The Queen's Ball

Dearest Reader, this Author has waited two long Seasons for the Duke of Blackmere to unlock his doors. Tonight, at last, he has. Lady Greyford is to be presented at the Queen's Ball, and every bachelor in London has been polishing his boots. This Author would only remind them that her father has a very long memory, and two very large sons.

The Duke of Blackmere had prepared for tonight the way he had once prepared for Salamanca.

He had studied the terrain. He had assessed the enemy. He had, at his request, received from Samuel Whitmore a set of fourteen small cards, each bearing the name of an eligible gentleman and a summary of his debts, vices, and general unfitness, arranged in alphabetical order and slipped into the left pocket of his waistcoat.

His wife had found them in the carriage and confiscated them.

He had a second set in his right pocket. A man did not survive the Peninsula without a reserve.

The Queen's Annual Ball blazed below them. A thousand candles burned overhead, the orchestra was tuning, and Queen Mery sat beside a cake the size of a small cathedral, peering over her spectacles at the room like a magistrate who had already decided the verdict. Every eligible man in London had come, which Rowan found personally offensive.

The Greyfords stood at the top of the grand staircase, waiting to be announced.

"Forty-three," Alexander said grimly. "Forty-three unmarried men. Forty-four if you include Lord Pettigrew, which I do not, because he is eighty-one, though he is looking at her."

"He's looking at everyone. He's half-blind."

"Then he's looking at {{user}} blindly. It's worse."

To Rowan's left, Theo was shaking with suppressed laughter. His cravat was already slightly loosened, and they hadn't yet descended a single stair.

"I've got eleven pounds at White's," Theo announced cheerfully, "that says Father makes it to the bottom of the staircase without threatening anyone. Hartmore bet he wouldn't. I'm now reconsidering my position."

"Theodore," Rowan said.

"Yes, Papa?"

"Be silent."

"Yes, Papa." Theo did not stop smiling.

And then there was Lucilla, in midnight-blue silk with diamonds at her throat, who was not looking at the ballroom at all. She was looking at her husband's right waistcoat pocket. She held out one gloved hand, palm up, without a word.

Rowan considered his options. He had faced French artillery. He surrendered the second set of cards.

The Master of Ceremonies struck his staff three times, and the room went quiet.

"His Grace, the Duke of Blackmere, and Her Grace, the Duchess of Blackmere. The Most Honourable the Marquess of Westcombe. Lord Theodore Greyford. And Lady {{user}} Greyford."

Every head in the ballroom turned. Every one. Rowan felt it like the sudden shift before a cavalry charge. Three hundred people turning at once to look at his daughter. Somewhere below, a young man dropped his glass of punch. Rowan noted the young man, the punch, and the direction in which the punch had been dropped.

They descended. Rowan kept himself one pace ahead of his daughter, which his wife had specifically forbidden, and which he did anyway, because nobody had ever successfully court-martialled a duke.

"Rowan," Lucilla murmured. "You are standing in front of her."

"I am aware."

"The entire purpose of a debut, my love, is that people see her."

"I'm aware of that too. I object to it."

The presentation went the way presentations go. The Lord Chamberlain called the name. Lucilla took {{user}} forward. Rowan stood at the side of the room with the other fathers and endured it the way a man endures a surgeon. He stood rigid and silent, and he made a list of everyone in the room he would like to have shot.

The red-haired baronet by the pillar, who had straightened his cravat. Noted. The two young idiots near the refreshment table who had elbowed each other. Both noted. The viscount who had actually put down his champagne to get a better look. Underlined. Lord Pettigrew, who had raised his quizzing glass. Eighty-one and half-blind, and still. Noted, on principle. A captain of the Guards in a scarlet coat who had smiled, and not politely. Rowan committed the man's face, his regiment, and the exact shade of his whiskers to memory, and mentally moved him to the top of the page.

"Twenty-three," Alexander murmured beside him, without turning his head.

"Nineteen."

"You missed the two by the orchestra, the one behind the potted palm, and Ellsmere by the terrace doors."

Rowan's eyes cut to the terrace doors. Felix Marlowe was leaning against the frame with a glass of champagne he had almost certainly not paid for. He met the Duke's stare, smiled, and raised the glass an insolent half inch.

Twenty-three. Rowan underlined that one twice, in his head, in ink.

Queen Mery studied Lady {{user}} Greyford over her spectacles for a silence so long that two mothers began quietly to hope.

"Flawless," said the Queen. "It seems the Duke of Blackmere has been hiding a jewel from us, and for two Seasons too long."

London exhaled. Then it stampeded.

The first arrived within eleven seconds.

Lord Bartholomew Fothergill came through the crowd like a heron wading through reeds, all elbows and freckles, his gloves twisted into a knot in both hands.

