London, January 1807
From within the protective camouflage of the gaggle of companions, Prudence Virtue watched her sometime partner and one-night-only lover drift around the banquet hall. No one else saw him. Like the shadow he named himself, he skirted the edges of the pools of candlelight, but even when his self-appointed duties moved him close to a group of guests, they overlooked him. None of the privileged, not even the Earl and Countess of Sutton, whose party it was, noticed one extra footman.
He was very good. He had the walk, the submissive bend of the head, the lowered eyes. Even Prue—herself hiding as just one more brown-clad, unimpressive companion among a dozen others, waiting patiently in an alcove for the commands of an employer—did not detect him for her first half hour in the room.
But Prue’s body was wiser than her mind and left her restless in his presence, until her eyes caught so many times on a single footman among dozens that she began to take notice. And she saw Shadow, for the first time since that one disastrous morning five months earlier.
Prue was here to meet her employer. She had arrived early to check the layout, wearing a plainer bodice in cheaper fabric over her modest gown, and a voluminous apron, blending into the army of servants bustling busily all over the house with the last-minute preparations for this pre-season soirée.
And what a success the gathering was! With Parliament in session, more people than she expected were in town, and the winter cold did not prevent them and their families from sampling the events on offer.
Was Shadow here for the same meeting as her? If so, she would be calm, professional, indifferent. She would never let Shadow know how much she longed for him; how often she replayed that final morning, searching for the words that would lead to a different outcome. Perhaps if she had stayed instead of fleeing to hide her tears… No. She had not gone far, and when she did return to the rooms they shared, he had already left for the wharf where the boatman from the mainland was waiting, so that her questions and explanations died in her throat.
Prue stayed out of sight in the back of the alcove as the time for her to make her move approached. He had left the room several times in the hour she had been watching. With luck… Yes. There he went again. Now, if several of the dowagers would give orders at once, every companion would think she was obeying another… Done. Moving to where any of three or four ladies might be giving her instructions, she hurried away as if running an errand.
The key, the man she knew as Tolliver had taught her, was to fit into people’s preconceived ideas of the universe; to appear to be someone doing something for which they had—or didn’t need—an explanation. The key was to blend into the background of the story they were telling themselves. ‘Don’t notice me. I’m just a companion running an errand,’ her behaviour said. And five minutes after she left, not one of them would remember what she looked like or which direction she went.
Prue glanced quickly around to check that she was still unobserved, then slipped behind the curtain that half-masked the door to one of the network of passages that riddled the walls, allowing servants invisible access to every part of the vast mansion of the Earl of Sutton’s father, the Duke of Winshire. Narrow, dimly lit, unornamented, currently deserted, the passage beyond the door stretched into the gloom on the left past a row of service rooms, and terminated on the right in a steep flight of stairs.
She was almost at the stairs when a sound caught her attention. Whimpering? Then a woman’s voice, pleading. “No, my lord. Please. Let me go, my lord.” An expletive in a male voice, followed by silence.
Prue retraced her steps, to listen at each door, throwing the third open. In the room beyond, the bangs and scrapes of a struggle ceased but a smothered whimper continued.
“Get out. This has nothing to do with you.” She could just make out the man who spoke, a shape in the dark room, looming upright over the woman he had pinned to a low bed or couch. Then he flinched back. “Ow! You bitch. You bit me.”
The woman spoke over his indignant protests, a young breathy voice shrill with fear. “Help me. Please help me.”
Prue moved so that the meagre light from the passage fell onto the small pistol she had retrieved from her reticule. “Remove yourself from the young lady’s person, my lord. Do so very slowly, or I shall shoot you for the mad cur you are.”
“Do you know who I am? You cannot shoot an earl.”
She gestured with the gun, and he reluctantly obeyed. She could still make out little more than his silhouette, a blacker mass than the darkness of the room behind. Then the girl was up and across the room in a flurry of silk. What was this? A lady? Prue had assumed that she’d caught some lordling bothering a servant, but the girl’s voice and the quality of her clothing put her in the ranks of guest rather than staff.
She put the girl behind her with her free hand, then pulled the door closed. Something thrown banged against it on the other side.
