He deliberately let his gaze linger on a particularly buxom countess, who giggled and turned to whisper behind her fan to a friend.

Medmenham, unfortunately, was not to be distracted. Folding his arms across his chest, he contemplated Charlotte with the lazy scrutiny of a gentleman considering the purchase of a new mare. “I might be willing to take her off your hands, Dovedale. For a large enough douceur, of course.”

“Angling for a dowry, Medmenham?” Robert didn’t bother to keep the sharp edge off his voice.

Medmenham was unperturbed. “Which of us isn’t?”

“There are greater heiresses in London.”

Medmenham’s inscrutable gaze followed Charlotte as she, curtsying, handed the Queen a dropped handkerchief before falling back into ranks with the other maids of honor. “Perhaps I find myself in want of connections at Court.”

“Your friend, the Prince of Wales, will be disappointed to find you gone over to his father’s camp.”

“My dear Dovedale, I inhabit no camp but my own. I believe I shall ask your cousin for a ride in the park tomorrow. She can ride, can’t she?”

“The topic has never come up,” Robert said shortly, wondering how in the devil Medmenham managed to make absolutely everything sound like a double entendre. “I see Innes waits on the King.”

“Yes,” said Medmenham idly. “His brother procured him the post, believing that time spent in the royal monastery would reform Innes’s disposition. A foolish notion, that.”

“Especially with you on hand to effect a counterreformation.” Robert managed to make it sound more compliment than criticism. “Does the Order meet again soon?”

“Patience, patience, good Dovedale. In a week, I think. That should be time enough.”

Time enough for what?

It was all Robert could do to paste on the requisite expression of jaded ennui when all he wanted to do was shake Medmenham until he told him what he needed to know. He bitterly loathed clinging to Medmenham’s coattails but tentative forays into finding Wrothan on his own had confirmed him in the unhappy conviction that the only way to Wrothan was through Medmenham. No one else seemed to know the least thing about a man answering to his description — and Robert was afraid to ask too much for fear of giving the game away. Espionage, he realized, was not his forte.

The project that had begun as a simple plan to find and exterminate Wrothan had changed into something far more dangerous and complex. To kill the man who had killed his mentor, that was one thing. But now, knowing that Wrothan was actively plotting with the French — or, at least, a Frenchman — Robert knew there was no way he could just run Wrothan through and walk away, leaving Wrothan’s contact free to coolly carry on with whatever dastardly doings he had in train. How could he ignore something that might cost more lives? It wasn’t just the Colonel anymore or the other men who had died due to the sale of intelligence before Assaye. It could be whole battalions of men at stake. Lord Henry had a position at court; Lord Freddy’s father was one of the King’s ministers; even the loathsome Frobisher had a brother at the War Office. All had access to secrets of state; all might be stripped of those secrets for the price of a gallon of strong cider or a whiff of drugged smoke in a subterranean chamber.

If Wrothan and his French contact were using the Order of the Lotus’s orgies as a means of meeting, that would be the best place to catch them, truss them, and haul them off to justice. As soon as he knew where and when the meeting was to be, he could put his plans into operation. And then he could leave. Leave London, leave England, leave Europe. The ultimate location didn’t matter, just so long as it was a very long way away, away from Charlotte and Girdings and this bizarre homesickness for something that had never been his to long for in the first place.

Despite himself, Robert’s eyes wandered to the cluster of ladies around the Queen, drawn, as always, to Charlotte. She was smiling at something one of the others had said, smiling too broadly for it to be anything but false. And he knew, without knowing how he knew, that she was as aware of him as he was of her, and would be, no matter where in the room he roamed.

It was only a matter of weeks, Robert reminded himself. Then Wrothan would be found, his work here would be done, and Charlotte could marry the sort of man she was meant to marry.

Just so long as that man wasn’t Medmenham.


As soon as the Queen released her, Charlotte did what she always did in moments of great emotional distress.

She made straight for the library.