"Your Grace," he gasped, bowing to each of them in turn, like a woodpecker with a schedule. "Your Grace. My lord. My lord." Then he turned toward {{user}}, growing pinker by the second. "Lady Greyford. I wondered, that is, if it would not be too presumptuous, if I might have the honour of a place on your dance card..."

"No," said Rowan.

"No," said Alexander, at precisely the same moment.

It was perfectly synchronised, like a single cannon fired twice.

Lord Fothergill froze, mouth open, one gloved hand still halfway extended toward a dance card he would now never touch.

"You," Rowan went on, with perfect, glacial courtesy, "have not been introduced to my daughter, Lord Fothergill."

For once in his life, etiquette was on his side, and he intended to use every inch of it.

Lord Fothergill blinked. "But we have been introduced, Your Grace. At White's, last week. Lord Theodore introduced us."

Rowan turned his head, very slowly, to look at his second son.

Theo became deeply interested in the chandelier.

"You were introduced to me," Rowan said, turning back. "Not to my daughter."

"Ah. Then perhaps Your Grace might be so kind as to..."

"No."

"No," Alexander agreed.

Theo made a sound like a strangled goose and turned away to cough violently into his sleeve.

Lord Fothergill went from scarlet to white. He looked from the Duke to the Marquess. He looked at the Duke's scars and the Marquess's jaw. He looked, briefly and with great longing, at the exit.

"Of course," he whispered. "Forgive me. Good evening." Then he bowed and fled with commendable speed into the safety of the crowd.

Rowan exhaled in satisfaction. Alexander nodded once, grimly, as though a dangerous enemy patrol had been successfully repelled.

"Rowan."

The Duchess said only that one word, in that tone, but it held twenty-eight years of marriage. Rowan winced.

"He wasn't introduced," he said. "I am upholding the laws of polite society. You should be proud of me."

"He is a botanist, Rowan."

"Exactly. A man who spends his life admiring flowers. I don't trust it."

Lucilla closed her eyes for a long moment, as though praying for strength or patience or possibly widowhood. When she opened them, she smiled at {{user}} with infinite sympathy. "Darling, I am so sorry. Your father and brother were raised by wolves. I've tried. Truly, I've tried." She turned to her eldest son. "Alexander. Go and ask some poor young lady to dance. Now. Before you frighten off the entire peerage."

Alexander opened his mouth to protest. Lucilla raised one elegant eyebrow. Alexander closed his mouth and walked away as slowly as it is possible to walk without technically standing still. He made it nine steps before Lady Marchmont intercepted him, plumes first, with her daughter Arabella attached to her arm like a bayonet.

"Good luck, Pip," Theo murmured to his sister. "Personally I'd give it twenty minutes before Papa challenges someone to a duel. I've bet on thirty." Then he vanished into the crowd toward a table of laughing young men and, Rowan noted with a grim twitch of his eyebrow, at least three of Lady Sinclair's known informants.

The orchestra struck the opening bars of the first quadrille of the Season.

Rowan reached automatically for his pocket. His wife had his cards. She also, he now discovered, had his pen. He had planned to write his own name on the first line of his daughter's dance card before anyone else could. Lucilla had evidently anticipated this. Wellington would have made her a colonel.

So he did the only thing a commander can do when the line breaks. He held out his own scarred hand.

"I am also available," said the Duke of Blackmere.

"Rowan."

"I'm merely noting it, for the record."

Lucilla took the dance card, turned it over, and placed it in her daughter's hand, along with the confiscated pen. Her smile had no mercy in it at all.

"Your card, darling," she said. "Your choice. Your father will survive." She paused. "Probably."

She had barely finished the word when the second wave broke.

The captain of the Guards arrived first. He wore a scarlet coat, he had magnificent whiskers, and he had been smiling at {{user}} since the presentation. He bowed with a click of his heels.

"Your Grace." Another click of the heels. "Captain Lord Charles Fairleigh, Coldstream Guards."

Top of the page, Rowan thought. Of course.

"It's an honour, sir. Every man in my regiment knows what you did at Badajoz."

The captain let that sit for a moment. It was a good opening, and he knew it.

"Lord Theodore was kind enough to introduce us at White's." He turned the smile on {{user}}. "Lady Greyford. The first quadrille, if your card allows it. I'll return you in one piece. I suspect your father would accept nothing less."

Rowan did not look at Theo. Theo had already vanished. In Rowan's experience, Theo only vanished when guilty.

The second came at a stately shuffle, leaning on an ebony cane, his quizzing glass raised and trained on {{user}} like a sharpshooter's sights.

"Blackmere," wheezed Lord Pettigrew. "Danced with your grandmother, you know. And your great-aunt. Proposed to one of them, can't recall which. Practically family." He swayed, recovered, and beamed at {{user}}. "First quadrille, my dear. If I expire halfway through, my nephew inherits, and he's a frightful bore, so do try to keep me alive."

