Amanda worked there forty or more hours each week, bringing her little boy with her, and they’d recently hired two other women as part-time clerks. Louise was hopeful of expanding soon.

As she stepped from the brougham then through the shop’s door she tried to ignore the light headache that had plagued her for hours. Her anxiety had run high for days following the run-in with Darvey. Sometimes she feared she was being followed, watched. But that might as easily have been due to her clandestine bodyguards. She suspected Byrne had assigned one or more of his men to follow her whenever he couldn’t be with her. In fact, she rarely saw the man himself. He seemed reluctant to openly accompany her on her jaunts into the city, preferring to shadow her from a distance. Why this should be, she was at a loss to understand. Perhaps he thought a more discreet form of protection would draw less attention to her.

But when she realized she hadn’t seen him around at all for days, a fresh form of worry came at her. The Fenians were desperate radicals, capable of ruthless violence. They would not hesitate to attack an agent of the queen if they saw him as a threat to their wicked plots. She feared for Byrne’s safety as well as her own family’s. And yet she, like Byrne, refused to stay shut inside Buckingham Palace. When fear of death became fear of living one’s life, the Fenians would have won. And so she went about her routine, though she felt perpetually shadowed by evil.

She found Amanda at the shop, in a gray mood not unlike her own. Whereas days earlier her friend had inadvertently destroyed items out of sheer excitement over the suffrage rally, today Amanda was a bundle of nerves and incapable of picking up any object without immediately dropping it.

“I’m so sorry,” her friend apologized after letting a second porcelain saucer slip from her fingers in less than twenty minutes. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Louise watched her friend sweep up broken shards with trembling hands. “What’s wrong? You’re shaking from head to foot, dear girl.”

“It’s Darvey. I’m sure I’ve spotted him twice more, though he keeps his distance. I worry what he has in mind.”

Louise closed her eyes and swallowed to calm herself. Either Byrne hadn’t yet confronted the bawd or his threats had proved ineffective. “Come, let’s just lock up for the night. I knew I wouldn’t be long, so I asked my driver to wait for me. I’ll deliver you and Eddie home where you’ll be safe. One of my mother’s men has been detailed to approach the scallywag and put the fear of God in him.”

“Thank you. I’ll feel ever so much safer in a carriage tonight.”

Louise wrapped a comforting arm around her shoulders. “And where is my godson? I haven’t seen him since I arrived.”

“Sleeping in the back room.” Amanda laughed. “He exhausted himself whacking away at crates and pots, pretending he was a drummer in the queen’s guard on parade. You can go and wake him if you like.”

“No, let him sleep a few more minutes while we tidy up and tally receipts. You can do the sums. Paper isn’t fragile.” She smiled affectionately at her friend. “I’ll dust up the china while I wait for you.”

A few minutes later, Amanda closed the account book and slipped the day’s earnings into a small canvas bag. “Done. Let’s wake the boy and be off before it gets dark.”

Louise climbed down from the ladder she’d used to reach the top shelves where some of the more fragile objects were kept out of reach of small hands and ladies’ bustles. “Are you still working with my tutor on your writing?” she asked.

Amanda beamed at her. “Yes, and that reminds me. I wanted to tell you what he said. He’s encouraged me to submit one of my articles to the Times, as an editorial piece. He says it’s quite good enough, better than many of the pieces by their own reporters.”

“Oh, Amanda, I’m so very proud of you!” Louise went to her and clasped her hands. “Tell me what your article is about.”

It was then—as Amanda started to explain the exposé she’d written about women of any age who, like her, had lost family property to a distant relative simply because he was a male—that Louise first heard the soft scuffling sounds. She turned toward the back room and smiled at Amanda, who stopped talking.

“What?” Amanda asked.

“I think Eddie’s up and about. Maybe we should collect him and go.” Louise glanced toward the shop’s front window. “It looks like rain, and it will be dark early.”

“Good idea.” Amanda plucked her cloak from its peg and laid it across the countertop. “I’ll go fetch him.”

But as soon as she opened the door to the storeroom, clouds of oily, black smoke billowed into the salesroom.

“Oh, Lord!” Louise cried.

“Fire! Eddie!” Amanda shrieked. Frantic to reach her son, she dove into the smudgy clouds.

