assume you had come to ask for my advice. On the strength of our limited acquaintance, however, I suspect you have already made up your mind to go and have simply come here to request that I accompany you”—his gaze took in her riding costume—“posing, I take it, as your groom?”
“And to beg the loan of a horse. I was forced to slip out the basement to avoid my watchdog.”
“We could take a hackney.”
“Then I would need a lady’s maid, not a groom,” she pointed out.
“True. Unfortunately, I don’t own any ladies’ horses.”
“Neither do I.” She glanced at the ormolu clock on the mantel. “If you have finished your tea and bread?”
“It’s a trap, you know,” he said, suddenly serious.
“Will you do it?”
“Drink your tea,” he told her, “while I transfer myself into a more humble attire.”
Lying just to the west of St. Clements, Strand Lane proved to be a narrow cobbled passage that wound a torturous path down toward the river.
The day was overcast and cold, with the kind of biting wind more typical of March than May. Pausing his gelding at the head of the lane, Sebastian let his gaze flick to the watch house and church of St. Mary’s that had been left marooned in the center of the Strand by the widening of the street. “It seems an unlikely place for a frightened prostitute to go to ground,” he said.
“Perhaps she grew up around here,” said Miss Jarvis, reining in her mount beside him.
He kneed his horse forward between aged gabled houses of timber and whitewashed daub that nearly met overhead. The buildings might be old, but they were well kept, the cobbles and worn doorsteps swept clean. A little girl dashed past, laughing as she chased a kitten through flowers tumbling out of green-painted window boxes. They passed a ramshackle old inn, the Cock and Magpie, and a livery. But within a hundred yards or so, the lane unexpectedly opened up to their right and Sebastian found himself staring out over a tumbledown stone wall at a stretch of open land.
“It’s a curious place for a meeting,” he said, reining in. He could see, scattered amidst rioting wisteria and lilacs, the broken, ivy-covered statues and rusted iron gates of an abandoned garden that stretched all the way to the terrace and neoclassical side elevation of Somerset House in the distance.
“It’s the ruins of the eastern gardens of the original Somerset House,” said Miss Jarvis. “When they tore down the old palace, the plan was to construct an eastern wing on the new building that would stretch nearly to Surrey Street. But the government ran out of money. My father is always raging about it. He thinks the capital of a great nation needs impressive government buildings, and London is woefully lacking in anything majestic or monumental.”
Sebastian narrowed his eyes against the glint of the light reflected off the Thames. Down near the river’s edge, to their left, stood a lumberyard, its great stacks of drying timber towering twenty to thirty feet in the air. But a strange air of quiet hung over the area. “I don’t like it,” he said, thankful for the weight of the small, double- barreled flintlock pistol he’d slipped into the pocket of his groom’s coat before leaving Brook Street.
“Surely if it were a trap,” she said, “the rendezvous would have been set for tonight. What are they going to do? Cosh me—and my servant—over the head in broad daylight? It’s not exactly a disreputable neighborhood.”
“Would you have come here at night?”
“Of course not.”
Sebastian studied the expanse of overgrown gravel paths and untamed shrubbery. “Where exactly is this Hannah Green supposed to be?”
“There,” said Miss Jarvis, nodding to what looked like a caretaker’s cottage at the base of the garden near the water’s edge.
Sebastian swung out of the saddle. “Wait here,” he told her. “Your groom is going to knock on the door.”
He expected her to argue. Instead, she took his reins in her strong gloved hand, a frown line forming between her eyes as she studied the small stone house.
The original Somerset House had been built in the mid- sixteenth century by the Duke of Somerset, uncle and Lord Protector of the boy king Edward VI. A vast Renaissance palace, it had been pulled down late in the previous century and replaced by the current Somerset House, now used by various Royal societies and government offices. Only this stretch of the old gardens had survived. Once, the sandstone cottage near the river might have been a part of the ancient Tudor palace itself. A retainer’s lodge, perhaps, or a delightful garden retreat for the dowager queens who had once used the old palace as their Dower House. The echoes of the original house’s renaissance glory were there, in the crumbling stone steps, in the sweet-scented damask rose blooming stubbornly from amidst a thicket of thistles.
Sebastian walked up the neglected path, the gravel crunching beneath his feet, his senses alert to any movement, any sound. The garden appeared deserted.
Studying the cobwebs draping the delicately carved tracery of the windows and the leaded panes, Sebastian knocked on the warped old door and listened to the sound fade away into nothing. He was raising his fist to knock again when he heard a furtive whisper of sound from the far side of the thick panels. The scrape of a slipper over stone flagging, perhaps, or the brush of cloth against cloth.
He waited, aware of a sense of being watched. Tilting back his head, he scanned the crenulated decoration at the wall’s edge, then heard the rasp of a bolt being drawn back.
The door creaked inward a foot and stopped. He had a glimpse of a young woman’s pale face, her brown eyes widening in fear. Behind her stretched an empty stone-flagged passageway with thick whitewashed walls.
“Miss Jarvis sent me to inquire—” he began, only to have the woman let out a little mewl of terror. Her hands slipping off the door’s latch, she whirled, her fists clenching in her skirts, her brown hair flying as she pelted back
