And three armed sentries.

And she had thought that just getting into the building had been nerve-racking. There had been that heart-stopping moment when the guard at the front entrance of the Ministry of Police had demanded their passes. He had peered at the seal Geoff had purloined from Delaroche with a care that could denote either suspicion or poor eyesight. Amy and Lady Uppington had avoided looking at one another, lest they betray their fear in a guilty glance. But after an agonizing hour of scrutiny (which in reality had been thirty seconds at the most), the guard had shoved the papers back at Amy, with a grunted “All in order.”

He had, nonetheless, demanded to see the contents of their pails. “The minister thinks there might be trouble tonight,” he growled by way of explanation, as the water sloshed in Amy’s bucket, and the rag that had been draped over the side slid down into the liquid with a slow plop. Amy had endeavored to look nonchalant, but the unaccustomed bulk of her dagger’s sheath burned against her calf. She tried to stand as a charwoman would stand, perhaps with a bit of a slump from the weight of the bucket.

Glancing over at Lady Uppington, Amy couldn’t help but be impressed by Jane’s handiwork and the older woman’s acting abilities. There wasn’t a hint of the English marchioness left in the woman beside her. Lady Uppington’s silvering blond tresses had been liberally combed through with ashes, to turn them a rough, dirty gray, and then covered with an equally sooty kerchief, that looked as though it had served as both a cleaning rag and someone’s handkerchief before being pressed into duty as a head covering. Her tattered brown dress hung shapelessly from her form as she slouched forward, unspeakably aged, clutching two voluminous shawls around her shoulders to warm her old bones and make up for the ripped and patched state of her sleeves. Even her face looked different. Jane had accentuated her crow’s-feet with a careful web of lines drawn in charcoal, but it was more than that. Something about the slack hang of the mouth, the tired droop of the eyelids.

Past the first obstacle, Lady Uppington and Amy had scrubbed their way down the midnight hallways of the Ministry of Police. Torches along the walls cast flickering reflections in the water in their pails as they lurched through the halls in search of the staircase that would lead them down to the dungeons and Richard. They stayed in the pools of light, rather than the shadows. “Less suspicious that way,” Miles had advised. “Why would a washerwoman hide unless she wasn’t really a washerwoman?”

The flagstones of the ministry provided echoing warning of anyone’s approach—unless that person had, like Amy and Lady Uppington, removed their shoes. But the only people to pass them had been soldiers, whose booted and spurred feet gave the alarm in ample time for Lady Uppington and Amy to fall to their knees and pretend deep absorption in grime removal.

All their earlier trials paled when compared to the prospect of having to fight their way past three sentries with what Amy had to confess to herself was a fairly meager arsenal. In her daydreams of espionage, she had always been armed with an epée and a pistol (never mind that she had never been taught how to use either), and an escort composed of well-muscled members of the League of the Purple Gentian, who presumably knew how to employ both sword and firearms. Never had she imagined that she would find herself in the dungeons of the most closely guarded building in Paris, accompanied by an aging English noblewoman, with an armory consisting of one dagger strapped to her calf, one elderly dueling pistol (courtesy of Lord Uppington, who had last fired it in 1772), and a bottle of drugged brandy. Jane had insisted on the brandy, over Miles’s protests that opiates had little place in hand-to-hand combat. Amy supposed they could always use the bottle as a club.

A dagger, a pistol, and a bottle against three large men armed with muskets.

“Do you think he’ll have more men inside with him?” Amy whispered to Lady Uppington, leaning over to make sure her dagger was still safely in its sheath.

“We’ll face that when we get there. Or rather”—Lady Uppington patted the dueling pistol tucked beneath her voluminous shawl—“they will face us. Ready, my dear?”

Amy loosened the ribbons securing her bodice and edged her neckline down to the verge of immodesty. Four weapons, she thought with a surge of optimism. After all, even Revolutionary guards couldn’t be entirely proof against the male propensity to make utter cakes of themselves when faced with a shapely female form. Jane had garbed her with just that prospect in mind, ransacking the wardrobes of Richard’s maids until she had found a low-cut blouse that laced up the front, and a wide woolen skirt that stopped an inch short of Amy’s ankles and accentuated the sway of her hips.

“Ready,” Amy whispered.