And the third did not hurry at all.

Gabriel Lennox, Earl of Hartmore, had been leaning against the same marble pillar since the presentations began, watching the Duke repel boarders. He waited until the captain and Lord Pettigrew had made their attempts. Then he pushed away from the pillar and crossed the floor at an easy amble. He bowed to the Duchess, who smiled. He bowed to the Duke, who did not.

"Your Grace," he said pleasantly. "I'm told you've not threatened a soul all evening. Theo's going to be insufferable. I'm out ten pounds."

"The evening," said Rowan, "is young."

"Aye. That's what I'm counting on." Gabriel turned to {{user}}, and his lopsided smile went crooked in a different way. The Highlands crept into his voice. "You beat me at fishing last summer at Hartmore, my lady, and I was fool enough to wager a dance on it. I've come to pay my debts."

He did not need an introduction. He had been eating at the Greyford table since he was thirteen. Rowan had a dossier on him so clean it squeaked, and he hated every page of it.

The quadrille was already playing. Four hands were held out to her. One wore a scarlet sleeve. One trembled on an ebony cane. One belonged to a Scot paying off a wager. The fourth was the Duke of Blackmere's own scarred palm, which he had not withdrawn and did not intend to.

Somewhere across the room, Theo was taking bets.

🎻 THE QUEEN'S ANNUAL BALL 🎻 Dance Card of Lady {{user}} Greyford

First Dance (Quadrille): ... Second Dance: ... Third Dance: ... Supper Dance: ... Waltz: ...

The Morning After The Queen's Ball

Dearest Reader, the Duke of Blackmere has finally unlocked his doors, and London has stampeded through them. Her Majesty declared Lady {{user}} Greyford "Flawless," and every bachelor in the room took it as a personal invitation. Lord Fothergill was refused twice before he could finish a sentence, and is said to be undeterred. Lord Pettigrew, aged eighty-one, offered himself for the first quadrille. So, astonishingly, did the Duke of Blackmere. Whom the lady actually chose, this Author dares not print. This Author is told Greyford House will need a larger door. The Duke, she hears, would prefer a moat.

Greyford House had a perfectly adequate front door. By half past nine, it was under siege.

The street outside the breakfast room was full. A florist's cart had stopped at the kerb. Behind it, a carriage with a gold-trimmed crest had stopped too, and four men in sky-blue livery were arguing in German about where to stand. A fifth was holding a bouquet roughly the size of a small tree.

Theo had Lady Sinclair's column propped against the marmalade and was reading it aloud for the third time.

"'So, astonishingly, did the Duke of Blackmere,'" he said. "I'm having it framed."

"Theodore," said the Duchess.

"He held out his hand for a full minute, Mama. In front of half of London. I watched the whole thing from the punch table. I've never been so proud."

At the head of the table, the Duke of Blackmere had not touched his eggs. He folded the paper into a precise square and set it beside his plate.

"A larger door," he said.

"It's a figure of speech, Rowan."

"And a moat." He looked down the table. "Alexander. Could it be done?"

Alexander did not look up from his toast. "Mayfair sits on clay, sir. It would hold water."

"Do not encourage your father," said the Duchess.

"I'm not encouraging him, Mama. I'm answering the question." Alexander buttered his toast with great precision. "We'd lose the rose garden."

The Duke considered this.

"Rowan."

"I'm merely weighing the costs."

Hollis appeared in the doorway. He had answered the front door eleven times before breakfast and had stopped pretending to enjoy it.

"The morning's deliveries, Your Grace. For Lady {{user}}."

They came in on a procession of trays.

First came a potted fern, slightly lopsided, with a card in careful copperplate. The hart's-tongue fern. It is hardy and asks for very little. I hope the same may be said of me. B. F.

"Undeterred," Theo said happily. "The column was right."

"The column," said the Duke, "is a menace."

Two dozen pink roses in Lady Marchmont's unmistakable taste, with a card reading With the deepest admiration, Kettering. On the back, in faint pencil. I did not choose these. I'm so sorry. P.

A leather portfolio sealed in blue wax with a falcon crest. Theo weighed it in one hand. "Eleven pages," he said. "Translated. I'd stake my horse on it."

A velvet box from Rundell and Bridge. Inside, a sapphire bracelet. Theo whistled and priced it at four hundred guineas without blinking. The card read To the only woman in the room worth looking at. E. Alexander removed it from the tray, closed it with a snap, and put it beside his own plate without a word.

"Bought on credit, my lord," said a quiet voice from the doorway. "I'll see Rundell's has it back by noon."

Samuel Whitmore stood just inside the room with the morning's correspondence under his arm. Nobody had heard him come in. Nobody ever did. He looked at the Duke, at the bracelet, at the window, at the clock. He looked at everything in the room except Lady {{user}}, and he did it very carefully.

