“Ah, but I have set the stage, as it were.” The steady, concentrated gaze reappeared. “It became obvious from their content and complexity that the ciphers were originating in the upper classes of British society, circulating within them before finally being sent to France. With Napoleon’s forces gathered at Boulogne in ’04 for a proposed invasion, the Home and Foreign Offices went into a panic. The plans for Pitt’s coastal fortifications in Sussex and Kent were discovered in a packet bound for Holland. I saw them myself and deciphered the note that accompanied it; a very elegant, inventive one I might add.” He smiled wryly at the memory.

“Well done, Dy, but the problem remained!” Darcy was caught in his friend’s narrative. “It was the men themselves who needed to be apprehended!”

“Precisely!” Brougham replied. “But how to discover them? They moved in the first circles of Society. They were highly intelligent and possibly powerful men. They might even have been part of the government itself ! The introduction of an agent would prove useless, for he would never be accepted, let alone trusted. It remained, therefore —”

“It had to be one of their own!” Darcy looked at his friend in wonder and some apprehension. “Someone they would accept without question but who was their equal in cunning and resourcefulness. Good Lord, Dy! You turned spy?” Brougham offered him a confirming bow. “All this time! Your pose as a rattle and nod cock?”

“Unfortunately, yes.” He sighed. “It was rather depressing how quickly I was accepted as such, but there it is! For King and Country, you know!”

“But did you catch them?” Darcy persisted. This was too incredible! His best friend a spy!

“Oh, yes, I caught him.” A strained look appeared upon Brougham’s face. He veiled his eyes. “But I cannot reveal his name or those of others I have exposed. They are dealt with by others and quietly while the Rattle continues on his rounds of dancing and hunting, gaming and playing Society’s fool. I swear, Fitz, you do not want to know what is revealed to a fool about those of our set.”

“Or to a servant?” he asked quietly. It may have begun as a noble quest to redeem his family’s name and an exciting challenge to his active intellect, but now the chase was taking its toll upon his friend. Darcy could see it in every line.

“Yes, when I do not have the right connections, such as those that would gain me entrée to the fanatics who surround Lady Monmouth. She has no use for the likes of me, much too devoted a lady to want my sort of fool. Would you offer me something to drink, old man?” he asked abruptly. “Dry work, this confessing! Almost envy you your way!”

“Getting drunk, do you mean?” Darcy groaned. “I do not recommend it. Besides, you may say something you ought not.” He strode over to a cabinet and opened it upon an assortment of spirits. “Wine or brandy?”

“Wine! We dine with your sister in a few moments, and I do not wish to have anything stronger lingering about my person.”

Darcy poured him a glass and then put the bottle away. No wine until supper for him! “And your familiarity with innkeepers and wonderful ability with locks?”

“Tools of the trade, Fitz.” He almost drained the glass in the first swallow. “In this business it is not enough to know the powerful. One must follow treason behind locked doors, through the streets, and into the gutter as well. There are parts of our fair city you would not believe existed even were I to swear on my honor to it. But gutter or town house, the stench is the same, and few are what they seem. I was even beginning to worry about you, old man!”

“Me?” Darcy stared at him, surprised and affronted.

“Oh, not that you were disloyal! Heavens, man, do not poker up so!” Brougham chided. “But I was worried about the company you were keeping. Sayre and Trenholme were always dubious pieces of work, not your sort at all! Then, it seemed that you were taken with Lady Sylvanie, now Monmouth, who has become a rather dangerous woman with whom to be connected. Recently, your behavior had become so unusual, especially in regard to Miss Darcy and since your return from Kent, that I did not know what to think. When you insisted on accepting Monmouth’s invitation, I feared for your reputation and tried to discourage you.” Dy skewered the area over his heart with a finger. “But you ignored even my ‘pointed’ advice.”

“I thought that display was concerning Georgiana,” Darcy responded, only partially mollified, “which is another subject we must discuss before we join her.”

“Must we?” Brougham’s jaw hardened. “I would rather not.” He downed the last of his wine.

“I believe we must.” Darcy tensed at his friend’s reluctance. “You were quite correct about her, and your reproofs to me were more than warranted. I thank you for both. I see now that I have lately given into your keeping responsibilities that were rightly only my own and that I must ask you to relinquish.” Abruptly, Brougham turned and walked back to the window, leaving Darcy to frown after his frame outlined against the gathering dusk. “Dy?”