The pages and footmen and guards who peopled the Queen’s House already knew Charlotte by sight. They let her pass without comment, which was a very good thing, since Charlotte wasn’t sure quite what would come out if she opened her mouth. She had kept it pressed very tightly shut all through the long afternoon at the Queen’s side, smiling, smiling, smiling. She had smiled through the end of the reception, smiled through the trip from St. James back to the Queen’s House, smiled as Princess Augusta read aloud from The Lay of the Last Minstrel, smiled until she wanted to scream from the strain of smiling, all the while reliving, in excruciating detail, every second of the past few weeks, from Robert’s arrival at Girdings through his stunning defection just now.

At the end of it, all Charlotte was left with was the sense of having been terribly, horribly wrong. For someone who prided herself on her ability to read, she had painfully misread everything that had happened, every word, every gesture, every embrace. That almost kiss hadn’t been almost because he didn’t want to sully her; it had been almost because he just wasn’t that interested. As for the roof . . . good heavens, she had all but kidnapped him. He had even called it a kidnapping. Then, once she had him alone and poised on the edge of a sheer five-story drop, she had practically attacked him.

Charlotte managed a sickly smile. There was something funny about the image of a strapping army man cowering in terror from the amorous advances of a diminutive debutante. “Demmed fierce things, those debutantes,” she could hear them telling one another in their clubs. “Gotta watch out for the little ones. Get you around the knees and don’t let go.”

Charlotte swallowed a laugh that sounded a bit too much like incipient hysteria for comfort.

That would cause a scandal, wouldn’t it? “Queen’s New Maid of Honor Goes Batty at Buckingham House.” Charlotte glanced carefully left and right as she slipped out of the Queen’s apartments, but no one seemed to have noticed anything out of the ordinary.

Charlotte’s train whispered along the marble stairs behind her as she descended to the ground floor. She no longer found its swishing quite so satisfying as she had before. All around her, painted into the walls along the Great Stairs, murals depicting the sad career of Dido and Aeneas leered down at her.

Had Aeneas simply been amusing himself, too? Beguiling the long hours on Carthage with the first willing woman who came to hand? Given the smug expression on Aeneas’s face, just where the double flight met and turned into a single one, Charlotte rather suspected as much. Like Robert, Aeneas had simply turned and run in the middle of the night. And yet men called him a hero. Surely there was something wrong with that?

According to legend, England had been founded by another Trojan, a comrade of Aeneas’s named Brutus. If Robert was any indication, the old strain bred true.

Charlotte winced at the recollection of how slavishly adoring she had been, doting on his every word and painting pretty daydreams about knights in armor. She had, she realized, had an entire romance with an object out of her own imagination. Take one reasonably handsome man, paste on armor, and, voilà! instant hero.

He had even tried to warn her, with all that business about rotten apples. But she had been too intent on being adoring to pay the least bit of attention to what he was actually saying. No wonder he had decided to take what was so willingly offered! Until the novelty of playing hero palled. Was that why he had left so abruptly? Did he find her adoration too stomach-turningly cloying to bear for another hour?

Well, she was no Dido to fling herself onto a pyre, even if she felt dazed and battered, as though she had just tumbled off the edge of a fairy tale into a strange new world where none of the old happy certitudes held sway.

Crossing into the complex of rooms that housed the King’s apartments, Charlotte maneuvered her hoops through the doors of the Great Library, just one of three vast rooms constructed by the King to house his remarkable collection of books. Court dress might be charming in a drawing room, but it vastly complicated one’s interactions with doorways and furniture. Narrow dresses might not be nearly so glamorous, thought Charlotte, squishing her hoops as she squeezed through the door, but they were a good deal easier to move about it.

Charlotte breathed in the library smell like a tonic, the comforting scent of fresh leather bindings and decaying old paper. At this time of day, there were no visitors to goggle at her in her Court dress, no scholars to glower at her for invading their intellectual precinct. Even the King’s librarian had left his post at the vast desk on one side of the room. Even the desk had been designed to do its part for storing books. The sides housed immense folios, each as high as Charlotte’s hips.

It wasn’t the folios Charlotte was after. Taking her candle, she held it up to the long rows of books that lined the walls. She was in search of a heroine.