Circle of Spies by Roseanna M. White Page A

the angle of that. Then she closed the drawer again and relocked it.
    Now what? She could keep poking through the room, but her twitching nerves dissuaded her. She would retire to her own desk, where she usually spent her mornings seeing to correspondence, and examine all she had just found at her leisure.
    On her way out, she grabbed a few books from the shelf. She would move them into the main library and claim, if Dev asked, that she had gone in for that express purpose.
    Her second-floor drawing room faced east, where morning sunlightfiltered through the lightweight curtains and gilded the chamber in gold. She had redone the appointments in pale greens and blues when she moved into the house after her wedding, and now its familiarity wrapped around her. She settled at the delicately carved desk and opened the first letter awaiting her.
    But she didn’t read the missive from her aunt. She read instead the first sheet she had looked at in Lucien’s study.
    Names. Members of their castle? Assuredly. Lucien’s took the first position, with Captain written beside it—and then crossed out.
    The page was filled, front and back, Lucien’s hand mixed with Dev’s. Some of the names she recognized, some were unfamiliar. Some surprising, some not.
    And several more crossed out. A few with a note— fell at Shiloh, fell at Carthage, fell at Gettysburg . Many had stars beside them and notes as to which regiments they belonged to.
    Northern ones, most of them. Sorrow pinged. This was why the president had made mention of the group being another arm of the military, because they had invaded his own forces and were undermining his troops.
    She focused her mental eye upon one of the names. He had died at Gettysburg. And was a member of the V Corp.
    Stephen’s corp.
    Her brother had likely been fighting side by side with a traitor. Someone who had joined the Union army with the sole purpose of betraying it.
    Marietta drew out a fresh sheet of paper, her personal stationery, and her pen and ink. Dear Granddad …
    The note was benign, inviting him and Grandmama Gwyn to dine with her on Tuesday. But then she stood and went to the door. After glancing down the hall, she eased it shut and flipped the key in the lock.
    She had stashed the invisible ink he had given her with the small vials of perfume she kept in her desk. She often dabbed their sweet scents on her correspondence as an added personal touch. If any of the servants happened across the bottles of straw-colored stain, they would think it her lilac water.
    Granddad Thad had shown her how to use it, how to develop itwith the counter liquor. He had also pulled out the code book he and her uncles and father and brother used. Flipping through the pages and then putting it away, he had smiled. Because, he’d said, he didn’t have to make another copy and didn’t have to fear it falling into an enemy’s hands.
    Finally, a valid use for her perfect recall.
    She extracted the vial and a new quill pen from the drawer, and then dipped. Between the lines of the note itself she penned her encoded message, careful to keep the invisible ink from passing over the black, lest it run. She kept it concise, merely explaining what she had found and where, and saying she would put the list of names on the back of the paper. After waiting for it to dry into nothingness, she flipped the page over and got down to work.
    Names were difficult to encode, having to do so letter by letter and using a dictionary as key. Granddad had said it was unnecessary in anything she would send him, that the ink itself was insurance enough. So she just wrote. And wrote, until her hand cramped. Each and every name on the list.
    Some he no doubt already knew, but some he might not. She crossed out the ones that had been crossed out, starred the ones that had been starred. Wrote until what she assumed was the entire castle filled her page.
    While it dried, she unlocked her door.