She stood for a long moment in the center of the room, her hands clenched before her. She had called Gabrielle friend for six years. But although they had been close in many ways, Hero realized now just how compartmentalized their friendship had been. They had talked of history and art, of philosophy and poetry. Hero knew the pain Gabrielle had suffered at the early loss of her mother and her lingering grief over the brothers who died so young; she knew her friend's fondness for children. But she did not know Gabrielle's reason for turning away from marriage and any possibility of bearing children of her own.
It occurred to Hero that she had simply assumed her friend's reasons mirrored her own. But she knew that assumption was without basis. Gabrielle had challenged the typical role of women in their society by her own enthusiasm for scholarship and her determination to openly pursue her interests. Yet she had never been one to crusade for the kind of changes Hero championed. When Hero spoke of a future when women would be allowed to attend Oxford or to sit in Parliament, Gabrielle would only smile and faintly shake her head, as if convinced these things would never be and perhaps never should be.
She had certainly never spoken of her friendship with some mysterious French lieutenant. But then, Hero had never mentioned to Gabrielle her own strange, conflicted attraction to a certain dark-haired, amber-eyed viscount. And Hero found herself wondering now what Gabrielle had thought of her friend's sudden, seemingly inexplicable wedding. They'd never had the opportunity to discuss it.
There were so many things the two friends had needed to discuss, had intended to discuss that morning Hero was to drive up to Camlet Moat. Now Hero was left with only questions and an inescapable measure of guilt.
`What happened to you?' she said softly as she let her gaze drift around her friend's room to linger on the high tester bed and primrose coverlet, the mirrored dressing table and scattering of silver boxes and crystal vials. The chamber was, essentially, as Gabrielle had left it when she went off on Sunday, not knowing she would never return. Yet Hero could feel no lingering presence here, no whispered essence of the woman whose laughter and dreams and fears this place had once witnessed. There was only a profound, yawning stillness that brought a pricking to Hero's eyelids and swelled her throat.
Leaving the house, she directed her coachman to the Park Lane home of a certain member of Parliament from the Wolds of Lincolnshire. Only then, as her carriage rocked through the streets of London, did Hero lean back against the soft velvet squabs, and for the first time since she'd learned of Gabrielle's death, she allowed the tears to fall.
A few carefully worded inquiries at the War Office, the Alien Office, and the Admiralty provided Sebastian with the information that there were literally thousands of paroled French and allied officers in Britain. Most captured enemy officers were scattered across the land in one of fifty so-called parole towns. But some were billeted in London itself.
Prisoners of war from the ranks were typically thrown into what were known as the hulls. Rotting, demasted ships deemed too unseaworthy to set sail, the hulls were essentially floating prisons. By day, the men were organized into chained gangs and marched off to labor on the docks and in the surrounding area's workshops. At night they were locked fast in the airless, vermin-ridden, pestilence-infested darkness belowdecks. Their death rate was atrocious.
But the officers were traditionally treated differently. Being gentlemen, they were credited with possessing that most gentlemanly of characteristics: honor. Thus, a French officer could be allowed his freedom with only a few restrictions as long as he gave his word of honor as a gentleman, his parole that he would not escape.
`That's the theory, at least,' grumbled the plump, graying functionary with whom Sebastian spoke at the Admiralty.
`Problem is, too many of these damned Frog officers are not gentlemen. They raise them up from the ranks, you see, which is why we've had over two hundred of the bastards run off just this year alone.' He leaned forward as if to underscore his point. `No honor.'
`Two hundred?'
`Two hundred and thirty-seven, to be precise. Nearly seven hundred in the past three years. These Frenchies may be officers, but too many of them are still scum. Vermin, swept up out of the gutters of Paris and lifted far above their proper station. That's what happens, you see, when civilization is turned upside down and those who were born to serve start thinking themselves as good as their betters.' The very thought of this topsy-turvy world aroused such ire in the functionary's ample breast that he was practically spitting.
`Yet some of the best French officers have come up through the ranks,' said Sebastian. 'Joachim Murat, for example. And Michel Ney...'
`Pshaw.' The functionary waved away these examples of ungentlemanly success with the dismissive flap of one pudgy hand.
`It is obvious you know nothing of the Army, sir. Nothing!'
Sebastian laughed and started to turn away.
`You could try checking with Mr. Abel McPherson, he's the agent appointed by the Transport Board of the Admiralty to administer the paroled prisoners in the area.'
`And where would I find him?' asked Sebastian, pausing to look back at the clerk.
`I believe he's in Norfolk at the moment. I've no doubt he left someone as his deputy, but I can't rightly tell you who.'
`And who might have that information?'
`Sorry. Can't help you. But McPherson should be back in a fortnight.'
Hero was received at the Mayflower house of the honorable Charles d'Eyncourt by the MP's married sister, a dour woman in her mid-thirties named Mary Bourne.
Mrs. Bourne had never met Hero and was all aflutter with the honor of a visit from Lord Jarvis's daughter. She received Hero in a stately drawing room hung with blond satin and crammed with an assortment of gilded crocodile-legged tables and colorful Chinese vases that would have delighted the Prince Regent himself. After begging dear Lady Devlin to please, pray be seated, she sent her servants flying for tea and cakes served on a silver tray so heavy the poor butler staggered beneath its weight. She then proceeded, seemingly without stopping for breath, to prattle endlessly about everything from her Bible study at the Savoy Chapel to her dear Mr. Bourne's concerns for her remaining in the metropolis with such a ruthless murderer on the loose, and followed that up with an endless description of a recent family wedding at which fandangos and the new waltz had been danced, and the carriages decked out in good white satin. `At a shilling a yard, no less!' she whispered, leaning forward confidingly. `No expense was spared, believe me, my dear Lady Devlin.'
Smiling benignly, Hero sipped her tea and encouraged her hostess to prattle on. Mary Bourne bragged (in the most humble way possible, of course) about the morning and evening prayers that all servants in her own household at Dalby near Somersby were required to attend daily. She hinted (broadly) that she was the pseudonymous author of a popular denunciation of the modern interest in Druidism, and from there allowed herself to be led ever so subtly, ever so unsuspectingly, to the subject Hero had come to learn more about: the precise nature of the relationship between Charles d'Eyncourt and his brother, George Tennyson, the father of the two missing little boys.
Charles, Lord Jarvis lounged at his ease in a comfortable chair beside the empty hearth in his chambers in Carlton House. Moving deliberately, he withdrew an enameled gold snuffbox from his pocket and flicked it open with practiced grace. He lifted a delicate pinch between one thumb and forefinger and inhaled, his hard gaze never leaving the sweating pink and white face of the stout man who stood opposite him. `Well?' demanded Jarvis.
`This c-complicates things,' stammered Bevin Childe. `You must see that. It's not going to be easy to...'
`How you accomplish your task is not my problem. You already know the consequences if you fail.'
The antiquary's soft mouth sagged open, his eyes widening. Then he swallowed hard and gave a jerky, panicky bow. `Yes, my lord,' he said, and then jumped when Jarvis's clerk tapped discreetly on the door behind him.
`What is it?' demanded Jarvis.
`Colonel Urquhart to see you, my lord.'
`Show him in,' said Jarvis. He closed his snuffbox with a snap, his gaze returning to the now-pale antiquary. `Why are you still here? Get out of my sight.'
Hat in hand, the antiquary backed out of the room as if exiting from a royal presence. He was still backing when Colonel Jasper Urquhart swept through the door and sketched an elegant bow.
`You wished to see me, my lord?'