Hollis, undeterred, kept the trays coming.

Next came a scented note in a looping hand. Darling. You were a triumph. Arabella has gone a shade of green not found in nature, and her mother is blaming the lobster patties. Save me a waltz. P.S. Your father's outstretched hand was the most romantic gesture of the evening. Two ladies swooned. So did Lord Pettigrew, but I gather that was his heart. J.

Then a card in a shaking, enormous scrawl. Same time next Season, my dear. If I'm spared. Pettigrew.

And on the tea tray, between the toast rack and the honey, sat a small white box from Fortier's with no card at all. Inside was her favourite pastry. The Duchess looked at it, then at the doorway. Samuel had become deeply absorbed in the morning's correspondence.

The last item was not for Lady {{user}} at all. Hollis carried it the length of the table and presented it to the Duke, which surprised everyone, the Duke most of all. It was a single stiff card, black-edged, with an imperial crest.

He read it twice. A muscle moved in his jaw.

"'Prince Orlovsky,'" he read aloud, "'will call upon the Duke of Blackmere at three o'clock, to inform His Grace of his intentions.'" He set the card face down on the table. "Inform."

"Nothing from Hartmore," Theo said, scanning the trays. "That's a shame. I've money on Hartmore."

Hollis cleared his throat.

"Lord Hartmore did not send anything, my lord. Lord Hartmore came himself. He is below with two saddled horses and asks whether Lady {{user}} would care to ride in the park before the crowds."

The Duke looked at the clock. It was a quarter to ten in the morning.

"And the Germans?"

"The gentleman on the step says His Serene Highness is prepared to wait all day, Your Grace. He has brought a chair."

The Duchess set down her teacup and turned to her daughter. Her husband had lost every argument to that smile since the day he married her.

"Well, darling," she said. "The Season has come to breakfast. Who shall Hollis show in first?"

The Old Friend

Dearest Reader, the Duke of Blackmere has received a guest. Lord Stratford has returned from India after more than twenty years, with two children, one walking stick he refuses to use, and no wife. He is said to be the Duke's oldest friend. This Author is told the Earl of Hartmore and Lord Ainsley were also at Greyford House last evening, and that the conversation was lively. This Author would give a great deal to know what was said.

Nathaniel Fielding had been received by maharajas. He had walked into the palace at Mysore under a canopy of gold, and into a besieged hill fort under a canopy of musket smoke. He had also once paid a formal call on a nawab who was trying, with great courtesy, to have him assassinated. He had never once been nervous walking through a door.

He was nervous now. And it annoyed him considerably.

Greyford House had not changed. The same black-and-white marble hall. The same portraits of grim Greyford dukes glaring down the staircase. Hollis had grown grey and dignified, but he still took Nathaniel's hat as though it might have been somewhere unsanitary, which, in fairness, it had. Even the smell was the same. Beeswax, roses, and a faint trace of gunpowder, which Nathaniel suspected was Rowan.

Everything was the same. Except him.

He had sailed from England twenty-odd years ago, a young captain bound for India with two good legs and a great deal of hair. He had come back a colonel with one and a half, and with the hair going grey at the temples.

"Fielding."

Rowan came down the hall like an artillery barrage and did not bother to shake his hand. He hauled him into an embrace that would have cracked a lesser man's ribs, held on a beat too long, then stepped back and looked him over with the narrow, scarred scowl Nathaniel had last seen across a field at Badajoz.

"You look terrible," said the Duke of Blackmere.

"You look old."

"I am old. You're meant to have the decency not to mention it." Rowan cleared his throat and looked very hard at a portrait on the wall. "The children?"

"Asleep at home, I hope. Three weeks in England, and Thomas is already drawing a map of the Mayfair house to find the quickest route to the kitchens. Lily has made the nursemaid cry."

"Good," said Rowan, with deep approval. "They're yours, then."

Lucilla came next, and she did not hug him like a battering ram. She took both his hands in hers, looked up at him for a long moment, and said nothing at all about his wife, which was the kindest thing anyone had done for him since he landed at Portsmouth.

"Nathaniel," she said warmly. "You're too thin. I shall be having words with whoever has been feeding you."

"The East India Company, Your Grace. I wish you luck."

"Lucilla. You held my husband's head while a surgeon dug French iron out of it. I think we may dispense with Your Grace."

The drawing room was louder than any officers' mess Nathaniel had served in, and the average age was considerably lower. Alexander was the first face he recognised, mostly because it was Rowan's face with the scars removed and the temper put on ice. He offered a precise, correct bow and a precise, correct "Lord Stratford," and Nathaniel decided he liked him immediately and would not want to owe him money.

The next was a tousled, grinning young man with a loosened cravat and a waistcoat in a shade of orange Nathaniel had only previously seen on a tiger.

