Ouch! He had whacked right into an ornamental bench that some diabolical mastermind had placed right up against the wall. Miles swallowed a bellow of pain, cursing silently, which wasn't nearly as satisfying as cursing noisily.

Rubbing his shin, the black shadow limped along, examining his options. Up three shallow steps stood a balcony, with French doors that gave onto the garden. The steps, of course, were right in the center of the garden, in plain view of anyone in the house. The ornamental shrubs that marked out the patterns of the parterre would provide no concealment; they came to Miles's knee at best.

Easily enough remedied, thought Miles with a roguish grin. Placing one black-gloved hand on the corner of the stone balustrade, he vaulted over the railing, landing in a supple crouch on the balcony. Standing, Miles flexed his arms smugly.

Back against the wall, he edged his way to the French doors, and with one cautious, gloved hand, tried the handle. It turned smoothly. Once inside, Miles didn't let himself stop to gloat; he had worked out a plan of action last night, and intended to stick to it. He had already wasted enough time giving that revolting reprobate Frobisher the what-for.

Miles jerked his mind back to the matter at hand before it could stray into dangerous territory.

Vaughn's study would be the obvious place to search — which was precisely why he wasn't going to do so. If Vaughn was the ruthless spy he supposed him, he would have anticipated the possibility of midnight callers, and hidden his papers accordingly, planting false information in the more obvious spots, such as locked desk drawers and hollow globes.

Besides, Vaughn had only recently returned from his travels; he would have gotten in the habit of keeping his most sensitive papers close by him, ready to be packed up and moved along at a moment's notice. And when a gentleman wanted something kept close at hand, he kept it in his bedroom. The same principle applied for both documents of a sensitive nature and mistresses.

Even Delaroche, that half-mad fanatic, kept his more sensitive documents under his pillow — or had done, until Richard cleared out the lot. Vaughn's house was a connoisseur's dream and a spy's nightmare, filled with tottering vases and unexpected statues. Miles nearly fell back into one of the former as he rounded a corner to encounter a fourteen-feet-high Hercules guarding the front stairs. A very dispirited4ooking lion crouched underneath Hercules' foot, and the club in Hercules' hand seemed to be pointed directly at Miles.

"Hello, old chap," murmured Miles as he placed one foot warily on the first step, balancing on the balls of his feet to keep his heels from clicking tellingly against the marble. Rugs. That was what this house needed, decided Miles crossly. Lots and lots of rugs. It would make creeping about much easier.

Hercules continued to watch him as he climbed, the stairs circling around the statue. "Keep an eye out for the staff for me, would you?" Miles asked. He had always felt something of a rapport with Hercules ever since that incident with the determined countess. And he shared the man's dislike for snakes, an antipathy obviously not echoed by Vaughn. They figured prominently in his decorating scheme. Sconces encircled by writhing reptiles reposed at regular intervals along the walls.

Crossing his fingers for luck, Miles selected a room at random, slipping soundlessly inside, shutting the door again behind him. With the heavy drapes closed, the room was in complete darkness. Rather than blundering about, Miles decided to risk striking a match. In the momentary flare, he saw flowered wallpaper, a dainty writing desk, and an embroidered fire screen.

Not the earl's bedchamber — but the countess's?

Miles made it to the window just before the match burned down onto his fingers, nudging the drapes aside just enough to allow in sufficient moonlight to see by. Everything was a little blurry, but it was safer than another match, and what he saw confirmed his guess. The room was dainty, and feminine, and nothing in it dated to later than a decade ago. Dried-up bottles containing cosmetics and perfume still sat on the dressing table, and an old-fashioned sacque was draped along the end of the bed, as though its owner were expected to return and don it at any moment.

More importantly, there were doors in both walls, and where there was a countess's suite, there was bound to be the earl's. Much easier than blundering around the hallway, poking his head through more doorways. One never knew who might be on the other side.

The door on the far left yielded what Miles sought. He was in Vaughn's bedchamber. And quite a bedchamber it was. The room was dominated by an immense bed, placed on a raised dais in the French style, and adorned with innumerable swags of rich blue velvet. Two shapely nymphs held up the headboard, an immense shell that Venus would be proud to call her own. The carvings on the bedposts carried out the aquatic theme; dolphins disported themselves with water nymphs while Triton supervised from above. Miles gave the posts a careful tap — the dolphins' tails looked like excellent latches for a secret cache — but came away with nothing more than a bruised knuckle.

