clouds, some of them still gray with last night's rain, but Covent Garden shimmered with an air of festivity. The summer day was warm, riots of blue, red, and gold flowers overflowed baskets, women in cool linen haggled prices like the best of fishwives, game girls in bright reds and blues and greens sashayed about, darting into dark corners with gentlemen or hiding behind carts when a watchman strolled by.
I touched a peach, letting my fingers find joy in its downy softness. I paid the seller with a coin as bright as the fruit and bit into the peach's delight.
As I savored the fruit, sweet as a summer day, I thought again of Lydia Westin.
Her husband, who had been headed for disgrace and notoriety, was now conveniently dead. Lydia's foremost thought was to clear his name and save her daughter and herself from the stain of it, and to punish those she held responsible. She claimed she wanted justice, but I'd seen the look in her eyes, heard the note of fury in her voice. What she wanted was revenge.
I wondered anew if she had loved her husband. I did not believe I had witnessed a widow's grief at losing her heart mate; rather, I had seen wounded pride and great determination. She wanted her husband's name respected, but the relief she had exhibited when she spoke of his death had been true.
I also realized I felt more than mere curiosity, even my form of curiosity, which liked to pick apart events to find their cause or their source. Lydia Westin was deeply beautiful, and that beauty, even marred with dirt and blood and fear, struck a responsive chord within me. I recognized that, and I recognized the danger.
Behind her agitation lay a woman of profound serenity, as calm and clear as an unruffled lake. A man could close his eyes and lose himself in that beauty.
Wrapped in these thoughts, I emerged into crowded Russel Street and halted when a carriage door was nearly flung open in my face. The stopped carriage was opulent, with varnished wood inlay outlining the doors and windows. The wheels were picked out in gold, which matched the trim of the horses' harness. The coachman wore red livery with a brush in his hat; the footman who leapt from his perch and reached in for the passenger was dressed in blue satin.
I had seen the carriage before. Had ridden in it-once. And I was acquainted with the man who descended from it not a foot in front of me.
He saw me, and stopped. A fairly young man, he was lean of build, though as tall as I. His face might have been called handsome, but his blue eyes were cold as the depths of the Thames.
His name was James Denis. I had met him in the spring, and I loathed him. What he thought of me, I had no idea, for his habitually cool eyes betrayed nothing. They were soulless eyes, eyes of a man who cared for nothing, and no one.
James Denis procured things for people, for wealthy men who wanted something unobtainable through ordinary means. They made an appointment with Denis at his elegant Curzon Street house, and the item was made available to them for a high fee. Once, Lucius Grenville had hired him to help a French aristocrat recover a family painting that Napoleon had commandeered. Denis and his associates had managed to purloin that painting from under the emperor's nose. How, Grenville had declined to ask, and had advised me to do the same. Grenville thought it likely that much of the Prince of Wales's lavish collections of art had been obtained by James Denis.
Denis had not been guilty of the human trafficking I'd first suspected him of, but that fact did not relieve my qualms about him. The last time we'd met, he'd coolly dispatched a servant who'd had a hand in the murder of a young girl-not because of the heinous crime, but because the servant had acted without Denis's permission.
I had been enraged with the servant in question, and I had not tried to stop Denis meting out his own style of justice. Denis had afterward claimed that I owed him a favor. I had no intention of ever letting him call it in.
Now the two of us stared at one another in tense silence. His eyes glittered, cold and dispassionate. I did not bother to hide my dislike.
We regarded one another for a long moment, then he ever so slightly tilted his head in the ghost of a nod.
I cut him dead. Turning my back, I marched back across the street, my stick ringing on the pavement. A cart swerved to miss me, but I made it to the opposite side without mishap.
I longed to look back to see how he took my insult, but that would have ruined the impact of the cut direct. I strode on toward Grimpen Lane, the remains of the peach dangling from my nerveless fingers.
I returned to my rooms, tired and churning with emotions. I had not slept at all the night before, so I locked my door, stripped off my clothes, and lay on the sheets Lydia Westin had occupied. Her perfume lingered on them.
The day was sweltering, and I thought to lie awake contemplating all Lydia had told me. I scrubbed at my face, feeling prickly beard beneath my palms. Lydia had great faith in me. One did not lightly accuse a lordship of a crime. They could stand trial and be hanged, just like the rest of us, but one would have a hard fight on one's hands to get them to trial at all. These gentlemen and their families would never allow me, a nobody, to topple them, and well I knew it.
I did not lie awake as I'd expected. A few moments after I stretched upon the bed, I sank into slumber, my lack of sleep finally punishing me. I woke to the sun low in the west and someone banging on my outer door.
Chapter Five
Because I'd slept in my skin, I had to dress before I could limp to the door and open it.
Lucius Grenville stood on the threshold, with Bartholomew, his tall, bulky footman, behind him. Grenville was resplendent in buff breeches and boots and immaculate black coat, and wore an emerald stickpin in his snowy cravat.
He had dark brown hair, as I did, though his contained no threads of gray, possibly because he was a few years younger than I, or because his valet took care to remove or dye the offending hairs. His face was not handsome, being a little too plain and too sharp in the chin, but not one of his admirers seemed to note that. His eyes, as though to compensate for his plainness, were sparkling and lively. Grenville lived life to the fullest and took an interest in everything, great or small.
He seldom visited me in my rooms. Most of the time, he waited in his luxurious carriage at the end of the lane and sent his footman for me, or simply sent the empty carriage across London alone. Now he stood on my doorstep, his dark eyes alert with curiosity.
'Yes?' I snapped, not fully myself.
'Are you all right?'
I must have looked frightful, face unshaven, hair rumpled, eyes bloodshot. I raked my hand through my hair. 'Sleeping. I beg your pardon. Please come in.'
He stepped into my sitting room and looked about him as though I'd just invited him into a grand palace in Saint Petersburg. Across the lane the curtains of my opposite neighbor, Mrs. Carfax, stood open to catch the last of the daylight, allowing us to see right into her always painfully clean parlor.
A table stood in her window in the same position it had occupied for the year and a half I'd lived here. A book rested in the precise center of the table, edges in perfect alignment. I had witnessed both Mrs. Carfax and her faded companion carefully dust this book, but I had never observed either of them lift it, open it, read it. Mrs. Carfax liked to leave the curtains open as long as possible, she had confided to me one day in the bake shop, because she was forced to be very frugal with her candles. She would have hated living downstairs from Marianne.
Grenville peered through the dusty panes until Bartholomew had bowed and departed, then he pulled a newspaper out from under his arm and handed it to me. 'You have become famous, my friend. I congratulate you.'
I stared at him, nonplussed. 'Famous?'
'Fresh this evening.'
I took the paper from him and looked where he pointed. A caricature of myself, or at least a cavalry officer in dark regimentals brandishing a cavalry saber, accosted a frightened-looking man who was backing hastily away, dropping pencil and notebook. The head of the officer was overlarge, the saber too long. A ribbon of words from his mouth proclaimed: 'A flogging! I flogging, I say, sir! Forty lashes will teach you to keep a foul Tongue in your