"Theo," said Theo, and shook his hand with enthusiasm. "I'm the disappointing one. Papa says you carried him off the field at Badajoz. Is it true he swore at you the entire way?"

"In three languages."

"I knew it."

There was a tall Scot by the fireplace with auburn hair and an easy, crooked smile, introduced as Lord Hartmore, who called Theo an idiot with obvious affection and looked at the doorway every few seconds as though waiting for someone. And there was a slender, honey-haired young viscount in the most extraordinary peacock-blue waistcoat Nathaniel had ever seen, introduced as Lord Ainsley, who looked him over from boots to greying temples and said, very pleasantly, "Oh, thank God. Someone in this house with conversation."

Then the room shifted, the way a camp shifts when someone important rides in.

Nathaniel turned.

Rowan had written to him about a daughter. Twenty years of letters, carried across oceans in the holds of East India ships, and every few months, among the politics and the estate business and the complaints about his sons, there had been a line or two. She has learned to ride. She has learned to argue. Lucilla says she is clever. I say she is too clever, and should be locked in a tower until she is forty.

He had pictured, without ever really thinking about it, a little girl. He had, in fact, brought her a present. It was in his coat pocket at that moment. A small carved wooden elephant from the bazaar at Mysore, with a painted howdah and one ear slightly chipped.

Lady {{user}} Greyford was not a little girl.

Ah, he thought. That is inconvenient.

He left the elephant in his pocket and bowed instead. It was a good bow. The leg held.

"Lady {{user}}," he said. "Your father told me a great deal about you in his letters. I see now that he was lying."

By the fireplace, Gabriel Lennox went very still.

"About what, exactly?" said Rowan.

"He said she would be locked in a tower until she was forty." Nathaniel straightened. "Clearly the masonry failed."

Theo laughed out loud. Julian leaned toward him and murmured, "Oh, I like him." Rowan narrowed his eyes at his oldest friend and said nothing, which, in Rowan, was the closest thing to a laugh.

X

The Magpie

Dearest Reader, a Spanish marqués has taken a house in Portman Square, and nobody in London has ever heard of his marquisate. This Author wrote to three Spanish acquaintances. None of them had heard of it either. The ton has decided this makes him mysterious rather than suspicious, which tells This Author everything she needs to know about the ton.

Lorenzo Salazar had robbed a viceroy's treasure ship off Cartagena, an admiral's dinner table at Gibraltar, and a bishop in Havana who had deserved it more than either of them. He had never once stolen anything in a ballroom.

The ballroom, however, made it insultingly easy.

Lady Cavendish's house was packed to the walls. Four hundred guests, eight hundred diamonds, and not one guard worth the name. Every woman in the room wore a small fortune at her throat, and every man was too busy looking at the throats to notice. Lorenzo had already counted two loose clasps, one paste necklace passed off as real, and a dowager whose rubies were held on by hope.

He took none of it. Robbing the guests of his hostess on his first night in her house would have been vulgar, and Lorenzo was many things, but never vulgar.

Then the Duke of Blackmere's daughter came down the stairs, and Lorenzo forgot about the rubies entirely.

She was not the most heavily jewelled woman in the room. That honour went to Lady Marchmont, who wore enough pearls to sink a frigate. But Lady {{user}} Greyford was the best guarded. A scarred duke on one side. A brother with a face like a locked door on the other. A second brother lounged behind them, grinning at the room as though deciding which part of it to set on fire first. Lorenzo had seen treasure fleets sail with less escort.

He smiled. It was not an entirely pleasant smile.

It took nine minutes and one country dance. The figures brought the lines together, a turn at the top of the set, a crush of silk and elbows, and his hand passing close to her ear for half a breath. When the music ended, Lorenzo walked away with a small pearl earring in his palm and an expression of perfect innocence.

He went and stood by the window, where the light was best, and held it up to examine it.

It was a good pearl in an old setting, and far from the most valuable thing in the room, but it had been the hardest to reach, which made it worth more to him than every diamond in the house put together.

He made no effort to hide it, turning it slowly between two fingers until it caught the candlelight, so that anyone missing an earring would know exactly where it had gone. Then he waited for the guard to change.

His chance came sooner than he expected. Lady Marchmont descended on the Duke with her plumes and her daughter, the elder brother was cornered by a general with opinions about cavalry, and the younger had wandered off toward the card room. Lorenzo closed his hand around the pearl, made his way through the crowd before any of them could look up, and bowed as deeply as any grandee of Spain.

"Don Lorenzo Salazar y Cortés, Marqués de Mirasol," he said. "We have not been introduced. I could not wait for the formalities." He straightened. Up close, his eyes were very dark and very amused. "You have lost something, señorita."

He held out the earring on his open palm, and closed his hand over it again just as it came within reach.

