attention to detail suited him ideally to the venture’s clientele. That Molly spoke Rouge, and was at least passably fluent in Violinish and Solidon, was an added piece of luck. She could translate, too, and copy critical documents.
Nicholas accepted. In two days’ time, he and Molly were living in well-furnished rooms, purchasing their first new clothes since arriving in Grayport, and dining on wholesome food before a clean, cheerful hearth. Molly took a bath and overslept in downy blankets. Nicholas got to work, examining Kofi’s backlog of foreign correspondence and leaving Molly alone to explore the wintry city, now with money in her pocket, and discover that it wasn’t so hostile after all.
Merchants spoke to her and smiled, sensing she could pay. The falling snow was lovelier, reminding her of warmth in their sweetly settled home, and even the taverns felt safer when she ducked inside, escaping the cold because she could, and sat before a fiddler with a cup of hot chocolate.
But her freedom was withheld as soon as she embraced it. Nicholas began to focus on Kofi Baa’s most pressing contracts and letters, leaving Molly to translate the rest and mind the public office, a quiet brown room that faced the vibrant street. There she sat for hours, day after day. She greeted customers and accepted their paperwork and payments. Messages of particular sensitivity were handled by her brother, who made her translate and copy the most flavorless, abstruse documents to and from Rouge. How she would have liked to wander in the snow—to make a friend, climb a tower, ride a horse beyond the city!
The doldrums only deepened once the office was established and her brother devoted himself to more delicate work in the rear parlor. Kofi Baa had benefited greatly from Nicholas’s varied expertise, and he began referring colleagues with questions about shipping regulations, tariffs, and taxes. Her brother read day and night, bolstering his knowledge, and by winter’s end, not a day was passing without several respectable businesspersons coming to Nicholas for advice or arbitration—some professional, some private, none of which he spoke about specifically with Molly.
“A property dispute beyond the purview of the courts,” he might say, or “Familial concerns,” or “Sensitive relations.” He was something like a lawyer, or a scholar, or a minister, and those who visited the office and met him in the parlor entered nervously, or grimly, and departed much at ease.
One night, Molly woke in the dark and sat up in bed. It was summer by then and depressingly hot. The overripe city rarely freshened with the breeze, which wafted from the west instead of from the sea so that its greatest effect was to move the smell of humid dung, sweat, and fishy remains from one stifling district to another. Molly’s window was open, and although it was late and quiet on the street, she felt that she’d been woken by an unfamiliar sound. Her senses twitched and flickered, and her heartbeat thumped, as if she’d woken from a nightmare and parts had followed her out.
“Nicholas,” she whispered to his door across the room.
She heard a sound downstairs: someone moving in the office.
“Nicholas!” she said.
The sound below her ceased. Had her voice carried down? She couldn’t leave the bed and risk creaking on the floor. Before deciding what to do, she heard the telltale hinges of the office door, so she knelt upon the bed and leaned toward the window, peeking down with only her forehead and eyes above the sill.
She saw a man leave the office, just below her in the dark. He shut the door behind him and stood for a moment, facing south and showing the back of his head. He had black sweaty hair and too-tight breeches, and when he turned and started north, Molly knew him at once by his long, crooked nose.
She sprang from bed and opened the door to Nicholas’s room. He wasn’t there. Molly wavered in her panic, considering first a cry of “Help!” to summon a constable or watchman but afraid, at such an hour, it would only bring the locket thief back toward the house.
She hurried down the darkened stairs, unable to see the steps, and opened the door to the lower parlor. There were shadows on the floor from a single lit candle. For an instant every one of them was Nicholas’s body—there a foot, there his head, there a small pool of blood—and finding they were nothing only heightened Molly’s dread. He had to be in