The small cabinet beside the bed likewise refused to yield up any vital secrets, containing nothing more exciting than a chamber pot. Determined to be thorough, Miles removed the item. After all, what more devious place to hide secret documents? An exceedingly quick inspection put paid to that theory. Sometimes, a chamber pot was just a chamber pot.

By the time he had rooted through all the bed linen, inspected Vaughn's armoire, gone through his collection of silver-headed canes, peered underneath an embroidered footstool and up the chimney, some of Miles's initial enthusiasm began to fade. He hadn't been expecting a folio volume to be sitting upon Vaughn's pillow, helpfully engraved with the legend my career as a cunning spy and other short stories, but something would have been useful. A letter in cipher, perhaps. Or a mysterious bit of crumpled paper. There had to be something. Clearly, he just wasn't looking in the right places.

Trying to scrub a hand through his hair, but foiled by the bloody bandana, Miles turned to glare at Vaughn's bed. What had he missed? There was no room to hide anything in the shell, and the nymphs were completely solid; Miles had checked, with special attention to the fleshier bits. The cabinet beside the bed held nothing but that chamber pot… and a book. How had he overlooked the book?

Skidding on a small Persian carpet, Miles bounded back up onto the dais and snatched up the book from the top of the cabinet. It was Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, and it wasn't hollow. Damn. But there was a piece of paper folded into it, marking the page.

It was too big to be the note he had seen change hands last night; Miles noticed that straight off. Sticking a finger in the book, so as not to lose Vaughn's page, Miles yanked out the folded piece of paper and shook it open. Damn, damn, damn. Nothing but a bloody playbill. No wonder Vaughn was using the thrice-blasted thing as a bookmark.

Miles started to return it to its place- — and froze. Slowly, with a dawning excitement, he held it back up to the meager moonlight. Not just a playbill. A French playbill.

If he hadn't been in Vaughn's house under decidedly suspicious circumstances, Miles would have jumped up and down and hooted. As it was, he gave an involuntary start of excitement that sent the book tumbling. Miles caught it before it could hit the ground and dumped it unceremoniously on the bed. The hell with marking the page — he had his man.

France! Vaughn had been in France! And, recently, too. The date on the playbill was only a fortnight ago, well after Bonaparte had broken the Peace of Amiens, and booted all Englishmen out of the country as potential enemy agents. Any Englishman found in the city was subject to instant imprisonment. Jane had only slipped beneath the notice of the

Ministry of Police because she was a woman, and the first cousin of Edouard de Balcourt, a toadyish hanger-on at the First Consul's court. Vaughn had been not just in France, but in Paris, heavily patrolled Paris, where the Ministry of Police was all a-quiver with anxiety over the Pink Carnation. Vaughn had been in Paris, attending a bloody operatic performance, in plain sight of Bonaparte's watchdogs. The whole thing reeked to high heaven.

Miles could have kissed that playbill, but he didn't want to smudge the ink.

Bringing it over to the window, he examined the document more closely in the moonlight. It announced the performance of one Madame Aurelia Fiorila, Queen of the Operatic Stage. The name niggled at Miles; he knew he had heard it before, and recently. He could chase down recollection later; right now, something else claimed his attention, an address, scribbled in the lower right-hand corner of the playbill: 13, rue Nicoise. Their operatives in France would have to follow the lead. It might be innocent, the home of an acquaintance, or a shop that specialized in ebony canes… or it might not be.

Miles was just folding the paper, when he heard the sound. A sound that wasn't the rustle of leaves in the maple trees, or the faint crackle of embers from the banked fire, or the steady tick of the gilded clock on the mantelpiece. The lilting lines of melody from across the square had long since ceased. In the silence, Miles heard the stealthy slide of feet moving deliberately across the floor behind him.

That was all the warning Miles had before reflected silver flashed in the window. Acting on instinct, Miles dodged out of the way, and the serpent's fangs plunged through the glass instead of Miles's head, spewing shards with a hideous clatter. Miles's assailant raised the cane to strike again.