“There are certainly more than enough Royalist émigrés moving about society, any of whom might secretly be working for the other side,” said their host frankly, helping himself to another biscuit. “But if Medmenham doesn’t know about your Mr. Wrothan’s extra activities, what does he get out of all those? Aside from the women and opiates, of course.”

Robert thought about it. “Power. Influence.” He remembered the rapt look on Medmenham’s face as he called forth his papier-mâché deity. It might have been merely the opiates at work, but he rather thought it went deeper than that. He could hear Medmenham’s voice at Girdings, speaking of more things than heaven and earth. “Much as he mocks it all, I wouldn’t wonder if Medmenham half believes his own mumbo jumbo. Ridiculous as it sounds.”

“Huh.” Their host kicked back in his chair, balancing his brandy balloon on his stomach. “We have enough demons in London without his raising more. Your esteemed relation, for example.” He cast a nervous glance over his shoulder as he said it, as though expecting her to pop out at him. “The Dowager Duchess.”

“Who is, mercifully, at Girdings,” said Robert. “And will hopefully stay there until this business is done.”

“Amen,” agreed their host, and got down to business. “When is Medmenham’s next meeting?”

“Tomorrow.” Robert felt duty bound to add, “The Frenchman might not appear again. It is something of a long shot.”

“My favorite kind!” Their host raised his hand to toast and realized he was holding a biscuit instead of his glass. Philosophically, he finished it off in two large bites, adding somewhat indistinctly, “Where’s the place?”

“Upon the heath,” said Robert.

“Really?” said their host eagerly.

“No. Not really,” Robert admitted. “We’re meeting tomorrow night at Drury Lane at six o’clock and then departing the theatre at a prearranged time to be led to the ceremonial meeting place, wherever that may be.”

“Midnight?” said their host, reaching for another biscuit.

“Nine o’clock.”

Their host coughed up brandy. “What self-respecting satanical society meets at nine o’clock?”

“One with an early bedtime?” suggested Tommy.

Robert considered the liquid in his glass. The wallpaper gave it an oddly greenish tinge, like something seen through water. “Or one with other activities planned afterwards.”

Their host raised his glass to Robert. “I like the way you think. Tomorrow night it is. To the Hellfire Club!”

Chapter Nineteen

Hallways always seem longer in the dark, especially when you don’t know where you’re going.

If there was a moon out, it wasn’t doing me the least bit of good. The hallway ran along the interior of the house; the only window was the one at the far end. It was so dark that I couldn’t even make out where the end of the hall was.

I hoped Robert Lansdowne and Tommy Fluellen conducted their reconnaissance mission more suavely than I was conducting mine.

I had a vague notion that Colin’s study — and in it, the computer, the ostensible goal of my quest — was somewhere on the second floor with me. The downstairs was devoted to reception rooms on one side, the kitchen and den on the other, and the long drawing room in the back. With the carpet runner prickling against the soles of my bare feet, I started cautiously down the stretch of hallway Colin had redirected me from earlier.

That sounds nice and gothic, doesn’t it? If I were a gothic heroine that would be the signal to all attentive readers that something dreadful (and key to the plot) was hidden at the end of the West Wing. Of course, if I were a gothic heroine, I would also have had a candle dripping wax on one hand and a demented old-maid servant popping out of the shadows to moan, “Beware! Beware! Beware the curse of the Selwicks!” before laughing maniacally and bolting down to the cellars to croon to the corpses of Colin’s six murdered wives.

Perhaps it was a good thing I wasn’t a gothic heroine.

At any rate, Colin’s injunction about the hallway hadn’t been anything sinister or even suggestive; he had merely meant to indicate that the library was in the opposite direction. But I did vaguely recall that he had gone off that way himself once I’d finally been set on the right path library-wards, hence leading to my logical deduction that therein lay the study.

It would have been easier to wait till morning and just ask him, but easy never seems like the appropriate choice at three in the morning when the pipes are moaning and the floorboards are creaking and the very shadows seem to have eyes. Nothing was going to put me to sleep but finding out where on earth 971 was, and then sending a long email to my friend Alex telling her how silly I was being, at which point it would all be out of my system and then I could go back to being a normal (all right, passably normal) human being.