“Do you have any idea what an extraordinary and precious young woman you have in your sister, Fitz?” Brougham leaned against the window frame. “I doubt that I have met her like in any female of our class, or at least in any that my public character has been allowed near! Already she is possessed of the graces an intelligent, discerning man appreciates. What she will be when she has reached maturity takes one’s breath away!”

“She is but sixteen, Dy!” Darcy remonstrated, alarmed at the intensity he heard in his friend’s voice, “and I had your hand that you —”

“That I would not be a danger to her!” Brougham turned back to him. “You have my hand still, my friend. I do not and would never play with Miss Darcy’s heart! I have been at some pains to keep my own feelings at bay, hidden beneath layers of mutual interests and friendship. Upon my honor, Fitz,” he protested vigorously in the face of his friend’s silence, “I have taken the greatest care that Miss Darcy know me foremost as friend. I am only too aware of her age; give me some credit for delicacy, I beg you!”

“But it will be some years before I would even consider giving her in marriage.” Darcy put as much disapproval into his tone as possible. “And the disparity in your ages, Dy!”

“Well do I know it.” He laughed grimly. “I would not have believed it myself. The baby sister of my best friend! How absurd! But there is this, Fitz. I’m old enough to know my own mind and know what love is. After this bloody war is over, I know what I shall do with the rest of my life, and it shall not be performing as London’s prize idiot, I assure you! You know me, Fitz, despite these last seven years. You know that I would cherish Miss Darcy above my own life, and if I ever did not to your satisfaction, you have my leave to thrash me within an inch of it!”

Darcy stared at his friend in silence. He could not doubt that every word Dy spoke was true and from the heart, but the idea that he loved Georgiana and wished to make her his wife was more than Darcy had ever expected to entertain today or any other. “Dy —”

“Please, let us not speak of this further for now,” Brougham interrupted. “She is too young, as you say; and I am entangled in this snarl of intrigue that makes my life not worth a tuppence. Nothing may come of this confession, you know! Any day a notice may appear in the papers. Until this war is done, I can say nothing nor ask anything of you or Miss Darcy. Perhaps, by the time Napoleon is finally dispatched, she will be of age to listen to my proposal. I leave it to you, my friend, to decide in the interim whether you will allow me to make it. Now…” He straightened and gestured toward the door. “Shall we go in to supper?”

“Dy, in all honesty, there is something you must know first.” Darcy made one last attempt to deflect his friend from his determination to wait for his sister.

“Yes?” Brougham stopped with a look of amusement. “Is there some dark Darcy secret that will deter me?”

“Dark?” Darcy bit his lip. “No, but you must know that she…” How was he to put this? There was no delicate way —

A knock sounded on the study door, causing the open expression that Dy had worn during his narrative to be replaced by one of wariness. “Enter,” Darcy called and watched with fascination the stages in the transformation of his friend from the sincere lines of the man he had been during their interview to the supercilious ones of his public persona. In the few moments it required for a footman to open the door and Georgiana to enter, the metamorphosis was complete.

“My Lord Brougham!” The pleasure in her eyes was unfeigned. She cast them down only briefly as she did him her curtsy and turned to Darcy. “Have you closeted with His Lordship long enough, Brother, or shall I have supper sent back to the kitchen?”

“Oh, we are quite at an end, Miss Darcy,” His Lordship interposed. “We have exhausted between us every topic of conversation. I fear it will fall upon you to keep us civil to each other through supper.”

Slipping back into his pose with uncanny ease, Dy proved an excellent dinner guest, entertaining them with anecdotes and absurd homilies interspersed with informative bits concerning the great, the famous, and those who aspired to be so. Darcy could almost believe their earlier meeting had been a dream, so little did the man sitting at table resemble what he had confessed. Still, Darcy watched with a heightened awareness for indications of the strands that might one day bind his sister to his friend. Certainly, Georgiana blossomed under his regard, losing her reticence in Brougham’s company even more than when among their relations; but he could detect no feeling for him other than a delighted friendship. On Dy’s part, there were no secret glances or soulful sighs. He continued to play the amusing rattle Society thought him, sometimes ridiculous, often ironic; yet his edges were softened in their company with occasional displays of his true intellect and powers of discernment.