The courier from the War Office looked at him, then at the folded piece of paper he held in his hand, and shrugged. "I don't know. I haven't opened it, have I?"

"Let's try this again, shall we?" suggested Geoff, with a quick sideways glance at the clock that hung between two red-veined marble pillars.

Ten minutes till midnight. If he left immediately, he might still make it to the Alsworthys' rented residence before the clock struck the hour.

"If you leave the note with me, your duty will be discharged. I will peruse it at my leisure and send an answer tomorrow morning. Early tomorrow morning."

"Can't," replied the messenger laconically. "Early is as early does, but my orders are I'm to have an answer back quick-like. And that means tonight. My lord," he added belatedly.

"Right," clipped Geoff, as the minute hand on the clock slipped another centimeter closer to midnight. "Tonight."

Why did the War Office have to send for him tonight of all nights? Couldn't they have had whatever crisis they were in the midst of the night before, when he was hunched over the desk in his study, scanning the latest reports from Paris? Even better, they might have timed their intrusion for two nights before, when Geoff was being royally beaten at darts by his old Eton chum Miles Dorrington, who wasn't above crowing over it. And when Miles crowed, he crowed very, very loudly.

Any night, in fact, would have been better than this one.

Losing his temper, he counseled himself, would only waste more precious time. It wasn't the messenger's fault any more than it was the War Office's that civilization itself was being menaced by a megalomanaical Corsican with a taste for conquest. If one were to allocate blame, it lay clearly at Bonaparte's door. Which, Geoff reflected, didn't do him terribly much good at the moment. Even if Bonaparte were available to receive complaints, Geoff rather doubted he could be expected to halt his advance across Europe for an insignificant little thing like a wedding.

Geoff's wedding, to be precise.

Or, as it was increasingly looking, Geoff's somewhat delayed wedding. Geoff filed it away as one more grievance to be taken up against Bonaparte, preferably personally, with a small cannon.

With a sigh, Geoff held out his hand.

"'Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,'" he muttered.

"My lord?" The courier gave him a hard look.

"Give me the letter and I'll pen a reply," Geoff translated. Signaling to a waiting footman, Geoff instructed in a low voice, "Go to MacTavish and tell him to go on ahead with the carriage as planned. I'll catch him up at the Oxford Arms. Tell him to give the lady my apologies and let her know that I'll be with her as soon as duty permits."

Mary would understand. And if she didn't, he would make it up to her. She had mentioned that Pinchingdale House needed redecorating—he rather liked his study the way it was, but if Mary wanted to drape it in pink silk printed with purple pansies, he wouldn't say a word. Well, maybe not purple pansies. A man had to draw the line somewhere.

Cracking the seal of the paper in his hands, Geoff quickly scanned the contents. They were, as he had suspected, in code, a series of numbers marching alongside Greek letters that had nothing to do with their Roman counterparts. A month ago, a note delivered within London, carried less than a mile by a trusted—if not too intelligent—subordinate of the War Office would never have elicited such elaborate precautions.

Of course, a month ago, England and France had still been observing a precarious peace. That hadn't stopped Bonaparte from flooding the English capital with French spies, but they had grown decidedly bolder since the formal declaration of war. Even Mayfair, heart of England's aristocracy, no longer provided a haven. A mere three weeks ago, one of the Office's more agile agents had been found, a well-placed hole in his back, sprawled on the paving stones outside of Lord Vaughn's London mansion. Whichever way one looked at it, the new precautions made sense.

They were also a bloody nuisance.

A message in code meant that it would have to be decoded. Even knowing the key, decoding the message and coding an answer in return would take at least half an hour.

As if on cue, the minute hand jerked into the upright position, and a pangent ponging noise rousted out the echoes from their shadowy corners.

Refolding the note, Geoff said in a matter-of-fact voice, "This may take some time. If you'd like to take some refreshment in the kitchen…"

"I'll wait here, my lord."

Geoff nodded in acknowledgment and turned on his heel, setting off through a succession of unused rooms to his study. He knew the route well enough to make the branch of candles in his hand redundant, as his legs, without conscious direction from his mind, skirted small tables and pedestals bearing classical busts.

