Chapter Two

The landau to which she'd been led seemed startlingly, sparklingly new. Blissfully comfortable, seats plump, redolent of leather

and polish. Worth two hundred pounds, if she had to guess. Four matched bays pulled it.

No crest was apparent on it. Did it belong to Brightwall?

If so, when had he commissioned it?

Magnus hadn't spoken since the driver had assisted her aboard and closed the door upon them. And he hadn't said a word to

her.

"Thank you for coming for me," she said to her husband, finally. Subdued.

Her raspy voice shocked her. It was shredded from shouting over the prison noise.

For long seconds he didn't reply.

Perhaps words couldn't possibly struggle through the thundercloud of his thoughts.

"Are you sound?" His voice was gruff. His eyes remained fixed on the carriage wall ahead of him.

"Yes. Thank you. I didn't know hairpins were considered a weapon. Or the leg of a stool."

She had no idea why these were the first things she would say to her husband in five years. She was apparently too tired to filter her thoughts before they emerged as words.

"Anything can be a weapon." He sounded faintly surprised. As if this was something everyone ought to have been born knowing.

Silly Alexandra. Then again, he supposed he'd been forced to view the whole of life that way.

She cleared her throat. "Are... you... sound?"

He snorted softly.

And he still didn't turn his head to look at her.

With a sense of unreality, she surreptitiously studied the profile of this familiar stranger to whom she was bound for life.

The sun revealed shadows of sleeplessness beneath his eyes. Lines, earned through years of peering across battlefields or

into the souls of enemies or squinting at maps and dispatches by firelight, rayed from the corners.

Seconds after they'd first been introduced, he'd held her fast in his cool, remote gaze for several potent seconds, during

which she could have sworn he didn't draw a breath.

And then his eyes had kindled to the warm blue at the center of a flame, and a wry, intimate smile had tipped one corner of

his mouth. As if he knew things about her even she had yet to discover, and liked them all.

She wondered if he'd ever anticipated then there would be a time he couldn't bear to look at her, let alone speak to her.

Perhaps she reeked of the prison. Or appeared haggard from sleeplessness.

Her vanity stung at the thought.

What a luxury it was to worry about how she looked, she realized. Despite its strifes, heartaches, and upheavals, her entire

life, end to end, was comprised of luxuries such as those. From now on, no matter what happened, she would never let herself

forget it.

And besides, she could hardly smell worse than the soldiers he'd lived with for months on end.

She tried again. "I wasn't aware you had returned from Spain."

He'd been there for nearly the whole of the last five years; they'd made him a diplomat after the war.

As his new wife, she was supposed to have gone with him. Destiny had thrown a flaming grenade into those plans.

Well, she had. She was the one who'd thrown the grenade.

It occurred to her then: What if he'd actually been in London for weeks and hadn't bothered to tell her? Her stomach twisted

at the implications.

But would it have really mattered?

"I arrived only a day ago. I sent word to you of my arrival via Mr. Lawler."

Mr. Lawler. The solicitor through whom they had conducted all matters between them for the last five years. He administered

to Alexandra her reasonable allowance and approved and paid all of her expenses, including clothing, servants, household furnishings,

travel, like her upcoming trip to New York, and entertainments.

Like the opera she was supposed to have attended when she was arrested.

In all of that time she had not exchanged one word directly with her husband, written or spoken. She had been kept apprised

of whether he was alive or not, and she assumed Mr. Lawler had likewise reported on her continued existence to Brightwall.

All Brightwall had asked in return was that she discreetly conduct herself in a way becoming of the wife of a man of his stature.

And it ought to have been so easy: she'd been raised to do, and be, exactly that, her entire life.

How had she failed?

"Lawler would have conveyed word of my presence to you had you been available to receive it," he added.

Oh , so very dry: In other words, if you had not been in prison due to a lark, Alexandra.

"How did you hear that I was in..." She couldn't quite bring herself to say it.

"I was awakened at my lodgings just past dawn by a distraught Mr. Lawler, who held in his hand a copy of The Times ." He paused. "Imagine my delight when the word used to describe my wife was ‘accomplice.'"

Oh, dear God.

"The gossip columns?"

"The front page."

Worse and worse. She squeezed her eyes closed.

"I understand Ackerman's is already selling the Rowlandson illustration accompanying the article entitled ‘The Beast Takes

a Bride.'"

Oh no.

Oh no oh no.

No wonder he was furious.

