“Sometimes,” said Robert, patting down the area around the wound. “If the owner bothered to have them put in.”

“Unless the other chappie relieved him of any burdens before sticking him.” Lieutenant Fluellen crouched down beside them, inspecting the dead man’s shoes for concealed hidey holes.

Charlotte hastily stepped back to give them more room. Next to her, Henrietta stood on her tiptoes, craning her neck to try to see over the men’s bent backs.

“He had no time,” said Robert tersely. “Unless he lifted something off Wrothan in the Robing Room beforehand.”

“Wrothan?” asked Charlotte, head swimming in a flurry of masculine pronouns. The gentlemen all seemed to understand one another perfectly, but she had no idea who was meant to have stabbed whom.

“The dead one,” supplied Miles helpfully.

“You mean Dr. Simmons,” corrected Henrietta.

“Unless,” said Charlotte, “Mr. Wrothan is Dr. Simmons.”

Robert pushed himself to his feet, scrubbing his hands against his robe with a compulsive gesture that reminded Charlotte of Lady Macbeth. The movement only smeared the blood rather than removing it, giving him, in his medieval cassock, the appearance of something out of a novel by Mrs. Radcliffe.

“Dr. who?” he demanded.

Lieutenant Fluellen lifted a restraining hand. His were streaked, too, but with mud rather than blood. “May I suggest we exchange stories somewhere more hospitable? By a fire, perhaps?”

“Oh, yes, please!” said Henrietta. “We have a carriage waiting at the end of the road.”

Miles staggered to his feet. “Our carriage?”

Charlotte glanced over her shoulder at the figure lying between the tombstones, nothing more than a shadow among shadows, shrouded in dirty snow. “But, surely,” she said uncertainly, “we can’t just leave him like this.”

Taking possession of Charlotte’s arm, Robert marched her briskly forward. “Why not?” he said, and his voice was as cold as the slush seeping through Charlotte’s slippers. “It’s no more than he has done to others.”

Numb with cold and confusion, Charlotte darted a glance up at him. “What — ” she began, but Lieutenant Fluellen intervened as smoothly as though it had been planned, saying soothingly, “He’s on consecrated ground, at least.”

As though to underline his point, incense seeped through the gaps in the boards on the church windows, redolent of ancient mysteries.

There was something oddly familiar about the smell of the smoke coming from the church. Frankincense? It did smell a bit like incense, but there was a sickly sweetness beneath the exotic herbs that was nothing like the smell of Sunday mornings.

“Wait.” Charlotte tugged against Robert’s arm. “I’ve smelled that smoke before.”

Robert stretched an arm across her back, marching her forward. There was nothing the least bit personal about the touch. His arm felt like an iron bar across her back. “I sincerely doubt it.”

“On the King,” Charlotte clarified, scurrying to keep up with him and trying to sniff the air at the same time.

“You can hardly mean to suggest that the King is an opium eater,” Robert said shortly, picking up his pace.

“Is that what that was?”

“Part of it.” Robert hoisted her into the carriage so energetically that Charlotte went careening straight to the far side of the seat. “I suspect there’s some belladonna in there, too.”

Charlotte sank back into her nest of lap rugs, which were, alas, now as cold as she was. “That would explain so much.”

“What would?” asked Lieutenant Fluellen, settling down across from her. Henrietta climbed in after him, with Miles attached to her other side like a very large cushion.

“Opium,” provided Charlotte as Robert took the only remaining seat, the one next to her. She wondered if Henrietta had done that by design, but there was no way of asking. “It seems that’s what I smelled on the King the other day.”

“You think the King is smoking opium?” said Lieutenant Fluellen curiously. “I find that hard to imagine.”

“Not of his own accord,” explained Charlotte. “I believe Dr. Simmons gave it to him.”

Robert looked to Henrietta rather than Charlotte. “Let’s start at the beginning, shall we? Who is Dr. Simmons?”

Charlotte and Henrietta exchanged a long look.

“That’s what we’ve been trying to find out,” explained Henrietta. “A man calling himself Dr. Simmons has been treating the King for, er — ”

“A return of his old complaint,” Charlotte put in.

“You mean he’s gone around the bend,” translated Miles. “Again.”

“Something like that,” agreed his wife, snuggling into the crook of his arm. “The Queen asked Charlotte to have a word with Dr. Simmons about the King’s condition, so we both went to seek him out. That’s how we discovered that Dr. Simmons wasn’t Dr. Simmons.”

