Letty wasn't quite sure "splendid" was the word she would have applied. Peering into the drawing room of the narrow red brick house on Cuffe Street, she was tempted to turn around and go straight back to her recently acquired lodgings. But going back to her lodgings meant being alone. Being alone meant thinking. As for thinking…It had become a very dangerous pastime.

Back in London, her thoughts had run along straightforward lines, organized into compartments such as "servants' wages," "placating parents," and "preventing sister from eloping." Ever since she had woken up on the Dublin packet, an entirely new category had monopolized her thoughts: Lord Pinchingdale. Late at night, long after Emily was fast asleep, Letty lay awake, rehearsing endless scenarios in her head. It hadn't escaped her notice that she grew more eloquent, and Lord Pinchingdale more easily convinced, in each successive daydream. By the time the boat had docked, delayed by a slight squall a mere day out of Dublin, Lord Pinchingdale was brushing a strand of hair off her cheek, gazing meaningfully into her eyes, and declaring soulfully that he had never truly seen her before.

Naturally, that was what would happen. Right after she was crowned Queen of France.

Reluctantly, Letty retrieved the remnants of her common sense. Soulful glances might not be terribly likely, but the more Letty thought about it, the more optimistic she was about her impromptu journey—at least, once the initial headache faded, and her mouth stopped feeling like a well-worn camel path. Thanks to Henrietta's revelations, she at least understood why Lord Pinchingdale had been treating her like the more disgusting sort of leper. Aside from that slight aberration, he had always struck Letty as a kind and reasonable man. Once she convinced him that she hadn't deliberately set out to ruin his life, they could both apologize to each other, and go on from there.

It all made excellent sense. Or, at least, it had while she was still on the boat.

Tomorrow, she promised herself. Tomorrow she would seek out her husband in his Dublin lodgings.

As for tonight…well, Emily would have been very disappointed if Letty hadn't accompanied her to Mrs. Lanergan's party, Letty rationalized to herself. Emily had kept up a constant monologue on the boat about all the wonderful things she wanted to do—and darling Mrs. Alsdale to do with her—once they got to Dublin. While shopping figured prominently, Mrs. Lanergan's annual party headed the list. Emily had planned her toilette, fretted over the ship's delay, and chattered about how many beaux she planned to attach.

"How do I look?" Emily demanded, swishing her pale pink skirts.

"Lovely," answered Letty, submitting to being towed into the drawing room, where women in pale gowns mingled with redcoated officers and dandies in gaudily colored frock coats. For such a butterfly creature, Emily had a surprisingly strong grip. "Really."

"Mere physical appearance," announced Emily's guardian, Mr. Throtwottle, repressively, stalking over the threshold behind them, "is a matter of extreme indifference to those who devote their lives to the cultivation of the mind."

Anyone could see that Mr. Throtwottle practiced what he preached in terms of dress. His clothes were a rusty black, his frock coat outmoded, his linen decidedly musty. The buckles on his shoes were so old that whatever paste jewels might have originally resided within the frames had long since fallen out, leaving only empty prongs in their place. Letty couldn't imagine a more inappropriate guardian for the flibbertigibbet Emily. Neither, apparently, could Mr. Throtwottle, who had gratefully handed Emily off to Letty for the duration of the voyage. By the time they had reached Irish shores, Letty's head rang with exclamation marks and swam with superlatives. Next to Emily's determined girlishness, Letty felt about a hundred years old.

Letty reached to straighten one of the pink flowers Emily had twined into a chaplet on top of her curls. "The flowers are a nice touch."

"Oh, thank you!" Emily beamed. "I wore them in honor of the Pink Carnation. He's so dreadfully romantic, don't you think?"

Letty had to confess that she had never given the matter serious thought. She found the whole topic of spies vaguely silly, at least the sort of spies who had their exploits written up in the illustrated papers and were dubbed romantic by empty-headed girls. Really, some of them were no better than highwaymen, constantly attention-seeking. One would think that a good spy would do his best to remain inconspicuous, rather than indulge in needless dramatics with black cloaks and mocking notes.

"I've read everything there is to read about him," said Emily dreamily, illustrating Letty's point admirably. "They say that he's a dispossessed French nobleman, flung out into the world. But I think he must be English, don't you, Mrs. Alsdale?"