Her husband had been found as a baby squalling in a sack on the back garden steps of a Yorkshire manor, next to a delivery

of potatoes. His name, Magnus Brightwall, was how the servants who found him had interpreted the barely legible scribble on

the scrap of paper pinned to his swaddling clothes. He had triumphed over incomprehensible odds. He was extraordinary by any

definition of the word. All of England considered him a hero.

She was one of the few who knew his ambivalence about the word "hero."

It seemed a cardinal sin to do anything at all to tarnish the name of such a man. The gossip sheets had no such compunction

about it, of course. Their fealty was to profits.

She wondered if she'd unwittingly been doing it in increments. Perhaps if she hadn't gone out to that performance of Artaxerxes at King's Theatre that one night a few years ago, for instance, a drunk young man she'd never seen in her life might not have stumbled into her opera box and loudly declared his love for her during the first aria. It transpired her sparkly tiara had transfixed him ten minutes earlier in the lobby, so he'd followed her. The gossip sheets had christened her "the mysterious Juliet" until they'd discovered the opera box belonged to Colonel Brightwall and that "Juliet" was in fact Brightwall's allegedly even more mysterious wife. That was when the fun really began.

She ventured out rarely into public after that. Her social circle remained primarily her extended family. This hadn't been

easy. She was a fundamentally social creature.

After that, from time to time, speculation about the nature of their marriage had sprung up in the gossip sheet like noxious

little weeds. But both she and Magnus remained tight-lipped about the reasons they lived apart, and absolutely no one besides

the two of them knew the real reason.

She wondered if Mr. Lawler had sent newspaper clippings to him in Spain.

She could not find it in herself to protest her innocence in this latest instance. It would have been an almost macabre echo

of their last conversation.

"Magnus, I do not yet know what the newspaper printed," she said carefully, her voice graveled. "And I expect I shall learn

presently. But I should like to tell you that this all was merely misunderstanding which escalated horribly. Thackeray swears

he was offered the use of the Duke of Brexford's phaeton. Brexford was away when Thackeray retrieved it from the duke's mews,

and apparently no one in the stables questioned him about it. He then retrieved me from the town house for our visit to the

opera with other friends. But when the duke arrived home and learned his phaeton was missing, he sounded the alarm because

he'd forgotten the arrangement... and... and soldiers descended upon us, and..."

She stopped.

"And..." Magnus prompted, with great irony.

Which is when she realized Brightwall had probably, somehow, already heard the whole story.

"And Thackeray may have swung his fist at a soldier who seized him," she said quietly.

Admittedly, this was a deeply stupid thing to do. Then again, while Thackeray was diverting company, he was hardly known for

his sense, which life seldom required him to use. He took after her father's side of the family. She'd tried to intervene

by speaking up on his behalf to the soldiers. She'd scarcely raised her voice. But they were having none of it.

Her husband was one of the most famous military officers in all of English history. She knew exactly how he felt about civilians

attacking soldiers doing their jobs.

Which meant she was aware of the futility, even the foolhardiness, of what she was about to say next.

But time was of the essence, and she couldn't live with herself if she didn't try.

"In light of the circumstances, I am aware that what I am about to ask is presumptuous in the extreme." Her voice trembled. "Thackeray won't survive long in Newgate, Magnus. He hasn't the funds or influence to get himself out. You've met him, at our house party five years ago. You have a sense of him, I believe. He means well, even if he is a bit rash on occasion, and this is what will get him hurt in jail. If you could... that is, he truly didn't intend to..."

She trailed off when she realized Magnus was studying her as if he'd never seen her before. With a sort of hard, closed curiosity.

Wondering, perhaps, what she had become. What on earth he had ever seen in her.

"Lord Thackeray might be your cousin, but he is a feckless idiot who recklessly endangered you, himself, my reputation and

yours." He explained all of this slowly, with great, amazed patience, as if this was something elementary she ought to have

learned with her numbers and letters. "Thackeray can rot in prison."

She stared at him. And as she did, toxic bubbles of fury rose through her exhaustion and unease and layers of grace and control,

always control, so carefully cultivated. Do not ever speak to me in that tone. No matter what I've done. No matter how angry you might be. She wanted desperately to say it. And she could have.

It wouldn't have mattered.

He could, of course, say or do anything he liked to her. She was his wife. His property in the eyes of the law.

She gave up and turned away from him, aiming her face toward the window, her eyes half closed, and said nothing more until

the carriage came to a halt.

