“Only from Falconstone. I really do have to get around to freeing his son from the Temple prison one of these days.” Richard resumed his seat and drained the remainder of his scotch in a single swallow. “Don’t be such an old woman, Miles. It doesn’t bother me. Look, I prefer Falconstone’s rantings to all those debutantes twittering about the Purple Gentian. Can you imagine what I’d have to put up with if the truth got out?”

Miles cocked his head thoughtfully, sending a lock of floppy blond hair tumbling in front of his eyes. “Hmm, adoring debutantes . . .”

“Think how jealous your mistress would be,” Richard said dryly.

Miles flinched. His current mistress was an opera singer as well known for the range of her throwing arm as that of her voice. He had already courted concussion by flirting openly with a ballet dancer and had no desire to repeat the experience. “All right, all right, point taken,” he said. “Oh, damnation! I promised her I would have supper with her before the opera. She’ll probably break half the dishes in the house if I’m late.”

“Most of them over your head,” commented Richard helpfully. “Since I prefer you with your head all in one piece, you’d better relay my assignment quickly.”

“How right you are!” Miles replied fervently. He struggled to collect himself and regain the gravity incumbent upon a representative of the War Office. “All right. Your assignment. We’re pretty sure that Bonaparte is using the peace to plot an invasion of England.”

Richard nodded grimly. “I thought as much.”

“Your job is to uncover as much as you can about his preparations. We want dates, locations, and numbers, as quickly as you can get them. We’ll have a string of couriers posted from Paris to Calais to relay the information as you find it. This is it, Richard!” Miles’s eyes glowed with sporting fervor, like a hound on the trail of a fox. “The assignment. We’re relying on you to keep old Boney out of England.”

A familiar tingle of anticipation rushed through Richard. How had Percy been able to give this up? The rush, the excitement, the challenge! Heady stuff, to know the safety of England depended upon him. Of course, Richard didn’t delude himself that he was the country’s sole hope. He knew the War Office had a good dozen spies scattered around the French capital, all striving to uncover the same things. But he also knew, without false modesty, that he was their best.

“The usual code, I suppose?” They had developed the code their first year at Eton as part of an elaborate plan to outwit their bullying proctor.

Miles nodded. “You’ll leave for Paris in two weeks?”

Richard rubbed his forehead. “Yes. I have some personal business to take care of—and I’ve promised my mother to squire Hen around to scare the fortune hunters away. Bonaparte should be away at Malmaison for most of next week, anyway, and I’ve left Geoff to keep an eye on things while I’m gone.”

“Good man, Geoff.” Miles rose and stretched. “Now if he were here, the three of us could have a bang-up night of carousing just like old times. I guess it’ll have to wait till we’ve foiled old Boney once and for all. Cry God for England, Harry, and St. George, and all that.” Miles was frantically trying to rearrange his cravat and smooth down his hair. “Damn. No time to stop off at home and get my valet to tidy me up. Oh well. Give Hen a kiss for me.”

Richard shot him a sharp look.

“On the cheek, man, on the cheek. God knows I’d never try anything improper with your sister. Not that she isn’t a beautiful girl and all that, it’s just, well, she’s your sister.”

Richard clapped his friend on the shoulder in approval. “Well said! That’s exactly the way I want you to think of her.”

Miles muttered something about being grateful that his sisters were a good deal older. “You turn into a complete bore when you’re chaperoning Hen, you know,” he grumbled.

Richard raised one eyebrow at Miles, a skill that had taken several months of practice in front of his mirror when he was twelve, but had been well worth the investment. “At least I didn’t let my sister dress me up in her petticoat when I was five.”

Miles’s jaw dropped. “Who told you about that?” he demanded indignantly.

Richard grinned. “I have my sources,” he said airily.

Miles, not a top agent of the War Office for nothing, considered for a moment and his eyes narrowed. “You can tell your source that she’s going to have to find someone else to fetch her lemonade at the Alsworthys’ ball tomorrow night unless she apologizes. You can also tell her that I’ll accept either a verbal or a written apology as long as it’s suitably abject. And that means very, very abject,” he added darkly. Miles snatched his hat and gloves up from a side table. “Oh, stop grinning already! It wasn’t that amusing.”

Richard rubbed his chin as though in deep thought. “Tell me, Miles, was it a lacy petticoat?”

