Louise shook her head when Byrne let out a little grunt of frustration and seemed about to take a step back. “No. You must give that to her now!”

She waved her hand at the scrap of paper dangling from his fingertips. A sudden image leaped into her head of one of the no-doubt-by-now-dead rats hanging limply by its tail from Brown’s big fist. The difference being, this little piece of paper was far more dangerous than any rodent.

“Mama, this can’t wait. Please.”

Victoria scowled at her disapprovingly. “If this message is so very important, perhaps Mr. Gladstone should also know of its contents?”

Byrne cleared his throat. “Ma’am, I don’t think it’s a good—”

The queen silenced him with a look of bleak displeasure. “Mr. Rhodes,” she said, turning to the PM’s secretary, “please do the honor of reading to all present this message that is so critical it stops our government from working.”

The gaunt-featured man stepped forward, head bowed meekly. He smoothed his thin mustache with two fingers then gingerly plucked the square of paper from Byrne’s hand. He cleared his throat as he silently scanned the words that would remain forever implanted in Louise’s mind.

The man’s eyes widened in shock. “Oh dear,” he whispered.

“Mr. Rhodes,” Gladstone’s stentorious voice rumbled in warning. He nodded his head, enveloped in a cloud of white hair, toward the paper. “Proceed, sir.”

Rhodes ran a finger under his collar. “Beg pardon, but I’d rather not. Not, that is, in front of the ladies.”

“Read, Rhodes!”

The secretary’s eyes snapped obediently back to the note. He moistened his lips, swallowed audibly, then let the words tumble out all in one breath. “ ‘Where three got in on four legs another might on two. Does it take a dead princess to win freedom for our Irish brothers?’ ”

The room fell silent.

Louise looked at her mother, sitting absolutely still behind her desk in her widow’s black bombazine and crape, her plump fingers wearing only funereal jet rings, hands pressed flat against a gold-embossed blotter. But Victoria’s moon face did not lose its color as Louise had imagined it would. Rather, it blossomed into hot rage.

“Where did this foolish riddle come from? What does this mean, Mr. Byrne?”

“It means, ma’am, that we’ve just come from Princess Beatrice’s bedchamber, where she and her governess confronted three very large and hungry rats.”

“In the palace? Impossible.”

“No, ma’am, they were most definitely rats.”

Louise shot a glance at Byrne’s dark eyes and felt an unexpected emotional tug she couldn’t define. Although his gaze revealed nothing, and despite the seriousness of the threat to her sister, she had a feeling he was holding back a smile. She would have kicked him in the shin good and hard for seeing any humor in this most grave situation, if he’d been within reach. Shouldn’t they be discovering how this intruder had got in? Where he, or they, might be even now? And what if there was another visitation with far more dire consequences than a warning?

“It was terrifying, truly,” Louise said. “Bea is in such a state, and Miss Witherstone near apoplexy. Brown remains back there even now”—she shuddered at the thought—“eradicating the beasts.”

Victoria drew a deep breath, filling her ponderous bosom and letting it deflate again. “I see. Are we to assume this is the work of those Fenian madmen who have been setting off bombs in our city on behalf of the Irish rebels?” She looked pointedly at Byrne but didn’t wait for an answer. “Have you alerted our guardsmen?”

Gladstone had taken the note from his secretary. After reading it for himself he passed it to Disraeli, who barely let his eyes drift with disdain over its surface before hastily placing it on the corner of the queen’s desk.

“Brown will handle that, ma’am. Anyone leaving the palace will be stopped and questioned. It’s my suggestion that the wedding party, and all accompanying them, move to the carriages at once. Vacating the palace will allow Brown’s men to search for any other surprises from the Fenians or whoever may be to blame.”

Gladstone coughed into his lavender gloved hand. “My apologies, Your Majesty, for this unpleasantness. The Irish problem is a tangled one, but it is unconscionable that your family be exposed to—”

“Nevertheless, we are exposed, as you put it,” Victoria cut him off. “We will continue our discussion, Mr. Prime Minister, on our return from Balmoral, whenever my men tell me it’s safe. Louise, inform any of our Ladies of the Court who aren’t already in their carriages to move to them with the utmost haste.”

