Then he was in front of her. Unwillingly, Claudia stepped aside. “Sebastian is in the front room. I’ll take you to him.” When he didn’t move, “I suppose I should introduce you to—”

He said, “Hello, Jess.”

Claudia said, “Do you know Miss Whitby? I suppose you meet all kinds of people—”

“Go away,” Adrian Hawkhurst said.

The rudeness silenced Claudia. Neither of them really noticed when she turned on her heel and flounced off.

He was Hurst, her old friend. Even now, knowing everything he’d done, half of her leapt up, thinking, He’s going to make everything right.

He looked at her steady, waiting till she decided what to say. He was dressed . . . She didn’t know how to put it. Not more prosperously. He’d always worn beautiful clothing. But . . . fashionably. That was it. He dressed like a nob, now.

“Hurst.” She held on to the newel post at the bottom of the stairs.

“I’m calling myself Adrian Hawkhurst these days.” He took his hat off and held it, all stiff and grave. How strange to see him with a high-crowned beaver hat. All that time in St. Petersburg, she’d never seen him with a proper hat, only that furry sable thing with earflaps. For years she’d thought that was proper attire for a butler.

“Did you get the letters I wrote? I always wondered.”

He said, “I got them. I kept in touch with Josiah, but I thought it was better to leave you alone.”

He still acted like he was Papa’s friend. He’d sent his dogs to pull Papa out of the warehouse in his shirtsleeves. He’d locked Papa up at Meeks Street and he was talking to her like they were friends. There’d be all kinds of plausible excuses. None of them worth the spit it took to say. If she’d been a woman given to crying, she would have taken the time to do some, right then. She sat down abruptly on the stairs and wrapped her arms tight around her.

Hurst came and sat down next to her. The two of them, side by side. It was all so familiar. Her stomach hurt like she had an animal trapped inside, clawing at her. She could have doubled over and moaned with the pain of it.

After a long time, she put her hands into her lap. “Remember the way we used to sit like this, in the house in St. Petersburg? That big marble staircase. The Russians were so fond of all that cold marble, but it about froze my arse off.”

“I remember.” He put his hat on his knee and watched it.

“You used to scold me for talking like that. Said it wasn’t ladylike. I wouldn’t have done it half as much if you hadn’t scolded.”

“I know.”

“I was almost grown up by that time. Twelve, maybe.”

“Thereabouts.”

“Papa would leave for a party with one of his mistresses, and we’d sit on the stairs and talk about the party and the mistress, and then we’d go down to the kitchen and the babushka would fix me little pancakes. I haven’t had one of those in years. Blini with honey.”

“There’s a place in Soho you can get them.”

“Is there?” She turned her hands over and looked at the crescent-shaped marks where her nails had bit in. “We’d sit in the kitchen and eat pancakes and drink cups of tea from those painted cups Papa had made for me. And play chess. You taught me to play chess. Papa never had the patience.”

“I thought you should learn to play one game you couldn’t cheat at.”

Hurst always talked like that. He’d understood how hard it was for her, being so very respectable all the time. She’d been able to say anything at all to Hurst. She’d felt safe with him. Even when Papa traveled all up and down Russia, she never minded because Hurst was there.

“Did you always let me win, right to the end? Or did I really get so I could beat you?”

“I let you win.”

The feeling of doubleness overwhelmed her, a sense of one man fitting over another. Hurst, the butler, who was her old friend. Adrian Hawkhurst, the spy. She would have trusted Hurst with her life, and he’d never even existed.

She said, “Remember the time you caught me sneaking brandy in Papa’s study? You took the bottle up to your sitting room and let me drink the rest of it, and I sat in your lap and told you I was in love with you. And then I got so bloody sick all over you.”

“I remember that.” He turned his hat so that it faced the other way on his knee. “Do you know, you are absolutely the only woman who has ever said she loved me.”

“Was it true what you said that night about loving a Frenchwoman? Or was that lies, too?” When someone is composed entirely of lies, it made no sense asking him questions, did it?

“That was the truth, Jess. Every word of it. You are one of three people in the world who know that.”

For what it was worth, she believed him. Even now, Hurst could lie to her and make her believe it. He was very, very good at lying. “I still can’t drink brandy. I like it. I can judge it and buy it, but I never did get a head for drinking the stuff.” Her voice flaked off in pieces around the edge.

