What could a father do? The earl pulled the blanket closer around his knees. He was not old, but he was not strong either, with a stubborn, debilitating cough that came every winter, and took longer to leave with each passing spring. More than that, he was a near recluse himself, seldom leaving the Hall, rarely entertaining company. He read his law books and occasionally contributed an article to a legal journal, but he was no longer one of the highest-ranking judges in the land, not since the scandal. Now Lord Royce was a rural justice of the peace, adjudicating disputes between his neighbors: straying cows, unpaid bills, verbal contracts gone awry. Rarely, when a prisoner of the assizes courts was desperate, Lord Royce might be called on to lend his legal expertise. Other times, if a case interested him, he might do some investigating on his own, when he had the energy to visit the prisons, to see for himself if the accused were truly guilty.

He had thought Rex would help him when the boy got home. Rescuing the innocent from a harsh justice system seemed a worthy crusade for a retired young warrior, especially one who could tell in an instant when the witnesses were lying, when the prosecutors were supplying false evidence. Rex had not been interested, preferring his bone-numbing, brooding excursions.

Such solitude was not good for the lad, Lord Royce knew. How could the earl not know, having spent almost half of his own life alone? Such loneliness sapped a man's strength and sometimes even made him wish for an end to the aching sorrow. Lord Royce brushed a bit of traitorous dampness from his cheek as he remembered the empty space in his own life, the empty rooms attached to his where his countess should have slept. He quickly replaced those memories, as always, with the image of the beautiful little blue-eyed sprite who used to laugh and giggle and bounce on his lap. It was too late for him, but the earl could not let his heir, his beloved boy, dwindle into a broken, bitter old man like himself. No, he would not, not while he had breath in his body.

The earl reached for the letter on the table by his side and smoothed out the creases. Maybe this piece of paper held the answer.


This could not be happening to her.

How many hundreds of prisoners had cried out the same thing? Two or ten thousand, Amanda did not care. This simply could not be happening, not to her. God have mercy, for she had not done anything wrong!

Well, she had, if one could call stupidity a crime. And she had, indeed, argued with Sir Frederick Hawley. Of course she had; he was a bounder of the blackest sort. Amanda and her stepfather had argued frequently since her mother's death five years ago. How else was Amanda to see that the servants were paid, that his own young son and daughter were properly cared for, that their house did not fall down around their ears? Sir Frederick was a miser, a mean, dirty-tempered, dirt-in-his-pores dastard. And he was dead.

He'd been all too alive that morning when they had fought over Amanda's latest suitor. The heir to a barony was going to call to ask for her hand in marriage-and Sir Frederick said he was going to refuse, again. It was not that Amanda loved Mr. Charles Ashway, but he was a pleasant gentleman who would have made a decent husband, and a husband was her only chance of escaping Sir Frederick's clutches. At twenty-two years of age, she had long since given up on girlish dreams of finding true love and was ready to settle on a kind, caring man. She respected and admired Mr. Ashway, who seemed to offer her respect and admiration in return, two things sadly lacking since Amanda's mother had wed Sir Frederick ten years ago.

Her mother had been lonely, two years a widow.

Amanda could well understand that. She could understand, too, how her mother could feel sorry for Sir Frederick's motherless children, Edwin and Elaine. What she could not understand was how her mother could not see Sir Frederick for what he was.

Not three months after the wedding, he had dismissed Amanda's beloved governess, claiming that since his spinster sister was well educated enough to teach his own children, she would be adequate for Amanda. Amanda's nursemaid went next. She was too old, he claimed. And what need for Amanda's pony, in the city?

Then, when Sir Frederick realized that instead of his being elevated to his wife's social position, the former Lady Alissa Carville was demoted to the fringes of the polite world that he inhabited, she became nothing but a burden to him. Amanda's mother was a frail burden, moreover, too sickly for his baser needs. Worse, her widow's annuity ended at her marriage, and the bulk of her wealth was in trust for Amanda.

Sir Frederick should have looked a little harder before he leaped, too. It was a bad bargain all around, with Amanda the loser. She lost her mother to despair, having to watch her pretty parent fade into a fearful shadow that disappeared altogether after five years of drunken tirades and ungoverned rages.