"Maybe a little sherry would help," Angelique suggested, tentatively.

The proprietresses of the boardinghouse by the docks known as The Grand Palace on the Thames had just settled in with a basket of mending in their little room at the top of the stairs to discuss an odd little problem: For the past week, the after-dinner discourse in their sitting room had been less spirited than... moribund.

And they both felt a little responsible.

Delilah laughed. "Are you suggesting we ought to get our guests foxed?"

But they both knew Angelique was only partly jesting.

The rules of The Grand Palace on the Thames required all guests to gather at least four nights out of the week, which they

believed helped foster what they liked to think of as the boardinghouse's warm, familial atmosphere. The room had been the

scene of impromptu dancing; sultry innuendo; feelings both hurt and soothed; passionate debate about apple tarts, ghosts,

the nature of love and death and phallic flora; and once, enthusiastic sex (at night, however, after everyone else had gone

to sleep). Bawdy songs had been composed on the spot there. Mr. Delacorte had made many trips to the Epithet Jar, which presided

over everything, and maintained civility. Anything could happen in that room.

But currently, almost nothing was happening in that room.

It had to do with their current mix of guests.

The very young Corporal Simon Dawson and his new bride, Cora, had been in residence for four days of the fortnight they intended to stay, and though they had obediently reported to the sitting room after dinner, they had thus far seemed impervious to every attempt to draw them into conversation. It didn't help that Corporal Dawson had a tendency to go mute from awe when the legendary smuggler-catcher Captain Tristan Hardy, Delilah's husband, was in the room, which amused Captain Hardy and didn't bother him a bit. Cora had freckles and Simon had a cowlick and both had big brown eyes and somberly deferential manners, all of which made everyone else present feel ancient. Corporal Dawson was sweetly solicitous of his shy little wife. They were, in a word, adorable; it was like hosting a pair of baby field mice. The Epithet Jar was in no danger of seeing a contribution from either of them.

And then there was Mrs. Prudence Cuthbert, who had come to London from Norfolk to visit her childhood friend, Mrs. Pariseau, a longtime resident of The Grand Palace on the Thames. Mrs. Cuthbert was polite but nervous, and though she and Mrs. Pariseau were both widows in their middle years, she seemed older, perhaps because her lips were so often compressed in a disapproving line. She had confided to Mrs. Pariseau that Mr. Delacorte reminded her of a dog she'd once owned who found it amusing to insert his snout into strangers' behinds, and then stand back and wag his tail. While this was a fair description of Mr. Delacorte, Mrs. Pariseau had later said, somewhat apologetically, to Delilah and Angelique, "I didn't realize Prudence had grown up to be so prim ."

Two nights ago, Mrs. Pariseau's attempt to lead a discussion of Greek myths had veered into chaos when Mr. Delacorte shared

that he'd thought "Testicles" was a Greek philosopher the first time he'd seen the word in print. ("Testi cleez , like Hercules," he'd explained to his stunned audience.)

Mrs. Cuthbert now went warily stiff every time Mr. Delacorte opened his mouth, and Angelique and Delilah had taken to keeping

smelling salts in the sitting room.

Mrs. Pariseau was patently not prim. She was thoroughly enjoying her relatively monied widowhood, and while she had no desire

to ever marry again, she adored handsome men as much as arcane discussion. There wasn't a single topic of conversation too

controversial for her to enthusiastically embrace, just as there wasn't a single topic of conversation Mr. Delacorte couldn't

make more awkward. Angelique and Delilah cherished both of them, and would be quite pleased if they stayed forever.

But both of them now seemed to be languishing.

For the past several days, Mrs. Pariseau had read aloud from The Arabian Nights' Entertainments , and everyone else had merely... listened politely. Even Mr. Delacorte, who had sat near the chessboard, his chin propped

on his fist almost disconsolately.

Delilah and Angelique had never thought a day would come when they would be uneasy about "politely." They had begun to feel as though they were failing in their mission to make The Grand Palace on the Thames a warm, familial place. The alchemy of guests was what had created the magic in the room thus far.

"We could always dose their tea with something from Mr. Delacorte's case," Delilah mused.

Angelique laughed.

Mr. Delacorte imported remedies from the Orient, "ground up herbs and bits and bobs of animal horns and whatnot," as he described

them, and sold them to apothecaries and surgeons up and down the coast. Some of them cured fevers and healed wounds and helped

slow bleeding and eased pains and headaches, some caused hallucinations or wild dreams, some did all of those things, and

some did nothing at all.