“I know.”

“I guess there’s nothing you don’t know about me, is there?” The inside of her head ached with not crying. “Papa never came out and told me you worked for the British. Not till the end. I don’t know why I didn’t figure it out.”

“You were very young, devochka, and you didn’t want to know about it. I ran the entire British Service operation for Russia out of your kitchen. Every so often your father’s spies and mine would bump into each other in the hall. You have something in your eye, I think.” He handed her a handkerchief.

It was the kind he’d always had. He bought them in Jermyn Street—cambric, dead simple, fine sewing, and the hem deeper than usual. She pressed it to her eyes so she wouldn’t cry. When she was twelve she’d have blown her nose in it. She’d acquired all sorts of airs and graces, hadn’t she?

He said, “That last day . . . Josiah wasn’t supposed to get shot. None of that was supposed to happen.”

“Did, though.” She folded the handkerchief up in a square, neat like. “Papa tells a story about the time he was in a storm off Majorca. Every penny he had in the world was tied up in cargo. They were going onto the rocks, so he threw the whole lot overboard, down to the last box and bale. He said it was a sacrifice to the God of Luck. When you call on the God of Luck, you have to scrape down and give up everything, or you don’t get his attention.”

She looked him straight in the eye. “My life’s like that. I keep having to throw everything overboard. Push. Splash. And there goes Hurst the butler. When did the Foreign Office decide they need our depots in the East? About last year, wasn’t it? They’re the ones who sent you after Papa.”

“Jessie—”

“Must have been a year ago they decided to destroy Papa. That’s when the garbage starts showing up in the account books.”

He didn’t move. Didn’t make a sound.

“It’s too bad you turned out to be a spy instead of a butler. You can’t be much of a spy if it took you a whole year to bring down my father. But you were an excellent butler.” She stood up and threw the handkerchief in his face. “Bugger you anyway,” and headed back to hide in the dining room.

Saying all that didn’t make her feel any better. She hadn’t thought it would.

Twenty

SEBASTIAN WAITED AT THE DOORWAY TO THE front parlor in the shadow of a knight’s armor. He’d engineered this meeting. If it was a disaster, at least he’d watch.

“She’s sitting on the floor,” Claudia said. “Like a gypsy.”

He put out his hand before she took off in that direction. “You don’t want to go over there. Let them talk.”

“I rather thought I was rescuing Adrian.” Claudia gave an abrupt, sharp-edged laugh. “Such an intense little tête-à-tête. There’s a history between those two, obviously.”

“Don’t interfere.”

“Your friend and your little heiress. If you have interest in that quarter you should intervene before he snaps her up himself. Are you sure you don’t want me to interrupt?”

“I want you to leave them strictly alone.” There was malice in Claudia. But once upon a time, she’d taught a fithy-mouthed, resentful bastard boy from the docks how to use a knife and fork. She’d had a sharp, nasty tongue then, too.

Quentin pulled himself away from a discussion with two clerks from the War Office and strode across the parlor with the weighty and distinguished tread of a statesman, face serious, his hands clasped behind his back. He frowned upon the pair sitting together on the grand staircase. “I don’t like this. What the deuce is that man doing with Miss Whitby? We stand, as it were, in loco parentis as long as she’s under our roof. He’s upsetting the girl.”

“Miss Whitby is upsetting him right back,” Claudia said tartly. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen Adrian ruffled. I didn’t know he could be.”

There he is, sprawling on the steps beside her. “Whatever her background, that’s ungentlemanly behavior.”

Then Jess got up, grim-faced, and stalked off. Not a successful first meeting. Adrian had been wrong about one thing, though. She didn’t spit at him.

Quentin puffed his cheeks out. “How much do we actually know about this Hawkhurst fellow? He’s a friend of yours, of course. That counts for something. Accepted everywhere. Presents a good appearance. But does anyone know his people? Does he even have people? When one moves, as I do, in government circles, one hears stories . . .”

“They say he’s a Romanov bastard. Perhaps Jess met him in Russia.” Claudia tilted her head. “Look. She’s gone off crying. How very affecting. I feel called upon to offer womanly sympathy.”