down to them. “Wot the bloody ’ell? There’s a pile o’ burned clothes ’ere! That musta been wot started the fire. Only wot the bloody ’ell—”
“Help!” she screamed. “Help us, quickly!”
Sebastian added his voice to hers. “We’re trapped down here behind a gate and the tide is coming in. Get a crowbar to break the padlocked chain.
The stairwell filled with gruff voices and the clomp of heavy boots tramping down the steps to splash through the water that crept ever higher. A giant of a man with red hair and a full blond beard eased one end of a crowbar into the loops of the padlocked chain, his face purpling with strain as he broke the links.
“Wot the ’ell ye doin’ down ’ere?” he asked as Hero Jarvis, her wet shift clinging to her skin, fell against him.
Helping hands reached out to grip them, drag them up to light and fresh air and the blessed, unexpected warmth of the late-afternoon sun. A blanket appeared, passed from hand to hand. Miss Jarvis clenched it around her like a cloak, her face so pinched with cold her lips were blue.
Sebastian took a deep gulp from a brandy flask pressed into his hands and said, “How did you know?”
One of their rescuers—the red-haired giant with the bushy beard—said, “We smelled smoke. Ain’t nothing a lumberman fears more’n fire. So we come to investigate.”
Sebastian’s gaze fell to the charred vegetation at his feet. And he realized some of the clothes they’d thrown to the top of the stairs must have wedged into the gap between the bottom of the old door and the worn lintel beneath. The fire might have gone out in the stairwell, but at some point it had obviously burned beneath the door enough to catch the long lank grass of the Duke of Somerset’s ruined, forgotten garden and set it alight.
The crowd around them was growing. Smocked workmen from the timber wharf and ostlers from the livery jostled with barmaids from the Crow and Magpie. Sebastian noticed Miss Jarvis studying the sea of curious faces, searching the assembly for their would-be murderers.
“Are they here?” he whispered, leaning in close to her. But she only shivered and shook her head.
He found his purse in the pocket of his ruined coat amid the pile of charred clothes at the top of the stairs and stood for a round of drinks at the Crow and Magpie. A cheer went up as the crowd surged toward the inn. A strapping barmaid eyed the coins in Sebastian’s hand and offered to sell “the lady” her best spare dress.
“An’ I got me a good stout cloak, too,” said the barmaid, “what you could buy.”
“Get the lady out of this,” said Sebastian, pressing another coin into her hand. “And see that she has some hot water to wash.”
The barmaid’s eyes widened. “We got a real nice chamber upstairs where she can clean up,” said the barmaid, shepherding Miss Jarvis toward the stairs. For one instant, Lord Jarvis’s daughter turned, her gaze meeting his over the heads of the noisy throng. Then she was gone.
Half an hour later, he put her into a hackney carriage and gave the driver an address a block from her own home. It was the first private moment Sebastian had had with her, and before he shut the door on her, he managed to say, “I am prepared to do the honorable thing—”
She snapped, “Don’t be ridiculous,” and told the jarvey to drive on.
Alighting from the hackney a block from Berkeley Square, Hero drew the hood of her barmaid’s rough cloak up around her face and walked briskly toward her house.
She expected to be stared at. Instead, no one paid her any heed. She was just one more cheaply dressed woman amidst a stream of housemaids and dairymaids, shopkeepers and traders’ wives. And she realized she’d caught a glimpse of the anonymity that Viscount Devlin sometimes employed so effectively in the course of his investigations. She’d never before understood what a heady sense of freedom it entailed.
Her knock was answered by Grisham, the butler, his condescending attempts to redirect her to the area entrance cut short when she shoved back her hood and brushed past him. “Miss Jarvis!” he said with a gasp. “I do beg your par—”
“That’s quite all right,” said Hero, heading for the stairs.
She had the misfortune to meet her mother on the first-floor landing. But Lady Jarvis simply smiled at her vaguely and said, “I don’t recall that cloak, Hero.” The smile faded, her eyebrows puckering together. “We really must consider changing your modiste.”
Hero gave a startled laugh. “I’m simply trying it on for a costume ball. I was thinking of going as a common barmaid.”
Lady Jarvis pulled her chin back against her neck. “I suppose you could if you wanted to, dear. But don’t you think it’s rather, well, common?”
“Perhaps you’re right,” said Hero, as if much struck. “Perhaps I’ll go as Jane Seymour.”
She was halfway up the stairs to the second floor before Lady Jarvis said, “Is there a fancy-dress ball soon? I don’t recall hearing about it. Goodness, I’ve given no thought to a costume myself.”
“Perhaps I simply heard someone talk about the possibility of giving one,” said Hero, terrified by a sudden vision of Lady Jarvis bringing up the topic of the nonexistent masquerade at her next soiree.
“Oh,” said Lady Jarvis, and continued on her way down the stairs.
Gaining the refuge of her own bedroom, Hero tore off her ragged clothes, and rang for her maid and a hot bath. She realized she was shivering again. Wrapped in a dressing gown, she went to sit on the window seat overlooking the Square below.
The dying light of the day drenched the garden’s plane trees and yew hedges with a golden richness they usually lacked. Yet the scene was otherwise unaltered from the tableau she’d seen every other evening of her life in London. She could see milk-maids heading toward home, their empty pails swinging from their shoulder yokes. A lady’s carriage whirled up the street toward the east, the clip-clop of its horses’ hooves echoing up between the tall houses. Everything was the same as it had been before.