“You’re saying there’s a real Dr. Simmons?” Miles tried to look down at Henrietta and went cross-eyed.

“Yes. And he wasn’t the man lying in that churchyard.” Henrietta shuddered, partly for dramatic effect, partly from cold. Miles gave her a comforting squeeze.

Charlotte wouldn’t have minded a comforting squeeze, but there didn’t seem much chance of one, not even of the cousinly sort. Robert maintained a grasp on the side of her pelisse much as a parent might hold on to a small child. It was about as comforting as a cod-liver oil.

Lieutenant Fluellen, who was, Charlotte had always maintained, a Very Nice Man, leaned forwards to pat her hand. “Not a pleasant sight, was he?” he said sympathetically.

“The man you knew as Dr. Simmons was in reality Mr. Arthur Wrothan,” Robert blurted out so loudly that Charlotte’s ears rang with it.

“He’s the chap we were pursuing,” put in Lieutenant Fluellen helpfully, smiling beatifically at Robert over her head. He clearly had found something terribly amusing. Whatever it was, Robert didn’t share the joke. He had gone as stiff and cold as an iceberg. A very icy iceberg.

“But who was he? Aside from impersonating Dr. Simmons, that is.” Lady Henrietta tilted her head up at her husband. “And how did you get involved?”

“War Office,” Miles declared proudly.

Henrietta wrinkled her nose. “They’ve let you loose again?”

Miles’s last foray into espionage had not exactly been an unqualified success. While Miles had many virtues, subtlety wasn’t one of them. It wasn’t exactly Henrietta’s strong suit, either, but Charlotte would never offend her friend by telling her that.

“Ouch!” Miles clapped a hand somewhere in the vicinity of his heart. “That hurts.”

“Not as much as a knife in the ribs,” said Robert acerbically. “We can weep over your wounds later. Once we’ve sorted out this tangle.”

Henrietta beamed at him. “I knew I liked you.”

“Who was Mr. Wrothan?” Charlotte demanded hastily before Henrietta could say something embarrassing. Like proposing on Charlotte’s behalf.

“Other than a scoundrel?” Robert settled back against the seat, releasing his grip on Charlotte’s pelisse. “Wrothan was a first lieutenant in the Seventy-fourth Foot. I have reason to believe that he augmented his income by selling secrets to the Mahratta in India.”

“And the French,” put in Miles, not to be left out.

“And the French,” agreed Robert. “Although what he was selling to them remains unclear.”

“Is that why you came back to England?” asked Charlotte, twisting in her seat to see him more clearly. “To pursue Mr. Wrothan?”

“Yes,” Robert said shortly, and left it at that. The stony set of his profile did not invite further questions.

Charlotte frowned down at her gloved hands as the past rearranged itself yet again like a mosaic that had been misassembled. He hadn’t come home, then, to take up the ducal mantle and settle comfortably into the peaceful flow of life at Girdings. He hadn’t come home to come home at all.

And she — she didn’t really have much of a role at all, did she, in this new, larger tale of betrayal and retribution? It was very lowering to be not just a side character, but a minor side character, little more than a footnote in someone else’s story.

Fortunately, no one else seemed to notice her abstraction. Henrietta, comfortably ensconced at the center of her own narrative, was busily trying to align this new information. “So,” she said, “your Mr. Wrothan pretended to be the King’s doctor and insinuated himself into the King’s household in order to glean secrets to sell to the French.”

“Lucky for him that the King should go batty again,” commented Miles comfortably.

Charlotte lifted her head. “Unless it wasn’t luck,” she said. She might be a side character, but there was no need to be an entirely insignificant one.

For the first time that horrible night, Robert looked directly at her. “The opium,” he said.

Their eyes locked in a moment of complete mutual comprehension.

“Would you mind explaining for the rest of us?” demanded Miles.

“If someone were to drug the King with opium,” Charlotte said, not altogether coherently, “they might be able to simulate something akin to madness. Everyone at Court is so afraid of another bout that the least little aberration in behavior would be taken as a recurrence of his old illness.”

“And he would be treated accordingly.” Robert’s words fell into the fraught silence like footsteps in a graveyard.

“A doctor would be called in,” confirmed Charlotte. “And not Dr. Willis. The King has expressly stated that he will not allow himself to be treated by Dr. Willis ever again, and the Dukes of Kent and Cumberland have expressed their resolves to bar any attempt by Dr. Willis to enter against their father’s wishes.”