Dropping to hands and knees, the two women rounded the corner, swirling their dirty cloths over the flagstones. Slosh, swish. Slosh, swish. Two yards closer to the guarded door . . . another swipe of the dirty cloth and another yard disappeared under a slick film of water. Amy wondered if the three guards, visible to her only as three pairs of boot-tops and three pairs of black gaiters, would realize that their charwomen were scrubbing very lackadaisically and neglecting whole swaths of floor. Although, from the state of the flagstones, it didn’t appear that anyone had scrubbed down in the dungeons for a very long time. Ugh, was that clotted blood? Amy scuttled around a particularly nasty brownish stain, yanking her woolen skirts out of the way.

“You!” One set of boots detached itself from the row and tromped up to Amy.

Amy’s head flew up, past black gaiters and dark blue breeches, at which point her neck refused to bend back any further. Settling back on her knees, she tilted her head up to a broad face sporting three days’ worth of fair stubble. The guard who had stepped forward was the largest of the three, and clearly their leader, a hulking Goliath of a man, with jowls sagging around a beefy face, and a shock of pale hair of an indeterminate shade. He wouldn’t be easily subdued, thought Amy grimly. Behind him, poised on either side of the massive door, the two others looked on. If the first guard was Goliath, then the second guard, considerably shorter than his companions, had to be David; Amy’s gaze caught him halfway through a yawn. As for the third, he was lean and dark; a thin mustache, not unlike the one Amy had drawn on Jane’s face earlier in the evening, shadowed his lips. There was a dangerous stillness about him, as though he was holding himself taut, waiting to spring. Like a slingshot, decided Amy. He would be one to watch carefully.

“You!” the big soldier—Goliath—barked again.

“Yes, sir?”

“What do you think you’re doing down here?”

Amy glanced down at her bucket, then over at Lady Uppington, who continued to ply her dirty cloth in slow circles, around and around the same flagstone. “Cleaning, sir?” she replied.

“I can see that.” The guard rasped his hand through the stubble on his chin. “Did no one tell you you’re not to clean down here?”

He sounded irritable, but not suspicious. Amy breathed a silent sigh of relief and feigned confusion. “No, sir,” she said eagerly, making a show of stumbling to her feet and brushing off her patched skirts. “We was just told to scrub. Did you hear that, Ma?”

“Yes, yes,” Lady Uppington croaked in cracked tones, the one word she could be trusted to say without alerting a listener to her English accent.

The guard nodded. “I can see as how it’s an honest mistake. Big place like this . . .”

Amy nodded enthusiastically; the guard didn’t seem to notice as she edged a few inches closer to the door with the movement. “You don’t know what a relief it is not to have to do this floor, too. Why, we thought we wouldn’t see our beds before dawn, and me Ma, well, she has another job days, at a big, fancy house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain.” Amy drawled the last name with the contempt appropriate to any good revolutionary.

“Long night,” the guard agreed with a nod.

“Yes, yes,” Lady Uppington cawed again in her crone’s cackle.

To Amy’s surprise, the guard actually smiled. “Agreeable woman, your ma.”

Lady Uppington smiled broadly in acknowledgment, revealing a mouthful of blackened teeth. Amy had always known that trick with the soot and gum would come in handy someday. “Yes, yes.”

Amy might have been tempted to laugh, had she not caught the hint of a sound from behind the door. Any potential amusement at Lady Uppington’s performance drained away from Amy instantly. Richard was behind that door, being questioned and possibly—no, probably—tortured. Enough chitchat.

Amy flung back her shoulders and leaned forward so that her loosened bodice gaped. So did the short guard. His jaw fell appreciatively open, and his musket sagged several inches. Following up on her advantage, Amy twined a dark curl around one finger. “Long night for you all, too, ain’t it?”

“Oh, it’s not all that bad,” David babbled, staggering forward a few steps from the door to get a better view of Amy’s charms. One down, she thought. Lady Uppington was nudging her bucket slowly along the flagstones, closer and closer to the door.

Amy took a little step back, drawing David out farther from the door, and focused the force of her smile on Goliath. “Must get pretty boring just standing here all night,” she said with a show of sympathy. “Don’t know how I’d stay on my feet that long. But then, I’m not a big, strong man like you.”

Something like a snort emerged from the shawl-covered form of Lady Uppington, but Goliath’s chest puffed out. “Doesn’t take much strength,” he said gruffly.