"Ah. No. Forgive me." He tucked it into his waistcoat pocket and patted it once. "I am a sentimental man. And you are very careless with your treasure, for a woman whose father guards her like the Bank of England."

Across the room, the Duke of Blackmere had begun to turn.

Lorenzo did not look at him. He kept his eyes on {{user}}, and his smile widened.

"Your father is coming. You may tell him I stole it, and he will call me out, and I will be forced to shoot a duke at dawn, which would be very bad for my reputation." He leaned in, just slightly. "Or you may come and take it back yourself. I will be on the terrace. I warn you, I never give back what I take." He paused. "But for you, señorita, I might be persuaded to trade."

The Captain

Dearest Reader, Tattersall's admits gentlemen only, which is why This Author was so interested to hear that a very young gentleman in an enormous hat spent Monday afternoon there, sharing a bench and a great many blushes with a certain captain of the Guards. Lord Theodore Greyford refuses to name the young gentleman, which This Author finds very telling, and so, she suspects, would the Duke of Blackmere.

The plan, as Theo explained it in the carriage, was foolproof. Tattersall's admitted gentlemen only, so his sister would simply become a gentleman, which required nothing more than his second-best greatcoat, a hat pulled low, and the firm instruction to say nothing to anyone on any account. Julian, who had tied her cravat himself and declared it the finest disguise in London, agreed that the plan was foolproof, and also that if anyone asked, it had been entirely Theo's idea.

They lasted twenty minutes before a grey hunter came into the ring, and Theo forgot he had a sister. He seized Julian by the arm, spun him round to look, and declared with enormous feeling that it was the most beautiful creature he had ever laid eyes on, that it had clearly been bred for Julian and no one else, and that if Julian did not have it, Theo would never forgive him and would very likely die of grief in the street.

Julian pointed out that he already owned four horses and rode two of them. Theo slung an arm around his shoulders and told him not to be tedious. Julian, who had never once in eight years managed to refuse Theo anything when he looked like that, sighed, adjusted his cuffs, and allowed himself to be steered toward the rail, promising over his shoulder that they would be back in five minutes. They left {{user}} on a bench beneath the colonnade with strict orders not to move.

That had been more than half an hour ago.

Captain Lord Charles Fairleigh had come to Tattersall's on a private errand. A certain young lady he very much wished to court was said to be fond of horses (he had it from a cousin of a friend of a lady who had once sat beside her at supper), and he had decided, after very little thought, that a gift of a mare would be just the thing. He was halfway down a bay's foreleg, wondering whether a lady's father would consider a horse an appropriate present or a declaration of war, when he glanced up at the colonnade and saw a young gentleman sitting alone on a bench in a greatcoat several sizes too large.

It took him less than a second to realise the gentleman was not a gentleman at all, and rather longer to understand that the lady he had been buying a horse for was sitting forty feet away in someone else's hat, at which point he dropped the mare's hoof, straightened his coat, and crossed the yard at a pace his drill sergeant would have admired, scarlet to the tips of his ears.

"Lady {{user}}," he said, very low, and then, with a glance at two horse dealers who were not looking at them in the slightest, lower still, "forgive me, but you cannot possibly be here. If anyone recognises you, your reputation will be in tatters by supper and your father will have me shot, and I should not mind the second half nearly so much as the first." He took off his hat to bow, remembered that bowing to another gentleman on a bench would look stranger still, and put it back on. "Where in God's name are your brothers?"

At the rail, Theo was bidding on the grey hunter with Julian's money, and Julian, who had not yet been told how much of it, was cheering him on.

The captain watched them long enough to establish that neither her brother nor Lord Ainsley intended to look round, then sat down at the far end of the bench, at a distance his commanding officer would have called correct and his mother would have called inadequate, and tried very hard not to smile.

"I shall stay until they come back. I cannot leave you unguarded, and I cannot walk you out without the whole yard seeing." He was smiling now, and making no effort to stop. "So we had better look like two gentlemen discussing horses. Tell me, sir, which one were you planning to buy?"

The Painter

Dearest Reader, the Duchess of Blackmere has commissioned Mr. Rafe Delacourt to paint her daughter's debut portrait. Mr. Delacourt has painted half the ladies of the ton, and at least three of them have since left their husbands. This Author is sure that is a coincidence. The Duke, This Author hears, is rather less sure.

Rafe Delacourt had painted a duchess who insisted on being shown twenty years younger, a countess who insisted on being shown with her lapdog, and a bishop who insisted on being shown with God, and he had obliged all three, because they paid in advance and he was fond of eating. He had been threatened by jealous husbands, sued by a viscount, and chased down Bond Street by an earl with a horsewhip, but at no point in his artistic life had he ever been required to paint under armed guard.

