You could have been killed.
Mélanie
could have been killed."
    "Christ, don't you think I know that?" Charles glanced at Mélanie and drew a breath. "I'm sorry. But I know the stakes, David.
Believe me
. If I thought I could safely turn this over to Bow Street, I would."
    David returned Charles's gaze. Twenty years of shared history hung between them. Sipping scalding cups of chocolate and pouring over dog-eared books during late-night discussions at Harrow. Pressing iced towels to bloody noses after unequal rights. Drinking cheap wine in an Oxford tavern, drunk on ideas. Sobbing with a raw despair one dared reveal to no one else.
    "Damn you," David said. "You always end arguments by asking me to trust you."
    "Do you?" Charles said.
    "Far more than is good for me. Or you, I sometimes think."
    "Were they trying to kill you as well or just scare you?" Simon asked.
    "I'm not sure," Charles said. "We didn't give them many clear shots. But they were certainly prepared to use lethal force. A few inches off and any of those bullets could have killed either of us." He glanced down at Mélanie, who was snipping off a length of lint, and fought an urge to touch her for reassurance. She'd look at him as though he were mad. "Knot the bandage and stop fussing, Mel. I want to look at Francisco's papers."
    "You'd find it dreadfully inconvenient to develop gangrene, Charles." Mélanie set down the scissors. "Try to keep your arm elevated."
    Charles moved aside a playbill and a sheaf of papers that appeared to be notes for Simon's latest play, and spread Francisco's papers out on the table.
    "Look at this." Simon pointed to a dark red splotch at the top of one of the sheets that Charles had taken to be a blood spatter. Now he saw a matching spot at the bottom of the paper. A red wax seal, snapped in two when the papers were opened. He turned the page over and folded it, bringing the two halves of the seal back together, and held it to the light of the lamp. It appeared to be some sort of castle.
    "Probably from a signet ring," Charles said. "But it's not a crest I've ever seen."
    "The Elsinore League?" Simon asked.
    "Very likely."
    David stared down at the writing on the two papers. "It looks as though it's a good thing I still have my dictionaries of ancient Greek."
    "The Greek's just an added flourish." Charles ran his finger over a line of text. "It's numbers, written out in word form in ancient Greek with a few extra letters thrown in to confuse matters. The trick is going to be turning the numbers into words. We'll need a pen and ink and rather a lot of paper."
    To turn the two blood-spattered pages of ancient Greek into a sequence of numbers was time consuming but not difficult. Charles studied the results. "They've only used