Charlotte immediately began to indicate that she wished to be set down.

“Not. Now,” Robert gritted out, tightening his hold on the backs of her legs. “Do you want them to have you?”

With any luck, the members of the society would be too eager for the promised pleasure of their magical elixir and multitalented dancing girls to care to pursue, but he wouldn’t feel properly safe until there was a good mile between Charlotte and the brethren. Make that two miles, he amended.

Through the thick wooden door the chanting was beginning, calling for the elephant god. Medmenham must have used the torch to light the braziers. Scented smoke began to seep beneath the door frame, making Robert’s stomach heave in memory.

Maybe it wasn’t just the smoke making his stomach heave. Robert kicked open the door on the side of the vestry, taking out some of his anger on the unsuspecting planks. This was not how this was supposed to have gone. What in all the blazes was Charlotte doing barging into the Hellfire Club? Serpentlike, he could hear Medmenham’s voice urging Charlotte to improve her acquaintance with “architecture.”

Bending forwards from the waist, Robert eased Charlotte to the ground, trying to keep her from tumbling over into the mud of the churchyard.

Charlotte stumbled as she landed, swaying in place as she tried to get her bearings. One hand lifted to her head while the other came to rest against the church wall. Lowering her head, she took a deep breath, then another, sucking in the cool, damp air.

“Are you all right?” he demanded in a rough whisper, grasping her by the arms. He resisted the urge to examine her for broken bones, an absurd notion. Any bruises were undoubtedly internal rather than otherwise.

Charlotte ducked her head, still fighting for breath. “Fine,” she wheezed, and then came the question he had been dreading. “What was — ”

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said quickly, knowing he could only delay, not avoid. “We need to get you away. Before they come after us.”

How was he even to get her away? He had come with Medmenham, in Medmenham’s carriage, which was now the devil only knew where.

“What in the blazes are you doing here?” he demanded belatedly. His hands tightened on her arms. “Did Medmenham invite you?”

“No! I hadn’t known he would be here. Or you. Or even where here is.” Charlotte blinked a few times, as though she were still having trouble focusing. “What are you doing here?”

He hardly remembered. “I’ll tell you the whole story,” he promised. “Later. After we get you home. This is no place for a lady.”

“But — ” began Charlotte.

“Did you come in a carriage? A sedan chair? This is no neighborhood to walk about in.”

It was already too late. A crunching in the underbrush alerted him to the fact that they were no longer alone.

Whirling around to face off French spies, treacherous Englishmen, and drunken monks of any nationality, Robert himself facing a medium-size female in an expensive silk cloak lined with swansdown.

“Um, Charlotte? Oh, hello, Dovedale.” Lady Henrietta Dorrington flashed him a winning smile while Robert attempted to realign his jaw with the rest of his face. “I do hate to interrupt, but there is something you ought to see.”

Charlotte had brought a friend? Robert bypassed guilt and went straight to anger.

“Does either of you realize that this is not Almack’s Assembly Rooms?” Robert gritted out.

“Of course,” said Charlotte, as if Robert were the one being silly. “There’s no ratafia.”

Robert found himself entirely incapable of speech.

Now he understood why their early ancestors had expressed themselves entirely in grunts. No other noise could quite encapsulate his current level of shock, anger, and general disbelief. Anger surged to the fore, trumping shock, when Charlotte, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he had just rescued her from the proverbial fate worse than death, blithely turned to her friend, dismissing him entirely.

“Did you find the doctor?” Charlotte asked eagerly.

The who?

“I’m afraid so.” Lady Henrietta’s face was as grim as it could get. Swinging her lantern, she gestured, not towards the street but towards the back of the church, where pitted gravestones clustered close together in the lee of the drooping eaves. “Follow me.”

With mud slurping around his boots, Robert followed. His only other choice was to fling Charlotte back over his shoulder and bear her bodily forth into the street. It was an attractive option, but not one that Charlotte was likely to approve.

Did it matter what she approved anymore?

“Who,” Robert demanded tersely, “is the doctor?”

“This is,” said Lady Henrietta soberly, pointing to the gap between two tombstones. She lifted the shutter of her lantern, and what Robert had perceived as merely a fallen log took on a hideous resolution.