“Yes, Mama.” She turned to leave and was halfway to the door, only vaguely aware of Gladstone and Disraeli bidding her mother a safe journey, when Byrne’s deep voice made her prick up her ears.

“If I may have a word with you in private, ma’am?”

“Of course,” the queen said.

Louise kept on walking, intent on her mission. But she couldn’t help wondering what it was Byrne felt compelled to say that he didn’t want anyone but Victoria to hear.

Brown didn’t like him; that much was obvious. She had heard the Scot call the American “Raven” in a clearly mocking tone. Normally Brown’s craggy, bearded face screened his emotions. Anyone he didn’t like was simply denied access to her mother. He had that much power these days. Victoria took his advice on almost everything, much to the annoyance of her sons and ministers, both of whom viewed the Scot as opportunistic and crude.

Yet the queen seemed to trust this foreigner despite Brown’s disapproval.

How odd.

Nearly as odd as her reaction had been to Stephen Byrne back at the nursery. Ordering him about as if she were the queen or her older sister Vicky, who sometimes behaved even more pompously with the royal staff than their mother. Why had she become so defensive when she was around the man? She, who enjoyed the relaxed friendship of commoners from all stations in life. She who prided herself on treating everyone with equal cordiality.

It seemed that the roguish American brought out the worst in her. Or, at least, brought out something she wasn’t sure she could control.

Six

Rupert Clark scooped black powder into a paper cylinder. He pinched then twisted the end tight between calloused fingers. Every now and then he stopped what he was doing to check on the work of the younger man beside him. Details were what mattered in this game. Details made you famous, or blew off your hand. Or worse.

Rupert had joined up with Major General Richard Taylor in the 28th Louisiana Infantry back in ’63. He had learned from his sergeant the technique of rigging an artillery shell with a primer sensitive enough to detonate the shell if a man or horse stepped on a pressure plate. Rupert quickly discovered he had talent for the work.

Soon he was designing his own, even more sophisticated, explosive devices. General Robert E. Lee heard about his successes and ordered Rupert transferred to the general’s own Army of Northern Virginia, not long after the Confederate victory at Fredericksburg. Will McMahon came on board at Chancellorsville, and he’d taught the boy enough to make of him a good assistant, even if he was a little slow and, sometimes, too impatient for such sensitive work.

After that they’d marched together, mining roads and blowing up bridges for the South wherever they were most needed.

Rupert gloried in constructing more and more sophisticated mines and bombs, and he felt proud of his successes. He’d only made one mistake; it had cost him three fingers from his right hand. But he could kill more Yanks in one short minute than any man he knew. And without wasting a single bullet or jeopardizing his comrades’ lives. Never had he felt so empowered, so important as during those grand and glorious campaigns.

As it turned out, it was all for naught.

Rupert had believed in their cause, breaking away from the tyranny of the North, saving his family’s land and their way of life for the children he would someday have with his sweet Annemarie. Now there was nothing left back home. Nothing worth returning to anyway. His parents were dead—of natural causes, or so he’d been told. His brother had taken off for somewhere out west. Annemarie perished in the blaze that burned down their house by the ferry landing in Irish Bend, Louisiana.

Had his wife stayed to try to protect their home? Had those damn Yanks sullied her before setting the house afire? The bitterness of not knowing burned in his gut like a white-hot sulfur flame. Tortured him. Devoured him.

“We might could head on up to West Virginia, work in the mines,” he told Will.

“Guess we could.”

But blasting out shafts was dirty and particularly dangerous work. Blowing a path through granite and shale mountains for the railways out west was more to his liking.

“Okay by me,” an always agreeable Will said.

“Trouble is, those damn Chinese work cheap and know their way around dynamite.” In the end, they gave up on that too. Mines or railways—there was nothing else for a man with such a singular talent when there wasn’t a war going on. “Maybe we should just work our way up north. Might be jobs, one sort or another in Chicago.”

He and Will had left the sickening devastation of their homeland. But they found nothing other than the stinking-of-death, bloody stockyards for work. Nothing, that is, until they stumbled on an Irish-American rally to raise money for militants bent on winning freedom for Ireland. If one brave endeavor couldn’t be won, Rupert reasoned, perhaps another might be. His missing fingers itched at the thought of being back in the fight.