A Thread for the Spider

Content note: 18+. Explicit consensual scenes, the blackmail of voters through bought debts, two men beaten in the street, arson of an occupied public house, a con man's manipulation of the heroine in the past, and drinking on the page.

She keeps the ward's debts in chalk. He won't buy a single pint.

Jessamy Lusk keeps the Anchor and Cable on Rope Walk, her father's house, and she keeps the river ward on the slate behind her counter: every regular's score in her own chalk marks, wiped when it is settled, and never once read out to a bailiff or a wife. On the Monday the polling notice goes up on her door, a rope-maker who has owed her all summer pays his whole score in new sovereigns. The coins come wrapped in a ruled slip with his name and a sum on it, and Jessamy knows that ruling. She last saw it three years ago, on the Fridays when a cheerful man in a good coat and a bad shirt sat at her corner table.

Laurence Dacre is standing for alderman as a reformer under the Act of '54, and in his first speech he named her house as a treating house. He is proud, exact and nearly penniless, he has read the statute for every hole in it, and he will not stand a single pint to win. When a cooper and then a block-maker tell him they cannot vote for him because somebody has their page, Laurence comes back down the hill to ask the one person on Rope Walk who knows what a page is. She lies to him. He knows it. She knows he knows.

"It's for the floor. I haven't decided about you."

A page is a man's entry in the black book of the Underwriter's House, which fell three years ago and lost its master book in the crush. Somebody has it, and he is copying out the ward's debts one slip at a time, each with a word in pencil: vote Sackett, or your page is presented and you are sold up. The bearded gentleman who keeps to the river stairs has a laugh Jessamy last heard across her own fire. Her house is in his book. So is something Laurence has not told her.

She gives no man's name to any court. He will not buy a single vote. The poll is eight weeks off, and it is open.

A Thread for the Spider is a slow-burn historical romance and an election mystery in one: a landlady who reads the ward off her slate and reads men by how they order, a reformer who knows the law of the poll to the clause, terms made out loud over a half-pint of small beer, a kitchen full of rope-makers' wives with empty buckets, and a ward that has to say, one man at a time and out loud, whose it is. Open-door heat on her terms, on-page danger, and an ending you can trust. For readers who like their heroines big-handed and unbought and their heroes proud enough to be wrong and honest enough to say so, and who want to watch an open poll climb the planks to the table.

A complete standalone. One couple, one full story, no cliffhanger, guaranteed happily-ever-after. Book Seven of The Owner's Table, a series of dark romantic suspense novels set in one connected world. Read them in any order. A Standalone Novel in a Connected World.