The French Master's Secret Register
A Victorian Boarding School Spy Novel

About this book:

Monsieur Charles Duprat has arrived at St. Jude's College to teach French to the sons of the British Empire—dukes' heirs, admirals' boys, and the Viscount Danforth's arrogant eldest. His credentials are impeccable: a disgraced Parisian academic fleeing the Second Empire's collapse. His accent is perfect. His temper is iron. And beneath the floorboards of his cold North Tower room lies a black leather register with steel corners, waiting for names.

By day, Duprat drills conditional tenses into boys who will one day command frigates and negotiate treaties. By night, he deciphers the careless margin notes of fourteen-year-olds who repeat their fathers' War Office secrets over Latin hymns. A railway sketch in a grammar exercise. A muttered boast about boiler trials. A prefect's midnight visit to the chapel crypt. Each scrap of intelligence is encoded in chalk on a blackboard, hidden in the sequence of naval vocabulary, spirited away to Paris before the morning bell.

But St. Jude's is no ordinary school, and the boys are no ordinary targets. When a wax seal is broken in the library, a telegram arrives from the Quai d'Orsay, and the Headmaster's dinner guest asks too many questions about the Channel coast, Duprat's careful cover begins to fracture. In a fortress where every stone has witnessed a century of imperial certainty, the French Master is about to learn that the most dangerous secrets at St. Jude's aren't written in his register—they're the ones the boys already know.