Colin’s ears turned slightly pink. “It’s not exactly the theory of relativity,” he mumbled.

“Still.” Rising on my tiptoes, I brushed a quick kiss against his cheek. “Thank you.”

Colin smiled down at me in a way that warmed me straight down to my toes. “You’re welcome.”

I would be lying if I said I didn’t hope Joan was watching. The kiss on the cheek was, to use a very homely metaphor, a bit like a dog peeing on its territory to ward of other dogs.

Speaking of peeing . . . there was a convenient little hallway just off the end of the bar, with the traditional male and female signs prominently displayed. I took a step back from the bar, hitching my bag higher up on my shoulder in the universal gesture of “I’m just going to the bathroom.” It’s like opening your mouth when you’re putting on mascara. Everyone does it without realizing it.

“If you’ll excuse me for just a moment . . . ,” I said, nodding towards the bathrooms. “I’ll be right back.”

The bathroom was much cleaner than those I’d been to in city bars, presumably because the clientele knew exactly to whom to complain if it wasn’t. There were four stalls all in a row, and the row of sinks and mirror across from them. Going for the stall on the far end, I was just zipping up my pants when I heard a flurry of feet barging through the bathroom door.

“ — bring her here,” Joan Plowden-Plugge’s voice shrilled through the air like an electric drill.

There was a rustle of hair and a sighing noise that sounded like, “Oh, Joan.”

I slunk back against the wall of my own stall, desperately hoping that neither of them would notice an extra pair of feet in the last loo. Fortunately, they were too preoccupied with their own conversation to notice me — or if they did see my feet, they didn’t recognize them.

I could hear Joan’s voice, smug, even through the stall door. “I wouldn’t want to be in her shoes when she finds out what he does.”

“I don’t think you could fit into her shoes,” commented Sally casually, and I could hear the bolt of her bathroom stall sliding home.

Joan’s stall door banged shut with considerably more force.

As I heard the rustle of a skirt being raised, I realized that this was the ideal time for me to make good my escape, while they were both incapable of exiting to investigate. But I stayed, like a rabbit in a hedgerow, frozen by my own curiosity. And probably just as likely to get mown over by a Range Rover. I didn’t think Joan was the sort to brake for fluffy bunnies.

Joan’s cut-glass tones sliced straight through three stalls. “That’s not what I meant. I just think it’s disgraceful, a grown man who had a perfectly respectable career — ” A forceful stream of pee drowned out the rest of her words.

“That’s you,” said Sally. “Not everyone would feel the same way.”

Joan clearly had little patience for relativism.

“I wouldn’t want my boyfriend” — the gurgle of the toilet flushing all but extinguished the rest of the sentence, right up until — “spies.”

Wait. She hadn’t really said “spies,” had she?

Maybe she had said “sties.” As in pigs. I couldn’t see Joan Plowden-Plugge having any truck with livestock that couldn’t be ridden.

I tamped down on a betraying giggle at the thought of Joan Plowden-Plugge riding pig-back in her immaculate Country Life riding gear.

It did make sense, though, that she would look down on farming. For all her lady of the manor pretensions, everything I had seen of Joan Plowden-Plugge implied that it was the money rather than the land that counted with her. Oh, she wanted the land, too, but only if it came with designer gardens and the latest in fashionable topiary. Someone who did something in the City, eventually ending up on the honors list for dodgy financial favors done to his local MP, would be much more in her style than the gentleman farmer who actually farmed. I was reminded a bit of Hyacinth Bucket from the old comedy Keeping Up Appearances , forever pushing her husband, Richard, to be more posh, even though Hyacinth’s view of posh was decidedly naff. Did anyone even use the word “naff” anymore?

As I pulled myself back from that fascinating byway, the other toilet finished hiccuping. “ — rather interesting, really,” Sally was saying.

Presumably not sties, then. I doubted even kindhearted Sally could find much to ooh and aah over in a sty. But spies? No. Too silly. I just had spies on the brain, courtesy of my dissertation research. It was one thing to have gentlemen spies running around in the nineteenth century, quite another in the twenty-first.

“If you like that sort of thing,” said Joan pettishly. I heard a rustling sound, like a purse being excavated none too gently.

“I like that shade,” said Sally, in a conciliatory tone.