His boots clattered unevenly on the shiny parquet floor of a ballroom that hadn't seen a ball since Geoff was in the nursery, across the fading Persian carpets of a drawing room whose drapes had been drawn for two decades, through a state dining room glistening with silver and hung with crystal that had seated its last serving back in the days when men affected red heels and women wore skirts that spanned the width of a stair. The Sabine women, painted in mural along the sides of the room, smirked at Geoff as he passed, but he didn't notice them any more than he noticed the lowering portraits of his ancestors or simpering French shepherdesses that graced the walls of the silent music room.

Shutting the door of his study firmly behind him, Geoff crossed to his desk, removing the ormolu ornament on the left-hand leg with one economical movement. From the tiny cavity, he wiggled out a closely written sheet of paper, screwing the fitting back into place with a practiced flick of the wrist. In contrast to the rest of the house, his study showed signs of recent habitation. A half-empty decanter stood on a round table by the long French windows, estate accounts warred for space on the desk with the latest editions of the weekly newssheets, and the broken bindings on the long wall of books provided silent testimony that they served for use rather than ornament.

From the row of broken bindings, Geoff drew an elderly copy of Virgil's Aeneid. That particular work had been chosen on the theory that the French, being a simpleminded sort of people, would never expect a code premised on Greek letters to lead to a Latin poem, and would fritter their time fruitlessly away trolling for hidden meanings in obscure fragments of plays by Sophocles. It had worked brilliantly so far; Geoff's Paris informant assured him that agents of the Ministry of Police had commandeered all the available copies of Plato's dialogues, and that there was scarcely a volume of Aristophanes to be found in all of Paris.

No more or less battered than any of the other books on the shelf, the poem's margins were filled with what appeared, to the casual eye, to be nothing more than schoolboy scribbles, scraps of translation jostled against fragments of amateur poetry and scrawled notes to a classroom companion complaining about the schoolmaster and contemplating mischief. Although the ink had been carefully faded to give the impression of age, none of them dated back further than the previous year. Geoff was nothing if not thorough.

Shifting impatiently from one foot to the other, he spread Wickham's note and the paper bearing the key side by side. The first number in Wickham's cipher brought him to "souls drifting like leaves through the underworld."

"Leave," wrote Geoff with one hand, flipping to the next indicated page with the other.

As codes went, it wasn't perfect. Virgil had failed to anticipate the existence of Prinny or of Bonaparte, and words like "canon" and "artillery" translated oddly from their archaic counterparts. But it did have the benefit of having baffled Bonaparte's agents since the League of the Purple Gentian had first put it into practice. Before that, it had worked just as effectively as a means to bedevil their tutors at Eton, men considerably better versed in the classics than Bonaparte. Or, at least, so they claimed when parents came visiting. Geoff had always had his doubts.

Within ten minutes, the tattered volume was back on the shelf, and Geoff held a heavily marked-up page that had reduced itself to the message "Leave for Eire soonest. Situation urgent. See early tomorrow for instructions." It would have been only eight minutes if he hadn't wasted two precious minutes puzzling over the word "air," alternately translating it as "ere" and "e'er" before hitting on Eire. Both "early" and "soonest" were unmistakable. Both had been heavily underscored.

Ireland wasn't the place Geoff would have chosen for his honeymoon—he had cherished romantic images of bearing his bride off for a tour of the Lake District, where they could dally among Norman ruins and read poetry by the waterside—but years of managing the affairs of the League of the Purple Gentian had taught Geoff the importance of flexibility. Plans were all very well and good, but homicidal maniacs brandishing swords generally didn't take it kindly when you informed them that they were supposed to be rushing at you from the other side of the room.

Besides, reflected Geoff with a rakish grin, all one really needed for a honeymoon was a bed and a bride. And he was willing to compromise on the former.

Confining himself to essentials, Geoff jabbed his quill into the inkpot and wrote quickly, "Some difficulties. Explain tomorrow."

Wickham, Geoff thought, neatly transcribing his words into a meaningless mess of numbers and symbols that took up far more space than their content deserved, was not going to be overjoyed with the sudden addition of an extra party. But that was something to be hashed out in person, not crunched into code. Rapidly reducing Wickham's note to ash, Geoff dribbled sealing wax on the folded page, stamped it shut with his ring, and looked triumphantly at the clock. Ha! Only a quarter past the hour.