The courier arrived after dark, which was the first wrong thing about it.
Estate correspondence came in the morning, almost without exception — Harold's administration ran the diplomatic channel with the kind of discipline that made exceptions rare enough to be their own kind of warning. Sophie was in the east garden with Mittens when she heard the gate bell, two short rings and a pause, the pattern reserved for messages marked urgent.
She didn't go to the gate. She'd learned, over the past year, that going to the gate herself only ever got her sent away from it by someone taller. Instead she went to the study window, which had the advantage of being a place she was allowed to be and a very good view of the courtyard below.
Oziel met the courier himself. That was the second wrong thing. Harold handled routine urgency. Oziel only came out for the kind that wasn't.
She watched him break the seal, read in the lantern light, go very still.
