Blood Moon Luna

The advertisement was three lines long and had ruined Isla Marchmont's sleep for a week.

WANTED: Secretary. Must be exceptional with figures. Must not waste my time. Apply in person, Camden House, Thursday, nine o'clock sharp. Late applicants will not be seen.

No name attached, though half of London knew whose house sat at that address. Isla had read it a dozen times in the coffeehouse where she wasn't strictly allowed to sit, wearing trousers that still felt borrowed even after four months, and thought, there it is. There's my way back in.

Now she stood outside Camden House at eight fifty-one, nine minutes early, her collar starched stiff enough to cut glass, trying to remember to walk the way she'd practiced. Longer strides. Looser shoulders. Hands still, not fluttering.

"Name," said the butler, not looking up from his ledger.

"Ian March." She'd said it so many times to her own reflection that it came out steady.

"Mr. March." He glanced at her, the way a man glances at a coin he suspects might be light. "His lordship is finishing with the previous applicant. Sit."

She sat. Carefully. Knees apart, the way men sat, though it felt absurd, like she was airing something out.

The previous applicant came through the study door four minutes later, looking freshly bereaved.

"Don't bother," he told her, straightening his coat with unsteady hands. "He's impossible. I have a first from Cambridge and he told me my penmanship was an insult to the page."

"I'll bring worse paper, then," Isla said. "Lower the bar for both of us."

He didn't laugh. He didn't seem to have laughter left in him. He simply left.

"Mr. March," the butler said. "His lordship will see you."

The Earl of Camden did not look up when she entered.

He sat behind a desk the size of a rowboat, buried in correspondence, his coat black and utterly without a single crease, as if wrinkles had been informed they weren't welcome and had known better than to argue. His pen scratched fast and hard across the page.

"Sit," he said. "Don't speak until I address you. Silence saves us both from you composing lies about your qualifications."

Isla sat. She folded her hands the way she'd seen her father do, and waited, and thought privately that this was one of the rudest men she had ever met, though she kept that thought entirely off her face.

He looked up eventually. Catalogued her the way she imagined he catalogued a doubtful investment.

"You're younger than the others."

"I'm told that improves with time, my lord." It came out quieter than she meant it to, testing the water rather than diving in. "Though I'm told very little else does."

He studied her another moment, unreadable. "What is four hundred and eighty-two multiplied by seventeen, divided by six, minus forty?"

"One thousand, three hundred sixty-five, point six repeating, my lord."

No pause. No flourish. She'd learned that much, at least, watching her father work: never perform the arithmetic, just arrive at it, like the answer had been sitting there waiting for someone to ask.

He set down his pen. "Where did you learn figures like that?"

"My father, my lord. He kept books for a shipping concern. I learned at his side."

"Kept. Past tense."

"He's passed, my lord. My mother as well." She kept her voice even, folded the rest of it away where it lived, quiet and unshown. "It's why I'm here rather than there."

He didn't offer condolences, and she was grateful, because she wasn't certain what her face would do if he tried.

"I don't hire men who weep in my study," he said.

"I've no plans to, my lord." A small breath. Bold, but not too bold, testing whether the ground would hold her weight. "Though if it eases your mind, I could schedule any weeping for Sundays, when you're presumably at church atoning for whatever it is Cambridge boys leave here atoning for."

Nothing moved in his face at all. Not even close to a smile. If anything, he looked mildly irritated that she'd tried, and Isla felt her stomach sink an inch, recalibrating. Too much. Pull it back.

"You'll start Monday," he said, already flat again, already bored of her. "Six in the morning until I say otherwise, which is rarely before midnight. You'll call me my lord. You will not touch my correspondence before I have read it. Is that agreeable?"

"Perfectly, my lord."

"Then that will—"

A folder slid from the edge of his overloaded desk before he could finish, spilling papers across the floor between them. Isla was on her knees gathering them before she'd thought better of it, quick, tidy, instinctive, the way she'd have done it at home, humming without meaning to as she squared the edges, a habit her mother used to tease her for.

She caught herself two seconds too late. Stopped humming. Cleared her throat instead, low and rough, the way she'd practiced.

When she looked up, he was watching her with an expression she couldn't place, somewhere between curiosity and mild suspicion, as though he'd noticed a smudge on a very clean window and wasn't yet certain if it was dirt or a flaw in the glass itself.

"You hum," he said.

"Apologies, my lord. A habit. I'll see it broken."

"See that you do. This isn't a nursery."

"No, my lord. Plainly not. Nurseries rarely have this many ledgers."

He didn't laugh at that either. He simply looked at her a beat too long, the way one looks at a sum that hasn't quite balanced, and Isla busied herself stacking the last of the papers so she wouldn't have to hold his gaze.

"That will be all, Mr. March," he said finally. "Monday. Six sharp."

She stood, papers squared neatly on the desk, and made for the door before her luck ran out any further.

"Mr. March."

She turned.

"Your hat," he said. "Off, indoors. I won't remind you twice."

Her stomach dropped clean through the floor.

She'd forgotten. In four months of practice, four months of learning to walk like a man and sit like a man and fold her hands like a man, she had never once forgotten her hat indoors. Until the one room in London where forgetting it mattered most.

"Of course, my lord." She reached up and pulled it free, feeling the short, ragged ends of her cropped hair settle around her ears. "I'll remember next time."

He looked at her hair. Her face. The line of her jaw, just a moment too long to be nothing.

"See that you do," he said, but slower now, like the sentence had cost him something to finish.

"My lord?"

"You may go."

She left before he could change his mind about any of it, out through the hall, past the butler, into the grey London morning, and didn't let herself breathe properly until she'd put three streets between herself and that study.

She told herself it was nothing. A passing glance. Men looked at strange things sometimes, and she'd simply been the strangest thing in that room.

She was still telling herself that on Sunday night, lying awake, when it occurred to her, far too late to be useful, that the Earl of Camden had not once, in the whole of their meeting, actually smiled.

And somehow that unsettled her far more than if he had.

Isla arrived at Camden House at five forty-eight, which she considered a personal triumph, given that she'd woken at four to bind her chest properly, wrap her hair under a cap, and rehearse walking down the stairs like a man who hadn't spent the entire night wondering why an earl had looked at her jaw as though it owed him money.

The butler, whose name she'd learned was Hodges, opened the door before she knocked.

"Early," he said, sounding almost offended by it.

"I was told six sharp, and I've found that sharp things tend to arrive before they're expected, or they aren't sharp at all."

Hodges blinked at her. "His lordship is in the study. He hasn't slept."

"Is that usual?"

"For him, Mr. March, sleep is usual. Not sleeping is simply more usual."

He led her down the same hall as before, past a wall of portraits so severe-looking that Isla found herself wondering whether the Camden family bred sternness the way other families bred spaniels.