The morning room at Greyford House had been cleared for the sitting, which meant that every piece of furniture had been pushed to the walls except one chair, placed precisely nine feet from his easel. He knew it was nine feet because the Duke of Blackmere had measured it himself, with a walking stick, before leaving for Westminster. The Duke did not use a walking stick. As far as Rafe could tell, he had borrowed one from the butler for the sole purpose of the measurement, and of informing Rafe that if the chair moved one inch closer in his absence, so would the walking stick.

The chaperone, a stout lady's maid named Mrs. Pruitt, had been placed in the window seat with her knitting and orders to watch everything. She had lasted twenty minutes, and was now asleep with her chin on her bosom, snoring very gently in three-four time.

Rafe considered the maid, considered the chair, and moved his easel six inches forward instead, since nobody had said anything about the easel.

He had been working for an hour and he did not like what he had. The face on the canvas was correct in every particular, the right eyes and the right mouth and the right pearls, and it would hang beautifully in a drawing room and bore every guest who ever looked at it. It was the face every debutante in London wore for her portrait, and he had painted it forty times, several of them half asleep and at least one of them drunk, and every single one had been hailed as a masterpiece. This was not because the debutantes were remarkable. It was because Rafe Delacourt was, and he had never seen any reason to be modest about it.

He set down his brush, wiped his hands on a rag that had not been clean since the Peace, and looked at her the way he looked at a difficult light.

"Mademoiselle," he said, in the low, amused voice he generally kept for duchesses whose husbands were out of town. His mother had been French, and he had learned to paint in Paris, and he had found both to be extremely useful in English drawing rooms. "May I be honest with you? I am told it is a dreadful habit of mine. It has cost me several commissions and one very good tailor."

He did not wait for permission, since he so rarely got it.

"I could paint a duke's daughter sitting nicely in my sleep, ma belle, and your father would hang it in the hall, and in a hundred years someone's great-grandson would walk past it without looking up." He leaned an elbow on the corner of the easel and smiled at her, the same smile that had once talked a marchioness out of her pearls and her husband out of suing. "I would rather paint something worth stopping for."

In the window seat, Mrs. Pruitt snored on.

He reached behind the easel and turned a small sketchbook to face her. On the open page was a quick charcoal drawing, rough and unfinished, of a young woman laughing. "I made this in Hyde Park last week, from the other side of Rotten Row. I have been trying to decide ever since whether I imagined it. Tell me, chérie. Was that you?"

The Gentleman

Dearest Reader, the gentleman highwayman of Hampstead Heath has struck again, and for the first time in his career he has taken nothing of value. Lord Theodore Greyford, who was in the carriage, describes it as the greatest disappointment of his life. What the highwayman did take, Lord Theodore refuses to say, though he has been seen grinning at his sister in a manner This Author can only call insufferable.

Theo had been trying to get himself robbed by the Gentleman for two years.

He had driven across Hampstead Heath after dark on eleven separate occasions, conspicuously alone and conspicuously wealthy, with his best watch on display and a short speech prepared, and on every one of those occasions the Gentleman had robbed somebody else. Lord Paxton had lost his snuffbox. The Bishop of Ely had lost his purse and, according to the papers, his temper. Theo had lost nothing but sleep, and he had begun to take it personally.

It was therefore a cruel irony that on the night the Gentleman finally stopped a Greyford carriage, on the way home from a very dull card party in Hampstead, Theo was asleep in the corner with his hat over his face, and woke only to the coachman's shout, the lurch of the brakes, and a calm, well-bred voice outside the window remarking that it was a fine night for it.

He sat up so fast that his hat fell off entirely.

The Gentleman sat a tall black horse in the lamplight, in a dark greatcoat with a black silk scarf drawn up over the lower half of his face, holding a pistol so loosely and politely at his side that it looked more like an accessory than a threat. Above the scarf, a pair of grey eyes took in the carriage, the crest on its door, and its occupants, with every appearance of amusement.

"Good evening," said the Gentleman. "Forgive the interruption. I shan't keep you long."

"Take the watch," said Theo at once, wrenching it from his waistcoat and thrusting it through the window. "It's gold. It was my grandfather's. Please take it. I've been waiting two years."

The Gentleman considered the watch, and then Theo, and his eyes creased above the scarf. "Keep it, my lord. I hear you have not been on time for anything since you left Eton. Clearly the watch is not the problem, and I should hate to deprive you of the excuse."

Theo stared at him in naked betrayal.

The grey eyes moved past him to his sister and did not move on. The Gentleman made no use of the pistol. Instead he swept off his hat and bowed from the saddle, low enough that the lamplight caught the long dark hair falling loose beneath it.

"Lady {{user}}," he said, as though he had known exactly whose carriage this was before he ever rode out of the trees. "You may be wondering why I stopped you, since I take only from those who deserve to be robbed, and you are not one of them." His horse shifted beneath him, and he settled it with one hand without looking down. "The truth is that I have been watching this road for a week, waiting for you, and I could think of no respectable way to make your acquaintance." He held out one gloved hand toward the window, palm up. "So I shall ask for one thing, and only if it is given freely. A ribbon, my lady. From your bonnet, your hair, or your reticule, I am not particular. Nothing more."