“Or, rather, this was,” she amended.

A man sprawled between the tombstones. Like Robert, he wore the simple brown wool cassock of the Order of St. Francis, tied at the waist with the regulation leather belt, tipped with twin prongs of metal. A pair of old-fashioned buckled shoes protruded from beneath his robe, any gems that had been set into the buckle long since prized out of their frames. His hood had fallen back from his head, revealing close-cropped dark hair and a face too thin for fashion.

The light of Lady Henrietta’s lantern reflected off the glistening surface of his eyes. For a moment, Robert expected him to speak, to lever himself up, to make a dash across the tombstones, through the churchyard. But the eyes were fixed, open, unmoving. It was only the treacherous lamplight that gave the illusion of life to eyes that would never blink again.

Someone had beaten Robert to his revenge.

Chapter Twenty-Three

“Good heavens,” Charlotte whispered. “It’s Dr. Simmons.” Henrietta took a step back, leaving room for the other two to get a better view. “I’m afraid I . . . well, I stepped on him. Not that it can hurt him now.”

Nothing was ever going to hurt him again. Blood mingled with the slush and mud, creating an unpleasant musky smell that made Charlotte’s stomach churn, overlaid with the faint, delicate scent of a foreign flower. The incongruity made Charlotte’s stomach churn. Catching on to a tombstone for balance, she backed away, shutting her own eyes to block out that fixed and glittering stare. The dead features were frozen in an eternal gloat.

“At least he died happy,” said Charlotte faintly, doing her best to cultivate an expression of sangfroid and failing miserably. Dead bodies weren’t something she generally encountered.

Robert swung towards Henrietta. “Did you see who did this?” he asked sharply.

Henrietta shook her head. “I heard a thud — ” she began, when two men pounded around the side of the tavern.

“Hullo!” The larger of the two waved a hand in the air as he vaulted — quite unnecessarily — over a tombstone to land within a yard of the doctor’s body.

“I see you’ve found him,” Miles gasped, resting his hands on his thighs and bending over to catch his breath. “We chased the chap who did it, but — Hen?”

“Miles?” Recovering first, Henrietta clamped her hands on her hips. “I thought you had a card game!”

Miles was the picture of outraged dignity, marred only slightly by a patch of mud on his cheek. “I thought you were still at the theatre!”

Charlotte hastily interjected herself between the two. “This is a sort of performance,” she said soothingly. “Like a masque.”

“Looks more like a farce to me,” commented Lieutenant Fluellen sagely, earning a glower from his best friend.

“What in the — er, what are you doing here?” Robert demanded, turning his glower on Charlotte instead.

“What he said,” Miles seconded, looping an arm firmly around his wife’s waist before she could get away again. “Including what he didn’t say.”

Charlotte cocked her head at Miles. “What he didn’t say?”

She tried not to notice the way that Henrietta leaned against Miles, her head fitting comfortably into the crook of his shoulder. Even while ostensibly arguing, they still gravitated together. It would be so lovely to be able to lean against someone like that, with all the unspoken support it implied. Not to mention the warmth. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Robert standing next to her, near enough that the hem of his cassock brushed against the side of her pelisse. He radiated heat, too, but it was all of the wrong kind. Tension and irritation rolled off him in palpable waves. Charlotte felt her own shoulders stiffen in reaction.

“Never mind that,” said Robert brusquely. “Why are you here?”

“We were following the King’s doctor,” Charlotte explained defiantly.

“The King’s who?” Miles demanded of his wife.

“You first,” Henrietta said. “You still haven’t told us why you’re here.”

“Are we really going to have this conversation here?” Grimacing, Lieutenant Fluellen waved a gloved hand at the doctor’s crumpled form.

“Well, we don’t need to worry about him eavesdropping,” said Miles cheerfully, earning a poke in the ribs from his wife. “Ouch!”

Lifting an eyebrow at Miles, Robert took charge before further horseplay could ensue. “Perhaps we should search him,” he suggested. Coming from Robert, the suggestion had the force of a command.

“Jolly good idea!” Miles hunkered down next to the body like a dog with a particularly juicy bone. “I say, do cassocks have pockets?”