The Bullet-Catcher's Daughter by Rod Duncan

We’re travelling to Loughborough to visit our families and attend to their various memorials.”
    “My brother should wake later.”
    “We’ll expect him this evening,” she said, with a look of satisfaction that made me suspect I had missed something important. Then she pulled a blue and white striped envelope from her purse and handed it to me. The markings belonged to the office of the Avian Post and were unmistakable.
    I thanked her, hiding my surprise. “I’ll put it in his hand,” I said.
    “But Elizabeth, this letter is addressed to you.”
    I saw then that her eyes were on me, intently examining my reaction.
    I sat for many minutes after she had gone, turning the envelope in my hands. I had never before received a message by Avian Post. The address must have been written by the pigeon master at the local loft. The script had a left-leaning slant.
    Miss Elizabeth Barnabus
    c/o the North Leicester Wharf
    North Leicester
    I held the sealed fold of the envelope to the light and brought it close to my eye. If Mrs Simmonds had steamed it open, I might expect some wrinkling to remain. When casually dampened and dried, paper does not return to the same pristine flatness, though the heat and pressure of an iron can sometimes do the trick.
    Inserting the tip of a thin knife under the flap of the envelope I slit carefully along its length. Inside, I found a sheet of pale blue paper onto which lengths of white silk ribbon had been glued. It was on these that the Duchess had written her message:
     
Elizabeth: I have had recent business dealings with your brother but he has terminated our relationship. I am taking the liberty of writing directly to you regarding this matter. When I sent payment to your brother, it was in the form of coins. I trust he may have retained the bag in which they were conveyed. If you examine the inner seam, you will find a maker’s label. You will have no trouble in locating the maker’s premises. If your brother wishes to return the remaining coins, I would be grateful if he could entrust them to you, to be carried to the bag-maker’s assistant in the aforementioned shop, this coming Friday during the afternoon. 
    Go alone.
    An official notice printed at the very bottom of the page informed me that the message could be erased with soapy water and the ribbon sold back to the local Avian Post loft at a rate of one penny per inch.
    John Farthing’s warning had caused me to put the quest for the Duchess’s brother out of my mind. But with her message in my hand, questions started to return. Why had she addressed it to my female persona? The cryptic language told me that she expected it to be opened en-route . Clearly, it would have been read by the local pigeon master as he glued it to the paper. But did she fear that it would also be read by the Patent Office? Who did she believe was being spied on – herself, my brother or perhaps both? And if John Farthing had read it, what would his reaction be?
    Upturning the small woollen bag, I spilled the Duchess’s remaining gold sovereigns onto the galley table and began arranging them in piles of ten. From her initial payment of seventy coins, sixty-one remained. Two coins would pay Bessie ’s mooring fees for the month. Another three might keep me in coal and food during the same period, if I lived frugally. But one hundred would be needed to pay off Leon, securing my boat and my livelihood for another year. Picking up a coin and turning it in the lamp light, I wondered at man’s strange fascination for this metal.
    Night conceals but twilight conceals doubly so. With dusk falling, I climbed from the forward hatch onto the crutch of the boat, face bewhiskered, enjoying the ease of movement granted by male attire. Fashions for bustles, corsets and hooped skirts would surely vanish should women experience such freedom. Even the rational dress I habitually chose did not allow me to clamber the shortcut from the towpath up the steep embankment.