The Reverend

Dearest Reader, This Author is delighted to report a great revival of piety in Mayfair. The front pews of St George's have never been so crowded, the young ladies of the ton have never sung so loudly, and the collection plate has never been so full of hopeful glances. This Author is sure it has nothing whatever to do with the new curate, who is young, fair, and so handsome that This Author suspects the bishop of doing it on purpose. God, This Author hears, has not noticed a difference.

The Reverend James Kingsley had preached a sermon on the sin of pride to four hundred of the proudest people in England, and not one of them had noticed, which he supposed was the point.

He had kept his eyes on the back wall of the church throughout. He had been taught at Oxford that a clergyman should never look at any one member of his congregation for too long, and he had never found the rule difficult until this morning, when the Greyfords took their pew in the third row and the back wall of St George's became a great deal more interesting than it had any right to be.

Now the service was over, and he stood at the church door in his worn black coat, shaking hands with dowagers and declining dinner invitations from mothers with unmarried daughters. He declined them all with great courtesy, and with the private knowledge that a curate on eighty pounds a year was only ever invited so that someone would say grace.

The Duke of Blackmere shook his hand as if inspecting it for weapons. "Kingsley. Good sermon. Shorter than last week's fellow."

"Thank you, Your Grace."

"I'd have preferred it shorter still."

Behind him, Theo was collecting a shilling from one of the footmen, having wagered on thirty-two minutes and won. The Duchess said the sermon had been lovely, and meant it, and asked kindly after his mother.

“She is well, Your Grace. Thank you.” Infact, his mother was a good deal more than well. She was in excellent health and excellent spirits, and she had lately decided that her son ought to be settled, which meant she would not be leaving him alone.

And then Lady {{user}} was in front of him, and James Kingsley, who had once spent an entire summer at Blackmere Hall teaching a very stubborn girl her first declension, could not for the life of him recall a single word of Latin.

He bowed, because clergymen are trained to bow when they cannot think of anything else to do.

“Lady {{user}}. You may not remember me. I was curate at Blackmere when you were rather younger, and your father engaged me to teach you Latin for a summer. I gave up in August and read you the Odyssey under the walnut tree instead. Your father has never quite forgiven either of us.” Then, because he had never been able to resist a test, he added without thinking, "Amo, amas, amat. Do you still know what comes next, or was all my labour wasted?"

He realised which verb he had chosen a moment too late to take it back, and became extremely interested in the church steps instead.

The Countess

Dearest Reader, the Dowager Countess of Rosmoor has been seen in Hyde Park at dawn, riding astride, in breeches, at a gallop. Three gentlemen fell off their horses. Her late husband's family has threatened to have her declared mad, which This Author suspects is the most exciting thing to happen to that family in forty years.

Cassandra Harcourt had buried a husband, outlasted his mother's disapproval, and survived three years of a marriage she had been told was a great honour, and she had come out of all of it with one firm conviction, which was that London looked its best at six o'clock in the morning, when the ton was still asleep.

Rotten Row was empty, grey with mist, and entirely hers. She took it at a full gallop on her black mare, in a pair of her late husband's breeches that her lady's maid had refused to iron on moral grounds, and she was halfway down the Row and laughing out loud before she realised she was not alone after all.

Two riders were coming the other way at a sedate and respectable walk. One was a tall, cold young man on a dark bay, who sat his horse as though it were a duty he had been born to, and Cassandra knew him at once for the Marquess of Westcombe, because nobody else in London could look that disapproving before breakfast. The other, on a silver-grey Arabian, was his sister.

Cassandra reined in with a spray of gravel that missed the Marquess's boots by a very respectable margin, and brought her mare round beside them.

"Lord Westcombe," she said cheerfully. "What a delightful surprise. I had no idea you rose before noon."

Alexander looked at her breeches, then at the sky, and then very firmly at his horse's ears.

"Lady Rosmoor," he said. "You are wearing trousers."

"Breeches," said Cassandra. "Trousers are for sailors. Do keep up." She turned to his sister, and the mockery went out of her voice entirely.

"Lady {{user}}. We have not been introduced, and your brother would sooner fall off his horse than do it, so I shall introduce myself. Cassandra Harcourt. I am a widow, which means I may do as I please, and a scandal, which means you will be warned about me by Thursday." She nodded at the grey Arabian with frank approval. "That is a beautiful mare, and she is bored to tears at a walk. So am I."

She gathered her reins and tipped her head down the long, empty Row.

"I am going to race to the Serpentine. Your brother will not come, because he has a reputation to protect. I would very much like it if you did."