With a wordless grunt of annoyance, Miles turned on his heel and stomped out of the room.

Picking up the news sheet Miles had left behind, Richard settled back down into the comfortable leather chair.

Two weeks, he thought. In two weeks he would be back in France, risking discovery and death.

Richard couldn’t wait.

Chapter Three

“How do you possibly expect to find the Purple Gentian?” Jane hurried after Amy into the airy white-and-blue-papered room they had shared since they were old enough to abandon the nursery. “The French have been trying for years!”

Their bedroom was beginning to look like a modiste’s shop struck by a hurricane. A garter dangled off the clock on the mantelpiece, Amy’s bed was snowed under by a pile of frothy petticoats, and, somehow, with one wild fling, Amy had even managed to land a bonnet on the canopy of Jane’s bed. Jane could just make out the tips of pink ribbons dangling over the edge of the canopy.

Amy had gotten it into her head that if she packed at once she might be able to leave the next day. It was, reflected Jane, a typically Amy reaction. If Amy had been around for the creation of the world, Jane had no doubt that she would have chivvied the Lord into creating the earth in two days rather than seven.

Several pairs of stockings came whizzing Jane’s way. “Remember that inn the papers said the Scarlet Pimpernel always stopped at? The one in Dover?”

“The Fisherman’s Rest,” Jane supplied.

“Well the Shropshire Intelligencer said that they thought the Purple Gentian might be continuing the tradition. So . . . what if we were to stop at the Fisherman’s Rest before we sail? With a little careful eavesdropping, who knows?”

“The Shropshire Intelligencer,” Jane reminded her, “also carried a piece about the birth of a two-headed goat in Nottingham. And last month’s edition claimed that His Majesty had gone mad again and appointed Queen Charlotte Regent.”

“Oh, all right, I’ll grant you that it’s not the most reliable publication—”

“Not the most reliable?”

“Did you see today’s headline, Jane? In the Spectator, mind you, not the Intelligencer.” Snatching up the much-thumbed sheet of paper, Amy read rapturously, “ENGLAND’S FAVORITE FLOWER FILCHES FRENCH FILES IN DARING RAID.”

Amy was cut off by the scrape of the door inching open. It couldn’t move more than an inch or two, because Amy’s trunk, which she had dragged out from under the bed, was blocking it. “Begging your pardon, Miss Jane, Miss Amy”—Mary, the upstairs maid, poked her head in and bobbed a curtsy—“but the mistress said I was to see if you would be needing any help dressing for dinner.”

Amy’s face contorted with horror like Mrs. Siddons performing Lady Macbeth’s mad scene. “Oh, no! It’s Thursday!”

“Yes, miss, and tomorrow’s Friday,” Mary supplied helpfully.

“Oh, drat, drat, drat, drat,” Amy was muttering to herself, so it was left to Jane to smile graciously and say, “We won’t be requiring your assistance, Mary. You may tell Mama that Miss Amy and I will be down shortly.”

“Yes, miss.” The maid curtsied again, closing the door carefully behind her.

“Drat, drat, drat,” said Amy.

“You might wear your peach muslin,” suggested Jane.

“Tell them I have the headache—no, the plague! I need something nice and contagious.”

“At least half a dozen people saw you running across the lawn in perfect health not half an hour ago.”

“We’ll tell them it was a sudden case?” Jane shook her head at Amy and handed her the peach gown. Amy docilely turned her back to Jane to be unbuttoned. “I haven’t the patience for Derek tonight! Not tonight of all nights! I have to plan!” Her voice was slightly muffled as Jane pulled the clean frock over her head. “Why did it have to be a Thursday?”

Jane gave Amy a sympathetic pat on the back as she began buttoning her into the peach dress.

They would be twelve for dinner tonight, as they were every Thursday. Every Thursday night, with the same inevitable regularity as the shearing of the sheep, an outmoded carriage with a blurred crest on the side rattled down the drive. Every Thursday, out piled their nearest neighbors: Mr. Henry Meadows, his wife, his spinster sister, and his son, Derek.

Amy flung herself into the low chair before the dressing table and began to brush her short curls with a violence that made them crackle and frizz around her face. “I really don’t think I can take it much longer, Jane. Derek is more than anyone should be expected to bear!”

“There are easier ways to escape Derek than to go chasing the Purple Gentian.” Jane reached around Amy to pluck a locket on a blue ribbon off the dressing table.