Oh Lord, they were putting on makeup? I began to wish I had run for it while I still could. Of course, then I would have missed all that about Colin. It had been about Colin, hadn’t it? And me.

It seemed like forever that they tarried in personal grooming, Sally drawing a brush through her hair, Joan frowning critically at her own reflection in the mirror, twitching a hair in place here, adding a dab of lipstick there. But then they were gone, and I sagged against the pink and white papered wall, my trousers going lose at the waist as I let out all the breath I’d been holding in a long sigh of pure relief at not having been caught.

As I let myself out of the stall, I grimaced at the thought of what Colin must be thinking. I just hoped he didn’t mention to the others that I’d been in the loo. Well, only one way to forestall that. Washing my hands in the sink, I dried them briskly on a paper towel and headed purposefully for the door.

It was time that the Plowden-Plugges and I were better acquainted.

Chapter Six

In her usual spot, on a small gilt chair by the wall, Charlotte could have pinpointed to the second the moment the Duke of Dovedale nodded farewell to Sir Francis Medmenham and set off across the ballroom — directly for her corner.

Charlotte immediately sat up straighter, a move that did not escape the attention of her best friend.

“Hail, the conquering duke approacheth!” exclaimed Henrietta, who didn’t need wine to make her dangerous.

“Shhhhh!” hissed Charlotte, making an ineffectual batting motion. “He might hear you.”

“I,” said Henrietta, enjoying herself altogether too much, “am not the one your duke is here to see. Or hear.”

Charlotte decided it would be a waste of time and breath to reiterate that she did not, in fact, have a duke. Besides, her — er, the Duke, was already upon them, looking painfully dashing in the light of the mirror-backed sconces.

He was wearing the same sort of evening kit as everyone else, with a garnet-toned waistcoat adding color to an otherwise starkly black and white ensemble, but on him, it looked different. It wasn’t just that his cravat was simply tied rather than being teased and creased into whatever the latest fantasy of fashion demanded. It wasn’t just that his breeches stretched against genuine muscles rather than padding when he walked. Charlotte knew she wasn’t supposed to notice such things, but after years of Penelope, one did, and a very nice view it was.

There was something alive and vital about him that made the glittering stretch of the gallery seem small and fusty. He needed a horse beneath him, a spear in his hand, an expanse of muddy battlefield, with trumpeters following along behind to sound out a triumphant peal as he passed.

“Charlotte?” whispered Henrietta. “Are you all there?”

“No,” admitted Charlotte. “Do you think it’s quite normal that whenever I see Robert, I hear trumpets?”

“I’ve heard of violins, but . . . trumpets?”

“I know,” sighed Charlotte. “It’s all the fault of Agincourt.”

There was no time for Henrietta to demand that she explain herself; Robert was already upon them, and the trumpets flared to a final, triumphal fanfare in her head.

It was rather odd to reflect that she had known him even before she had known Henrietta, whom she always thought of, in all capital letters, as her best and oldest friend.

Henrietta, however, seemed determined to make Charlotte rethink that designation.

“Hello!” Henrietta popped out of her chair, ignoring protocol with the blithe unconcern of one to the marquisate born. “You must be Charlotte’s duke.”

At the moment, Charlotte didn’t want a duke; Charlotte wanted a hole to open in the parquet floor and swallow her up.

“I’m afraid you have the advantage of me,” said Robert, although he did not, Charlotte noted with guilty pleasure, challenge Henrietta’s description of him. Of course, he couldn’t very well admit to being a duke but deny being Charlotte’s. So there was really very little to read into it, other than the fact that she was behaving like a complete ninny and needed to stop now.

“I am Lady Henrietta Sel — um, Dorrington.” Henrietta hadn’t quite gotten into the habit of her married name yet. She smiled winningly. “Charlotte’s oldest and dearest friend.”

“In which case,” said Robert, bowing over her hand, “I am doubly honored to make your acquaintance.”

Over his bowed head, Henrietta pushed up her eyebrows as far as they would go and pursed her lips in the general direction of Robert’s head. After years of Henrietta’s facial expressions, Charlotte was able to correctly translate it as, “I like this one! Keep him.”

As Robert straightened, Henrietta returned her features to their normal positions, assuming an expression of exaggerated innocence. At any moment now, she was going to start whistling.