"Oh, it feels a bit like tempting fate to say, but I almost wish a more exciting guest would arrive," Angelique admitted.

"Perhaps our sitting room recipe is missing just one crucial person to make it come alive again."

Just then a familiar thundering on the stairs made them leap to their feet.

Dot appeared in the doorway, and her flushed, triumphant expression could only mean one thing: she'd triumphed over Mr. Pike,

their new footman, in a race to answer the front door.

Answering the door was Dot's favorite thing to do, but Mr. Pike had gotten a taste of it and, unfortunately, decided Dot was

right: it was de lightful , like opening a gift every time, and he wanted to do more of it. Delilah and Angelique had mostly left the two of them to

sort it out between them, as an experiment and by way of avoiding crushing Dot's heart by telling her they wanted their strapping

footman to do it all the time. Dot had once accidentally trod on Mr. Pike's foot in a race for the door, which made Mr. Pike

darkly mutter "bollocks." This they knew because Dot had tattled on him. They were, after a fashion, each other's nemesis.

And like all nemeses since the dawn of time, they were fascinated by each other.

Dot needed three gulps of air before she could deliver her news, which she did in a rush, as if she wanted to prevent Pike

from beating her to that, too.

"We've a man downstairs who would like a suite!"

"What sort of man? One of means, it would seem, if he wants a suite, instead of just a room." Delilah began to untie her apron.

Dot's expression fleetingly clouded, as she apparently pondered this question, then cleared, as though she'd swiftly resolved

some troubling internal debate.

"Well, we have had other alarming guests before," she said cheerfully. "And they turned out just fine, didn't they?"

Delilah and Angelique froze.

Angelique ventured, "Are you suggesting this man is alarming? And if so, what sort of alarming? Is he swinging a shillelagh in the foyer? Is our chandelier at risk?"

She felt she could afford to be somewhat glib given that Captain Hardy and Lucien Durand, Lord Bolt (Angelique's husband,

the formerly infamous illegitimate son of an awful duke), would make short work of any alarming man. Their husbands were in

the smoking room at the moment, which was lovely, as they'd been so frequently away recently, traveling up the coast to supervise

repair of their damaged ship and the outfitting of their new one, Delilah and Angelique were beginning to ironically feel

as though they and their husbands were ships passing in the night. Their absence, too, was part of the reason the sitting

room had been less spirited at night.

As for Ben Pike, if they had to guess, he was likely doubled over, catching his breath and scowling after losing a race to

the door. He was also perfectly capable of thumping a man in the jaw, should the need arise.

"Dot?" Delilah pressed worriedly, when Dot didn't reply.

Delilah reached over to right Dot's cap, which had collapsed over her brow.

She discovered Dot's enormous blue eyes had gone starry.

"What is a... what is a... sillylaylee?" she breathed.

"ShiLAYLee. It's an Irish word for a versatile sort of cudgel. A cudgel is a club." Angelique made a swinging gesture. "The sort you hit people with in order to defend yourself. It can also be used as a walking stick."

Angelique was a former governess who had never lost the impulse to instruct, and Dot's mind was a vast, fertile plain (or

a howling tundra, or an attic full of cobwebs and mysterious, broken toys depending upon whom one asked). Dot considered every

new word a gift to be displayed proudly and liberally in her sentences for weeks thereafter, the way someone else might set

out their best china plates.

"I think it's the most beautiful word I've ever heard. ShILLAAAYLEEE."

"Dot, please. Is this gentleman truly alarming? Is he truly a gentleman? Did you feel alarmed as you spoke to him? Do we need to get a pistol? Is he that sort

of alarming?"

Delilah hung up her apron on the hook inside the door. Her husband had made sure everyone knew how to shoot, including Dot,

even though she had not yet mastered the aiming part of shooting.

"Well, no. It's more about how he looks. But he's also a bit friendly. Polite, like."

"Alarming and friendly could conceivably describe Mr. Delacorte," Delilah pointed out.

As they both tacitly agreed this could also easily describe Dot, Angelique and Delilah carefully did not meet each other's

eyes.

"Well, he's not the jolly sort of friendly, like Mr. Delacorte. But he said ‘thank you' to me when I said I would need to go and fetch you for an interview. And men don't usually say that to the people who open doors, do they? Especially the men who have engraved buttons on their waistcoats."

