“And when did you terminate your arrangement with her?”
“That afternoon.”
“You spoke to Jane Ambrose yourself?”
“As it happens, I did, yes.”
“And she didn’t seem upset at the time?”
“She expressed disappointment. But she acknowledged that given Anna’s lack of talent, there vas little sense in continuing.”
“I see. And your daughter is how old?”
Rothschild hesitated a moment, as if the response required some calculation. “Ten.”
“Would you mind if I spoke to her?”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible. The poor child is naturally grieved by the death of someone she both knew and respected. I vouldn’t vant to do anything that might upset her further.”
“Of course,” said Sebastian, settling his top hat lower on his forehead. “Thank you for your assistance.”
Rothschild simply inclined his head and dug his hands deeper into his pockets.
Sebastian started to turn away, then paused to glance back and say, “You wouldn’t by chance know what might have taken Jane Ambrose to Clerkenwell yesterday, would you?”
“Hardly. I vas scarcely acquainted vith the woman.”
“Yes. So you said.”
Sebastian was aware of the rich man’s gaze following him as he crossed the quadrangle toward the main entrance with its ornate looming clock tower. And it came to him as he pushed his way through the small knot of shivering Barbadian, Jamaican, and Spanish traders congregated around a brazier there that for someone who claimed he had no explicable reason to be interested in Jane Ambrose, Nathan Rothschild was nevertheless curiously well informed about the true nature of her death. Because Sebastian would never have been here asking questions if Jane hadn’t been murdered—and Rothschild obviously not only understood that, but he hadn’t been surprised by it.
Not only that, but for reasons Sebastian couldn’t explain but certainly intended to discover, Rothschild had likewise taken it for granted that her death involved the Regent’s powerful cousin and Sebastian’s own father-in-law, Charles, Lord Jarvis.
Chapter 8
Her Royal Highness Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales, granddaughter of King George III, only legitimate issue of the Prince of Wales, and heiress presumptive to the throne of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, lived with her attendants in a cramped and decrepit seventeenth-century brick structure known as Warwick House.
Lying on the far side of a narrow lane to the southeast of the Prince’s own palace of Carlton House, Warwick House had served as Princess Charlotte’s home ever since her father—in the grip of one of the endless remodeling schemes for his grandiose palace—had cast covetous eyes on his daughter’s apartments and decided to move her out. She’d been eight at the time.
Charlotte had lived alone ever since, with no one in the house who wasn’t paid to be there with her. Her mother had been banished years before and was seldom allowed to see her. Her father, the Prince, visited even less. Her care was entrusted to the oversight of a succession of aging noblewomen who held the honorary title of Governess to the Princess. The current holder of that position was the middle-aged Dowager Duchess of Leeds, an ostentatiously grande dame with annoying airs of condescension—and a long-winded, boring fixation on her own health—who typically put in an appearance at Warwick House between the hours of two and five. Assisting the Duchess were two live-in ladies, also gently born but considerably more impoverished. Although officially styled as subgovernesses, they essentially functioned as minders. The Princess’s actual education was managed by the Bishop of Salisbury, a humorless, pretentious prelate who oversaw an array of specialized tutors and instructors.
The previous year, as her seventeenth birthday approached, Charlotte had dreamed of throwing off her fusty old governess, replacing the subgovernesses with true companions styled as ladies-in-waiting, and finally being free to attend balls, dinners, and the theater like any other young lady her age. That ambition was ruthlessly squashed by her father, the Regent.
Charlotte then looked at her aging, unmarried aunts, the daughters of George III who were living out their wasted lives shut up at Windsor Castle in what Charlotte had long ago nicknamed “the Nunnery,” and panicked.
Hero arrived at Warwick House midway through the morning. Unable to use her carriage in the snow-filled streets and scorning sedan chairs, she pulled on demi-broquins of fine morocco lined with fur, wrapped herself in a fur-trimmed pelisse with a matching Swedish hat fastened up on one side, and walked.
It was a shockingly outré thing, to call on a royal princess on foot and stomp snow all over the cracked tiles of her dilapidated entrance hall. But then, Hero hadn’t come to visit Princess Charlotte. Hero was here to see her friend Miss Ella Kinsworth.
A tall, angular woman with graying dark hair, Miss Kinsworth had in years past enjoyed the kind of adventurous, independent life a younger Hero had once envisioned for herself. The unmarried daughter of an admiral, Miss Kinsworth had lived abroad for decades with her widowed mother and supported herself by writing books. But the wars eventually made continued residence on the Continent dangerous, and the death of her mother had diminished her income. Now in her late fifties, alone and impoverished, Miss Kinsworth was reduced to serving a royal family not known for endearing itself to retainers. For seven years she had held the position of companion to George III’s foul-tempered Queen before being appointed to serve as one of Princess Charlotte’s subgovernesses. In a spirited, daring rebellion, Miss Kinsworth had honored the young Princess’s wishes by insisting on being called a “lady companion” rather than a “subgoverness.” It was a tribute to both the force of her personality and the respect in which she was held that she’d been allowed to get away with it.
“This ferocious weather!” said Miss Kinsworth as she whisked Hero up to her small private sitting room on Warwick House’s first floor, not far from the Princess’s bedchamber. “You should have let me come to you, my lady.”
“Nonsense,” said Hero, ridding herself of ice-encrusted mittens, hat, scarf, and pelisse. “The walk was”—she paused, searching for the right word as she sank into a
