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Stuart rubbed one hand over his jaw. “Do you think it could provoke a confrontation?”

“I think hungry men carrying weapons and soldiers waiting for trouble require very little assistance in finding one another.”

The cottage fell quiet.

Baines looked again towards the northern hills. He had spent enough years in uniform to know how little resemblance violence bore to the language used before it began. Gentlemen spoke of restoring order, radicals of liberty, ministers of necessity and soldiers of duty. Afterward there were horses screaming, men bleeding into mud and someone obliged to write to a mother or wife explaining why a cause which had seemed terribly important at breakfast had cost her everything by supper.

He had no desire to see it happen here.

More uncomfortably, he had begun to understand some of the men who might be caught in it.

The Bells were not revolutionaries. Will Fletcher was not a revolutionary. The mill workers Judith worried over did not wake each morning longing to overthrow the Crown; most appeared to want sufficient wages to feed their children and some assurance that the gentlemen deciding their futures knew they existed. Baines could understand that grievance without believing a pike would improve it.

That grievance was what made the present situation so dangerous. Desperate men did not need to begin as revolutionaries. They required only enough hunger, enough anger and someone sufficiently persuasive to convince them that nothing short of violence remained.

Renforth raised one brow. “An unusually concise strategic assessment.”

Baines ignored him. “We should have found this source sooner.”

Manners looked at him. “We have been looking.”

Baines grunted. “Meanwhile, someone has been moving information out of Blackthorn beneath our noses.”

“You have been there less than a fortnight.”

“A remarkably long time if someone manages to start a war during it.”

Renforth’s expression hardened. “Do not take that path.”

Baines glanced at him. “Sir?”

“You decide that because you have identified a danger, you are personally responsible for preventing every possible consequence of it.”

Baines shifted uncomfortably. It was the truth.

“You are responsible for your task,” Renforth said. “Find the source of the disclosures and stop it. You are not responsible for settling all of Scotland.”

Baines knew Renforth was right about the limits of what one man could control; he had learned that lesson repeatedly during the war and disliked it every time. Knowing that he could not prevent every foolish decision made north of the border did nothing to lessen the urgency of preventing the one presently within his reach.

Fielding gave him a steady look. “Let’s find the man responsible before anyone has the opportunity to discover whether your fears are justified.”

Baines returned his attention to the handbill. “Then let us begin by admitting that our trap did not tell us what we expected. We assumed that the person to whom we gave each piece of information would either transmit it or not. What we did not consider was that the information might pass through another person before it ever left Blackthorn.”

Stuart frowned. “You think all three repeated what they heard?”

“Perhaps; or perhaps only two did. Perhaps Lady Beckenham mentioned her version to someone over tea, while Cranford boasted of his knowledge at cards and Pembroke demonstrated his own importance to a servant who was helping him dress. The significant point is that whoever prepared this—” Baines said, tapping the handbill,“—possessed enough fragments to reconcile the contradictions.”

Chum bent over the paper. “If he heard that cavalry were going north and troops were going west, he could conclude that forces were being redistributed in several directions rather than recognize that one report must be false.”

“Exactly. Then he adds Newcastle because Lady Beckenham’s information suggests troops are remaining there. The result is not any one of our stories, but an apparently coherent interpretation of all three.”

Manners considered it. “Which means we have been watching the people speaking when we ought to have been watching whoever was listening.”

Baines pointed at him. “That was almost intelligent.”

“I shall bear your admiration with humility.”

Renforth ignored them. “Who could have heard all three?”