This was both inarguable and a poignant glimpse into the world as seen through the eyes of the former worst lady's maid in

the world, current valued member of The Grand Palace on the Thames staff, even if she had dropped a tea tray yesterday because

she'd seen a ladybird land on the flowers in the sitting room and wanted to wish on it before it flew away.

"And he's taller even than Mr. Pike."

Angelique and Delilah exchanged a swift glance. This marked the third time they'd heard Dot use her nemesis, the gray-eyed,

hard-jawed, vast-shouldered Mr. Pike, as a unit of measurement. And while "He's tall enough to reach the sconces, like Mr.

Pike," could conceivably be excused as a fair way to describe a guest, idly commenting that the fire screen was only half

as wide as Mr. Pike's shoulders (as she had done yesterday) worrisomely suggested her brain was so brimful of Mr. Pike that

he would now be sloshing over onto everything she saw.

"And the gentleman's expression is very—" Angelique and Delilah took involuntary backward lunges when Dot glowered as blackly as the little gargoyles that lined the roof of The Grand Palace on the Thames. "He stands very straight, like Captain Hardy. And he has a skinny white scar right here." Dot touched her eyebrow. "I think I would say that he's the sort of man you would turn to stare at on the street because he doesn't look at all like anybody else."

The beloved bodies of their own husbands bore the marks of battles fought before they'd found their way to The Grand Palace

on the Thames. And that ramrod posture was often a giveaway of a military man—as was (possibly) the glower and the "thank

you." Taken together, they suggested a man who had achieved some stature and wealth—hence, the engraved buttons—and had acquired

manners but had not been raised a gentleman.

Dot was a savant when it came to noticing such things, and Delilah and Angelique indeed liked to be prepared before they ventured

downstairs to confront someone who could either become a cherished fixture in their lives or someone who would need to be

forcibly removed by the British army. The latter had happened only once before, however, and they liked to think that surely,

like a lightning strike, it couldn't happen to them again.

Still, it never hurt to be too prepared.

"And the lady with him looks as though she wants to be anywhere else and with anyone else," Dot concluded.

They stared at Dot.

And then Angelique pulled in a long, long breath, which Delilah knew from experience was the sound of her patience unraveling.

"The lady seems to be a new character in this narrative, Dot," Delilah suggested carefully.

"Well, she looks like a lady, only a bit..." Dot leaned toward them and whispered, ". . . worse for wear."

Delilah and Angelique exchanged glances. This story was really beginning to interest them.

"She's wearing one of the finest ball gowns I've ever seen—gold silk with gauze over it. Very dear or I'll eat my cap. And

it looks as though she's slept in it."

Dot would know what a slept-in ball gown looked like, too. As a former lady's maid, she'd tended to foxed women who collapsed

drunkenly straight into bed after balls.

Angelique exchanged a glance with Delilah.

"Dot, you're certain she's a lady lady? You do recall the man and woman whom we were forced to send away the other day..."

Pink bloomed in Dot's cheeks. She'd been forced to describe those two to Angelique and Delilah in a single, scandalized, whispered

sentence: "They are both giggling, and he's got hold of her left bottom and hasn't let go since they arrived."

The Grand Palace on the Thames's previous unruly incarnation still haunted the sign outside in the form of the ghostly outline

of the word "rogues," and every now and then someone appeared at the door, bearing a yellowed menu of prurient services such

as the Vicar's Wheelbarrow or the Archbishop's Piccolo, and would be sent away, dejected, the admonishment "read the sign!"

ringing in their ears.

"Oh, no. This one is a lady, just like you and Mrs. Durand," Dot said with conviction. "Just..."

"Bedraggled?" Angelique suggested.

"Yes. Draggled," Dot agreed confidently.

Dot did indeed know at almost a glance her ladies from her not-ladies. They were convinced she was correct.

"Did you happen to get this gentleman's name, as well as his coat, Dot?" Delilah asked.

"His name is something to do with a wall, I think, which fits, because he's a bit like a wall, only human. And he said he

would keep his coat, as he was going right back out again."

Delilah gasped as realization settled in. "Oh, good heavens. Could it be Colonel Brightwall?"

It certainly sounded like him. He'd been away from London on diplomatic duty in Spain since the end of the war.

"Wasn't his wife arrested for allegedly stealing Lucien's father's carriage?" Angelique whispered. "It was in the newspaper."

Dot gasped theatrically and clapped her hands over her mouth. Aghast and thrilled.

"Well. Perhaps we should be careful what we wish for," Delilah said brightly.

They went down to meet their exciting new guests.