Amanda vowed not to make the same mistakes, and vowed to escape Sir Frederick as soon as she was out of mourning and her stepsister was older. That was three years ago. Sir Frederick had other ideas. Having himself declared her guardian, her stepfather rejected any number of suitors, claiming they were fortune hunters or philanderers, when he actually had no intention of parting with her dowry, her trust fund, or the interest they brought.

No matter that Mr. Charles Ashway was above reproach. Sir Frederick was going to turn away his offer for Amanda's hand. Further, the baronet had shouted that fateful morning, he intended to refuse any other suitors she managed to bring up to scratch. By the time she reached five-and-twenty, he swore, he intended to see her fortune dissipated to a pittance.

"Bad investments, don't you know."

She would be a penniless spinster with no hope for a home or a family of her own. The servants, no, the whole neighborhood, could hear her opinion of that. They all saw the red mark on her cheek from where Sir Frederick had struck her, threatening worse if she went to the solicitor or the bank.

She went to Almack's that night anyway, certain to find Mr. Ashway there. Surely such a worthy gentleman as Mr. Ashway would understand Amanda's plight, would be willing to wed her in Gretna if need be, then fight in the courts for her inheritance.

Mr. Ashway turned his back on her.

She boldly placed her gloved hand on his sleeve. "But sir, we were to have this first dance, recall? We spoke of it yesterday."

Mr. Ashway looked down at her hand, then toward his mother and sisters, who sat on the sidelines of the assembly rooms. He adjusted his neckcloth, then led her toward the room set aside for refreshments.

"I take it you have spoken to my stepfather?"

Mr. Ashway swallowed his lemonade and made a grimace, whether for the insipid drink or the distasteful Sir Frederick, Amanda did not know. "You must not pay heed to whatever my stepfather said. We can circumvent his control; I know we can."

"The same way you circumvented the rules of polite society? I think not. After all, I have my sisters' reputation to consider, and my family name."

Amanda was confused. "What do you mean? What could he have said?"

Her onetime suitor put his glass back on the table. "He said he could not let a fellow gentleman marry soiled goods. Need I be more specific, madam?" He turned without offering her escort back into the ballroom, where Amanda's stepsister and Sir Frederick's sister, their chaperone, waited.

Amanda did not seek them out. She called for her wrap and went home in a hackney, too furious to think clearly beyond telling the doorman that she was ill. She had to let herself into the house, since the servants were not expecting them back until much later. She was not sure what she could do, yet she could not simply do nothing. Her good name was being destroyed, her dowry being siphoned off to her stepfather's account. Soon she would have nothing left, and less hope.

A light gleamed under Sir Frederick's library door, and she was so angry she went in to confront the fiend with this latest crime. If nothing else, she would make him see how blackening her reputation would reflect poorly on his seventeen-year-old daughter, Elaine, whom he had hopes of marrying off to a wealthy peer.

He was not in the library. The fool had left an uncovered candle burning, though. Amanda went to extinguish it, but she tripped over something that should not have been lying on the Aubusson carpet.

A gun? Had Sir Frederick become so dangerous then, or so drunk, that he was threatening the servants with loaded pistols? Suddenly realizing her own vulnerability, Amanda was glad he was not home after all. She picked the pistol up carefully in case it was loaded, to put it back in the drawer.

She screamed. What else could she do, finding Sir Frederick there behind the desk, with blood and gore and one sightless eye staring up at her? She screamed and Sir Frederick's butler came, buttoning his coat, his wig askew.

"The master always said you were no good."

Then she put down the gun.

Too late. Oh, so much too late.

The servants were shouting or crying. The Watch pushed them all aside. Elaine and her aunt rushed in. Elaine fainted, but Miss Hermione Hawley started shrieking and kept at it until the physician came, and the sheriff's men.

They dragged her off, Amanda Carville, granddaughter of an earl, hands bound, in a wagon, to a dark-paneled, crowded chamber. The room was filled with poorly dressed people and the stink of unwashed bodies. A rough-handed guard shoved her forward, her wrists still bound, to face a bewigged gentleman who never looked up from his papers. She could barely comprehend his words when he spoke to her captors, so numb was she, seeing nothing but her stepfather's face-what there was of it. She never got a chance to speak before her guard led her away. She did hold onto enough of her wits to hand the guard her earbobs, in exchange for his promise to get one message to the family's solicitor, another to an address in Grosvenor Square.