open the door.
Nichols, the young boy who ran errands for the theater, grinned and thrust a small sheaf of flowers into her arms. “’Ere’s another one. This bloke gave me a whole shilling. If this keeps up, I’m gonna be able to set up my own shop soon.”
“It wasn’t the same man?” asked Kat.
Sebastian lifted the flowers from her arms. “At least this one won’t take up half the room. It’s a strange bouquet, though, isn’t it? One yellow lily and nine white roses? What an odd conceit. So who is your admirer?”
Kat had gone suddenly, oddly pale. “The others were from the Comte de Lille.”
“This one’s not?”
She looked down at the card in her hand. “No.”
He frowned. “What is it? What’s wrong? Who are they from?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t say.”
He lifted the card from her hand. “‘And the king made silver and gold at Jerusalem as plenteous as stones, and cedar trees made he as the sycamore trees that are in the vale of abundance,’” he read aloud, then handed it back to her with a laugh. “What kind of gallant sends a woman a bouquet with a quote from the Bible?”
AFTER SEBASTIAN LEFT, Kat sat for some time staring at the strange bouquet. One yellow lily, nine white roses.
No, it couldn’t be. She told herself it was a simple coincidence, that the flowers must have been sent by an admirer. With a shaking hand, she lifted the note and read it again.
She kept a Bible tucked away beneath a collection of old costumes and programs in her trunk. It took her some time to locate the reference. She’d been raised a Catholic and her knowledge of the Bible was not extensive, but she found it eventually.
Chronicles, chapter one, verse fifteen.
She closed the Bible, the black leather covers gripped tight between her hands. Her gaze fixed on the crumpled note on the floor. In the soft light, the broken seal looked like drops of bright blood.
It had been so long, over four months now. Somehow she’d almost convinced herself this day wasn’t going to come. She’d even begun to delude herself into thinking that she might be able to put it all behind her. God help her, she’d actually begun to dream about building some kind of a future with the man she loved more than life itself.
But Ireland was still not free. The war between England and France still raged long and bloody. And on Wednesday the nineteenth of June, at one fifteen in the afternoon, Pierrepont’s successor and Napoleon’s new spymaster in London would be looking to meet Kat Boleyn in the Physic Gardens at Chelsea.
Sebastian arrived back at his house on Brook Street that night to be met by his majordomo.
“Young Tom is in the library,” said the majordomo in the same carefully colorless voice all senior servants seemed to use when referring to the tiger. “He insisted upon waiting up for you.”
“Ah. Thank you, Morey. Good night.”
Opening the door to the library, Sebastian expected to find Tom curled up asleep on one of the window seats. Instead, the boy was at the library table, his chin propped on one fist, a flaming branch of candles at his elbow, a slim volume open on the table before him.
He was so engrossed in his reading that at first he wasn’t aware of Sebastian’s arrival. Then the hinges on the door creaked and he looked up with a start.
“My lord!” He slithered from the chair, his face flushing hot crimson before fading to pale.
Sebastian smiled. “What are you reading?”
“I—I do beg your pardon, my lord.”
“It’s all right, Tom. What is it?”
The boy hung his head. “Jason and the Argonauts.”
“An interesting choice.” Sebastian walked over to pour himself a glass of brandy. “Where did you learn to read?”
“I went to school once, afore me da died.”
Sebastian looked around in surprise. It reminded him of how little he knew of the boy’s past, beyond the fact that his mother had been transported to Botany Bay, leaving her son to fend for himself on the streets of London.
“I expected you earlier this evening,” said Sebastian, splashing brandy in his glass.
“The place really started ’oppin’, come evening. I thought I might learn somethin’ if I stuck around.”
“And did you?”
Tom shook his head. “I checked the shops all up and down the lane, but no one owned up to ’aving seen her ladyship.”
Sebastian leaned against the library table and sipped his brandy in thoughtful silence. “The one-legged beggar, was he at his place near the Norfolk Arms?”