Tomorrow, I knew, I would feel extremely sheepish about the whole thing and wonder why it had seemed so imperative. But that was tomorrow.

With one hand on the hip-high molding that ran down the length of the wall, I felt my way down the hallway, groping my way by touch through the darkness. I encountered a door frame and kept going. Ahead of me, I could see a faint distinction in the quality of the darkness. Ah, glass. That was a window, one of the windows that looked out over the front of the house (the bedroom had windows on the garden front).

Doubling around, I blundered back to the last door frame. It was only a frame; the door itself had been left open.

Surely, that made any ideas about Colin being double-0-something-or-other even sillier. Any self-respecting agent in any novel would have left his study door both closed and locked. A good thing, too. Unlike the heroines of those sorts of novels, I (a) don’t wear hairpins, and (b) wouldn’t know how to pick a lock with them even if I did.

Oh, well. I had never really thought Colin might be a spy. It was just one of those titillating what-ifs, a harmless little daydream, like fantasizing about suddenly inheriting a castle from a long-lost relative, or being asked out by Sean Bean after accidentally stepping on his foot in the Marks & Spencer food hall (many was the happy hour I had spent with that one). You know they’re make-believe. Even if my heart did always beat a little faster when I entered that Marks & Sparks sandwich aisle. But it was all harmless fun, like imagining that my not-always-mild-mannered boyfriend might secretly be an international man of mystery.

And, hey, as daydreams go, it was at least slightly more likely than winning Sean Bean’s undying devotion over an egg and cress sandwich. Hadn’t at least three of Colin’s great-great-great-great-great-grandparents been in the business? (I was still excited over the whole his-being-descended-from-Miles thing.)

There I went again.

Shaking my head at myself, I shimmied my way through the door of the study, patting down the wall in search of a light switch.

Blinking in the avalanche of light, I twisted this way and that, like a comical cat burglar in one of the Pink Panther movies. What if Colin saw? What if it woke him up? Never mind that the bedroom was down the hall with the door closed; I dashed over to the desk, pulled the chain on the small brass desk lamp, and hastily switched off the overhead.

A gentle light diffused over the scarred wood of the desk and the reddish brown carpet. Ah, that was better. As my heart rate slowed to a reasonable pace, I looked around, taking stock of my surroundings.

It was larger than I had imagined it would be, more of a combination study-sitting room-library than my apartment-bred definition of a study. Bookcases had been set against the walls on three sides of the room, breaking only for the two long west-facing windows and another that looked south, towards the front of the house. On the right was Colin’s desk, facing out towards the door, with the promised computer crouching on it like a big, beige gremlin. If the desk faced out, that meant the computer faced in, where someone walking into the study couldn’t see what was on it.

The other side of the room featured a well-worn sofa, a squashy chintz chair, and a table with drink rings all over the top. Perched on top of a file cabinet sat an electric kettle, one of those white plastic ones without which no British kitchen seems complete, a battered French press with squished coffee grounds on the bottom, and a stained mug, off of which the lettering had been mostly washed by repeated use over time. There was also a biscuit tin with the lid half off.

I automatically shifted feet, scraping the sole of one against the ankle of another. No wonder the carpet beneath my feet felt mildly crunchy. I wondered if that brown in the rug was there by design or was really just splotches of spilled coffee.

Not exactly anyone’s image of a den of international espionage.

Crunching my way across the rug, I plopped myself comfortably into Colin’s desk chair. It wasn’t one of the wheelie kinds, but a plain old four-legged chair with reddish leather padding set into the seat and back. Fortunately, the computer was already on. It was a slightly different model from my own, so I could just see myself taking an hour to find the on switch. All it took was a slight jiggle of the mouse and the screen blinked crankily into life. Apparently, it didn’t much feel like being woken up, either.

Like a middle-aged lady donning its housecoat, the computer presented me with a plain blue screen and the option of logging on as Colin, Serena, or Guest. Serena had chosen a lilac as her icon. It suited her, I thought; thin and willowy and graceful. Surprisingly, Colin had also gone with the flower option. His was little and pink. It looked, in fact, remarkably like a pink carnation. Hmm.