Across the breadth of the drawing room, her husband was lifting the blond girl's hand to his lips. He paused in that pose, toying with the circumference of the sapphire bracelet that circled her wrist, running one finger around the jeweled length.

Letty's own hands clenched into fists. She could feel the Pinchingdale betrothal ring, the only concrete proof of her marriage, boring into her palm. On the boat, she had turned it around on her finger, wondering about the man who had given it to her, and what it would mean to make a true marriage with him. She had been naively, blindly optimistic, taking the ugly ring as a tangible token of things to come. Of promises given and meant. Oh, she knew that he didn't want to be married to her—it was hard to miss—but she had thought him an honorable man, not the sort to dishonor his vows a week after the wedding. Vows were vows, after all.

How could she have been such a fool? Spinning pretty daydreams while her husband of less than a week chased after the first skirt that caught his fancy.

Letty writhed in an agony of wounded pride. She remembered the endless conversations she had rehearsed in her head on the voyage over, the apologies she had made to him, the way his handsome face turned from condemnation to respect as she explained what had really happened that fateful night. Shaking his head with self-reproach, he would apologize for having misjudged her, and apologize again for having run off (in Letty's daydreams, he did a great deal of apologizing), pressing her hand between his and declaring that if he had known what she really was, he would have stayed. Sometimes, when Emily was fast asleep in the next bunk, and the ship rocked gently on the tide, and anything seemed possible, he would even lift her hand to his lips for a gentle kiss.

As Letty watched, Lord Pinchingdale kissed, not the woman's hand, but one gloved finger, turning the simple gesture into an act of homage so erotically charged that Letty blushed just to witness it, and more than one woman in the vicinity resorted to her fan. The blonde wagged her head and simpered in a way that was more invitation than discouragement.

Letty felt ill in a way that had nothing to do with the over-spiced mutton she had eaten for dinner.

"Who is that?" she asked Mrs. Lanergan, doing her best to imbue her voice with nothing more than polite interest. "The girl with the blond hair."

Always delighted to assist where gossip might be had, Mrs. Lanergan leaned forward, her bosom straining precariously against her dйcolletage as she peered past Letty.

"Oh, that's Miss Gilly Fairley. Quite an heiress, they say—and a beauty, too! The woman with her is her aunt, Mrs. Ernestine Grimstone." Mrs. Lanergan indicated a dark-garbed woman who sported a ferocious scowl. The scowl, Letty was pleased to see, was trained directly on Lord Pinchingdale. At least someone in the room showed some sense. Lowering her voice slightly, Mrs. Lanergan added, "Between the three of us, she's a cold fish, that one. Or do I mean a sour grape?"

"Don't tease, Mrs. Lanergan!" protested Emily, sweeping aside Mrs. Lanergan's culinary metaphors with a shake of her dark curls. "Who is the gentleman?"

Under the circumstances, Letty found the use of the word "gentleman" decidedly inapt.

"That," said Mrs. Lanergan importantly, "is Lord Pinchingdale, newly come from London. And to my little soiree!"

"I take it that Lord Pinchingdale is, as yet, unwed?" The words cracked off Letty's tongue like buckshot. She wondered fleetingly what the penalties for bigamy might be. Mrs. Grimstone didn't seem the sort to let her charge settle for anything less than matrimony.

Unsuited to nuance, Mrs. Lanergan answered the question but ignored the tone. "Oh, quite! And a most eligible gentleman, too. I hear he has a splendid estate in Gloucestershire, and an income of no less than forty thousand a year. Although, from the looks of it, he'll not remain a bachelor long," she added, with a smiling nod at Miss Fairley, who was fluttering her unfairly long lashes with enough determination to set up a squall in the Irish Sea.

Letty set her chin and tried to convince herself that her husband's blatant defection didn't matter to her in the slightest. How could it, when he had never been hers to lose? The only hold she had on him was words spoken under duress. From what she had witnessed, she didn't want any hold on him, under duress or otherwise. Miss Fairley was welcome to him, infidelities, betrothal ring, and all. A pity there wasn't some way Letty could just sign Lord Pinchingdale over to her, as one might any other kind of property for which one no longer had any use, like a piece of barren land, or a horse with a tendency to buck.