“We must get you to safety,” she told the girl, a very young debutante in a torn white gown, her honey-blonde hair falling from its careful coiffure, the delicate oval of her face streaked with tears.
“I cannot… I did not… Everyone will think…”
“Take the child to Lady Georgiana.” Prue started at Shadow’s voice, and the girl yelped and clutched at her for protection. Fussing over the girl gave Prue time to catch the breath that had escaped at his sudden appearance. He was leaning against the next door down, half concealed in the doorway. “There’s a small sitting room along there.” He pointed down the passage towards the far end, seemingly unaffected the meeting, while Prue was torn between spitting in his face and throwing herself at his feet to beg him to forgive whatever offence she had caused. “Halfway to the corner. Lady Georgiana is in there. She’ll take care of your maiden, and I shall see to the assailant. Who is it?”
Prue shook her head, mostly to clear it. But it would do for an answer, too; in the darkness, she had seen nothing to recognise.
“He said he was an earl,” she offered.
Shadow looked at the girl, lifting one eyebrow in silent question, and she answered. “Selby. It was Lord Selby. No one will believe… I did not know. Truly. I did not mean…”
Selby? Prue had thought the assailant a younger man. The Earl of Selby, who was a distant relative of her sister’s husband, must be a man in his fifties or older. What was he doing assaulting debutantes in the service rooms? She put her questions to one side, shelved them with her foolish yearnings after her former partner. The girl came first. Shadow was holding the door shut against Selby’s assault from the other side, and they needed to get the child to safety.
Prue led her down the passage, saying, “I believe you. Lady Georgiana will believe you.” The Earl of Sutton’s sister, Lady Georgiana Winderfield, was known for championing women who had fallen prey to unscrupulous men, ignoring her powerful brother and her even more powerful father in offering them support and help.
Lady Georgiana was a delicately built woman in her middle years, soberly if expensively clad in a dress of grey silk. Her hair, dressed in a plain chignon at the back of her head, was escaping to cluster in small soft ringlets around her kindly face. She took charge as soon as Prue arrived with the girl, draping her own shawl to cover the tears and sending a maid for the child’s mother.
Soon enough, Prue was able to leave, pausing in the doorway as a cluster of tall footmen passed, Shadow the shortest among them, hustling the assailant towards the far end. The glimpse she caught of him confirmed her impression of a younger man.
Tolliver was waiting in the room at the top of the stairs. Since she had visited in the afternoon, someone had made up the fire, and set chairs and a table near it. Two chairs. A set of decanters and two glasses. Just her and Tolliver, then. And that sinking of her foolish heart was not disappointment. She did not want to work with Shadow again. He could have found her if he wished any time these last five months. He clearly did not wish, and she would not yearn after a man who did not want her.
The fire and a three-branch candelabra on the table gave the only light. Most of the room was in darkness, especially along the side, where a wall of curtains hid a balcony that overlooked the banquet hall. In the Season, musicians would play on the balcony, and use this room to rest and refresh themselves.
“You are late, Mist.” Tolliver himself had assigned the code name by which she was known to the network of spies who served him, and through him, the Crown.
She ignored his rebuke, seating herself at the table and pouring herself a drink. Tolliver shook his head when she gestured with the decanter. “What delayed you?” he asked.
“Is Shadow here on your business?” Prue asked.
Tolliver’s eyes widened, but he hid any other reaction. “No. You are certain it is him?”
“I spoke with him.”
Tolliver stared into the fire for a long moment. “It is unlikely to do with our business,” he said, finally.
“Which is?” Prue prompted.
Tolliver was uncharacteristically silent, staring unfocused into the fire. Since Tolliver had first recruited her to his cause—to England’s cause, he would say, but sometimes she wondered—she had never known him to hesitate. Always, he began as soon as they were together, as if each minute of the meeting cost a guinea to be paid from his own pocket. He would lay out the facts in his dry solicitor’s voice, explain her role and his desired outcome, arrange her reporting schedule, and leave as soon as he could.
When they had first met four and a half years ago, Prue had been one and twenty and desperate to find a respectable way to earn money to keep herself and those she loved. Somehow, Tolliver knew about her first investigation over a year earlier: when she truthfully accused her employer’s grandson of theft and was imprisoned for it, destroying both her first love affair and her chances of employment. Tolliver had offered a job that—if not precisely respectable—at least did not involve selling her body.