"I haven't the slightest notion," said Letty, who was saved from replying further by the appearance of a middle-aged woman wearing a gown far too young for her years. The white contrasted unfortunately with the high color in her cheeks, and the soft muslin clung unforgivingly to her ample form.

Introducing herself as their hostess, she said eagerly, "I do hope you are enjoying my little party."

"It is as the poet says: 'And to Arcadia I go,'" intoned Mr. Throtwottle solemnly.

"Don't you mean 'et in Arcadia ego'?" Letty asked. Her father had a habit of trotting out Latin aphorisms, largely because it drove her mother, who couldn't understand a word of it, utterly mad.

"Of course." Mr. Throtwottle's arched nostrils quivered briefly in her direction. "Isn't that what I just said? I translate from the Latin, of course," he added, for the benefit of the unenlightened, in which group he generously included Letty.

Mrs. Lanergan clasped her beringed hands to her bosom. "Such a joy it is to have a man of learning by one's side! Mr. Throtwottle, you simply must visit again."

"I certainly shall, my good woman. But now, if I may, I will seek out the solitude of your library."

Mrs. Lanergan's brow furrowed. "There is the colonel's book room…."

"Would it be too much to hope that you possess a copy of the Consolations of Eusebius?"

"Boethius," muttered Letty, who had alphabetized her father's library no fewer than three times before finally giving up.

"Bless you," said Mr. Throtwottle, offering her his handkerchief.

Mr. Throtwottle departed for quieter regions, while Mrs. Lanergan chattered on beside her, pointing out other guests to an enthralled Emily. Et in Arcadia ego seemed an inopportune sort of phrase with which to begin an evening of revelry, signifying, as it did, the presence of death and decay even in the midst of life's pleasures, like the snake twining through the apple-laden leaves in the Garden of Eden. Perhaps, thought Letty, Mr. Throtwottle was tonight's snake in the garden, a grim figure in his rusty black as he stalked among the party guests in their gauzy gowns and bright regimentals. Put a scythe in his hand, and he would look just like the picture of avenging Death in an allegorical woodcut.

The frivolous young couple just in front of him rounded out the morality tale beautifully, decided Letty. Aside from their more modern costume, they looked exactly like a Renaissance painter's image of an amorous shepherd and his lass in the classic pose of seducer and seduced, her head tilted up toward him, his hand on the back of her chair as he leaned to whisper in her ear behind the fragile screen of her fan, his dark head bent close to her fair one.

Whatever he whispered must have pressed the bounds of propriety, because the girl with the silver-gilt curls furled her fan and rapped her suitor sternly on the shoulder. Stepping neatly out of range, he captured the hand with the fan—and Letty caught her first full view of his face.

The room felt very close, and the band that fastened beneath her breasts very, very tight. The other guests pressed around her like birds of prey, too loud, too shrill, too near. The room was too hot, the scents too oppressive, and her eyes ached with the smoke of the candles. She wanted, desperately, to be back in London. Anywhere but here. Even tea with Mrs. Ponsonby would be preferable. Anything would be preferable to watching her husband kiss the hand of another woman.

All of Letty's daydreams charred and shriveled, like a posy fallen too near the fire.

If only there were an innocent explanation! Letty toyed with the stock characters of fiction, the unexpected double, the long-departed twin. For a moment, the latter almost seemed believable. The features might be the same, but this man, with his too-knowing eyes and his leering lips, had nothing in common with the contemplative man who had so tenderly paid court to her sister. But Lord Pinchingdale was an only child. She knew that, because she had overheard him telling Mary about it once, what seemed like a very long time ago, in a London ballroom. His father, older brother, and two younger siblings had all been carried away by the same virulent attack of smallpox when he was eight.

The girl couldn't be a long-lost sister or an Irish cousin. One didn't lean that close to whisper into the ear of a cousin, or smile at a long-lost sister in that slumberous, heavy-lidded way. Every movement screamed seduction. He had never looked at her like that, or even at Mary. With Mary, he had always been respectful, almost reverent, never with that challenging sexuality simmering just near the surface. It made Letty squirm with embarrassment, and something else, something that she didn't care to analyze.