A house servant sat alone in a small room at the Ashford Estate.
She glanced at the closed door before lowering her head and returning to the piece of parchment before her.
With a quill in hand, she carefully wrote a series of seemingly meaningless symbols and numbers. To anyone else, they would have looked like random scribbles.
But there was a pattern to them, one she had spent years learning to understand and memorize.
When she finished, she inspected the message one last time before folding the parchment several times. She slipped it into a blue wrapper, sealed it, and rose from her seat.
A moment later, the wrapper disappeared into a trash bag.
It was an ordinary bag, filled with discarded paper, food scraps, and other household waste. By the time the servants finished their work, several such bags had been gathered outside the manor.
They were loaded onto a cart and taken away from the estate.