Unable to stop Amanda, Louise raced outside to summon her coachman and shout out the alarm. Her cries brought a handful of people into the street. Rain started to fall. A good wetting down of neighboring houses might contain the fire. The uniformed driver lumbered down from his perch, looking as if he’d been awakened from a nap. Where the hell was Byrne when she needed him?

From inside, she could hear Amanda calling out above the ever louder crackle of flames. “Louise, I have him. I—oh God, something’s blocking—” Her voice broke off at a splintering crash from deep inside the building.

“I’m coming. We’ll get you out.” Louise turned to her driver. “Quick. Come with me.”

She ran three steps but heard no one behind her. When she turned the man was backing into the street, away from the now visible flames and sparking cinders, a horrified look on his face.

“Stop!” she shouted. “We have to get them out of there.”

Ominous creaking noises followed by another boom shook the building. A fierce burst of heat rushed out through the front door, stealing away Louise’s breath.

The coachman’s eyes widened. “I’ll be off to roust up the fire squad, Your Highness.”

“There isn’t time. We have to—”

But he was off and away.

“Go then!” she screamed after him. Coward.

A shoeblack, whose stand she passed every day, shook his head woefully at her. “Them roofing timbers done burnt through and fallen. You’ll not be gettin’ past ’em, Your Highness.”

“The hell I won’t.”

She held her sleeve across her nose and mouth and ran straight through the front room of the shop and into the glowing inferno of the storage area. The heat seared her flesh, unbearable, coming in blasts, each one sucking the breath from her lungs. Her clothing was no protection. She wondered how long before her skirts caught a cinder and ignited.

“Where are you?” she shouted. Every word released allowed burning air to singe her lungs. “Amanda!”

No answer came.

Dear Lord. Please don’t let this happen. Please don’t take them from me.

She sensed someone coming up behind her and felt a thin ribbon of relief that the coachman had a change of heart.

“Are you insane? Get out of here!” Byrne’s voice.

“Amanda . . . Eddie, they’re—” Her eyes burned and wept, and she choked on the acrid, scorching air. “Can’t . . . can’t leave them.”

Byrne grabbed her arms and hauled her down to floor level. When their eyes met she saw a storm of emotions in his—fear among them, but something else that moved her.

“Stay down where the air is good,” he shouted above the roar of the flames. He moved ahead of her but stopped at a single smoldering beam that had fallen at an angle and was now propped at one end on a soapstone sink in the far corner. Wrapping his hands within the sleeves of his leather coat to protect them, he bent low and braced one shoulder beneath the timber. He heaved upward with a grunt and threw the wood aside. A shower of sparks erupted through the blackness when it landed. In that moment of orange-gold brightness, Louise glimpsed two figures curled on the floor.

“There,” she coughed out the word. “Behind the shelves.”

Scrambling on hands and knees, she made her way to Amanda. Her friend had thrown herself over the little boy. Eddie was sobbing but his mother appeared unconscious. It looked to Louise as if a smaller timber had come down on her head just after she’d reached him.

“It’s all right, Eddie. Come here to Auntie Lou-lou.” She tucked him under one arm and drew her jacket over his head against the poisonous, broiling air.

Byrne hauled up Amanda and flopped her over his shoulder. “Go!” he shouted, his voice rough with inhaled smoke.

They crawled, staggered, and tumbled out into the street. A crowd had started to gather around the front of the shop. Three men with buckets sloshing with water raced past her; she had little hope they could do much good. Someone shouted that the fire squad had been summoned.

At a safe distance from the burning building Bryne deposited a soot-covered Amanda on a quilt supplied by one of the neighbor women. The glass display window exploded, spraying shards of glass across the street. Louise sat on the curb beside Amanda, rocking Eddie to quell his crying. Only when Amanda moaned and tried to sit up did Louise break down in tears of relief and hand the child to her.

They’d all made it out. It was a miracle. The shop would be in ruins, but the only thing that really mattered was—they were alive.

“Thank you,” she gasped when Byrne returned, having organized a bucket brigade and informed the fire squad of the location of the blaze. “Thank you for saving them . . . us.”

His coal black eyes looked more accusing than concerned now. “How did it start?”