"Don't despair, my dear," said Mrs. Lanergan, patting Emily reassuringly on the arm. "We have another unmarried peer present. He came over on his own private yacht. Just fancy! He's a bit older than Lord Pinchingdale, but still a very handsome man for all that."

Letty resolutely turned her attention back to her companions, away from Lord Pinchingdale's "handsome" face. He was a rake, a scoundrel, a cad, a bounder—there weren't enough words in the English language to plumb the depths of his vileness. And she didn't care. Not one bit.

But no matter how hard she tried not to look, all she could see was her husband, breathing amorous accolades into another woman's ear.

* * *

"They have five hundred muskets being stored at the depot on Marshal Lane," the notorious Lord Pinchingdale murmured seductively to the beauty simpering beside him. "And they've ordered one hundred pairs of pocket pistols and three hundred blunderbusses."

Miss Gilly Fairley plied her fan so that her silver-gilt curls wafted in the resulting breeze, the shining strands glittering like a web of diamonds in the candlelight. Beneath the cunningly contrived blond wig, not a strand of Miss Jane Wooliston's own stick-straight brown hair slipped out. In the flighty creature arrayed on a low settee next to Geoff, no trace remained of the chilly beauty who had excited the admiration of the dandies at Mme. Bonaparte's salons little more than a week before. Diana, they had called her, paying tribute to her reserve and her classical features alike, as the poets among them composed odes to the symmetry of her face and the gravity in her gray eyes.

There was nothing the least bit antique about Miss Gilly Fairley, whose cheeks were pink with the excitement of a party, and whose eyes were rounded in perpetual circles of naive wonder. Through the magic of her paint pots, Jane had somehow contrived to make her face appear rounder, her fine-bridged nose broader. The ribbons fluttering about her face and a careful application of shadow along her lids convincingly tinted her eyes with blue, and rendered her entirely unrecognizable, even to those who had known her before. It had taken Geoff several moments before he realized that the gushing creature who descended on him in a welter of ruffles was, in fact, the poised young lady with whom he had plotted to release his best friend from the clutches of the French Ministry of Police a mere two months before.

It was, thought Geoff in sincere admiration, a masterful transformation, all the more impressive for being so understated. Over the past two days, his admiration had only grown. Jane and her chaperone had arrived a week before, and they had already amassed an impressive dossier of treasonous activities.

The previous night, they had all attended the theater, intercepting a basket of oranges with messages stuck beneath the skins. Smelling faintly of citrus, Geoff had followed that up with a clandestine trip of his own down to the rebel depot on Marshall Lane, where he had lurked behind the windows in the guise of a beggar, eavesdropping on a rather uninspiring session of drink and folksong.

What was it about rebel movements that always seemed to demand expression in song? The French had gone for the same, coming up with catchy numbers about the liberty of the common man. Geoff had had that interminable "Зa ira" song stuck in his head for months after infiltrating a group of Jacobins in 1799. It still popped back into his head at inconvenient moments. Geoff caught himself humming "Quand l'aristocrate protestera, le bon citoyen au nez lui rira" under his breath and made himself stop. Wrong country, wrong mission, and it didn't even scan.

"Have you discovered the manufacturer of the weapons?" Jane asked in a breathy voice that managed to convey forbidden trysts and wavering virtue.

Geoff deftly stole her fan, holding it just out of reach as she squealed and made a deliberately abortive grab for it, causing her dйcolletage to swell perilously above her bodice.

"Daniel Muley. He lives at 28 Parliament Street," he whispered into her ear, as her hand joined his on the ivory handle of the fan. "It's unclear whether he's one of them, or just in it for his fee."

"The liaison?" Jane tilted her head back as though brought to the verge of a swoon by his improper suggestions.

"Miles Byrne. He works in a timber yard on New Street. I mean to examine it more closely tomorrow."

"Excellent," murmured Jane. She snatched the fan back from him, exclaiming, in a voice pitched to carry, "La, sir! How you do tease!"

"La?" inquired Geoff under his breath. "La?"

Jane permitted herself a tiny grimace behind the shield of her fan. "Needs must," she murmured.

"There can be no doubt that the devil is driving," acknowledged Geoff, remembering some of the scenes he had witnessed in Paris. The streets hadn't quite run with blood, at least not by the time Geoff and Richard had made it out of there, but severed heads weren't something a man forgot in a hurry.