Prue’s success depended on her ability to observe closely, while remaining unnoticed. For four and a half years, Tolliver had moved her into houses that he needed to watch: houses where secrets waited to be uncovered. He’d moved her from position to position: housekeeper, governess, companion, even lady’s maid.
“Sir?”
Tolliver left off his close observation of the fire and turned his regard to Prue.
“A serious matter has come to my attention,” he told her. “A matter of blackmail.”
“A nasty crime,” Prue said.
“Particularly when the blackmailer requires payment in secrets,” Tolliver agreed, “secrets of value to a foreign power.”
Prue lowered her glass. “The French?”
“Perhaps.” Tolliver refused to jump to conclusions. “Possibly the Colonials. Or the Prussians. Perhaps even the Turks. Or merely a local villain who wants a commodity that may, in the future, prove valuable.”
“You have a place for me to start?” Prue asked.
“According to my informant, it seems probable that a certain… lady of pleasure has acted as intermediary between the blackmailer and her… intimate friends.”
“She has been questioned?”
But Tolliver didn’t give the expected affirmative. “It was thought best not to alarm her or the blackmailer. Or to unduly inconvenience those of her friends who are innocent. A subtler approach is called for, we believe.”
Prue frowned. Placing such constraints on an investigation suggested the case had sticky tendrils into the upper reaches of the ton. The last such case had nearly killed her and Shadow before they triumphed. On that occasion, Shadow had been Tolliver’s agent, not Prue. If Prue had not been hired by the victim’s godmother, the outcome could have been very different.
“In the Wyvern case, you kept information to yourself. You put me and Shadow both in danger, and you jeopardised the investigation. I can’t work that way, Tolliver.”
Tolliver nodded. “I know. That was a mistake. I will give you all the information I have. But I must insist it remains between us two.”
The courtesan was Lily Diamond: not one of the first tier in the demi-monde, but well enough known. She would, Tolliver said, be in need of a housekeeper within the next week. Prue would begin her part of the investigation from within Miss Diamond’s house.
Tolliver suspected all those intimate with the courtesan, and those who hoped to be. He had a list of five names. “There may be more, but doubtless you will soon find out who else calls. Remember, any or all of them could be a victim of the man we seek. And one of them might be the traitor,” Tolliver said.
“Come. Three of the five are here tonight. I’ll point them out.” Tolliver blew out all but one candle then led the way behind the curtain, to the darkness of the small balcony.
Over the roar of conversation and music slamming up from the banquet hall, Tolliver pointed out Lord Jonathan Grenford, the younger son of the Duke of Haverford.
“It was the older son, the Marquis of Aldridge, who first alerted us to the problem. Young Grenford went to his brother when his first attempts to pay off the blackmailer led to more sinister requests.”
Prue was trying to get a clear view of the young lord, who was dancing with a tall blonde in silver. “Is he reliable, Tolliver? A victim or a traitor?”
“An idiot,” Tolliver grumbled. “More money than sense and nothing useful to do. Ah. There is our next suspect. Lady Georgiana Winderfield, daughter of this house.”
“I met her earlier this evening,” Prue said. In a private room off a service corridor, and Shadow knew exactly where to find her. What was he doing? And who for?
The lady was talking to her brother, Lord Sutton, giving no sign that she had more on her mind than the pleasures of the evening. “What connection has she to Miss Diamond?”
“She is a regular visitor.” At her enquiring look, Tolliver expanded on the remark. “Perhaps she reads the woman improving tracts. She is on the route to sainthood amongst our soiled doves, by all accounts.”
Prue ignored his dry sarcasm. “And the third of your five?”
“Yes. Young Lord Selby. He was here earlier.”
“Young lord, you say? The earl is new to the title?” she asked.
“He inherited just before Christmas when his father took a fatal tumble down the stairs. He visits The Diamond, but it is a mystery how he affords her, and the other high-flyers he frequents.”
“Short of money?” Prue asked, though half her mind was on whether the death of the old earl would make a difference to her sister.
“The estate is in difficulties. The father was a heavy gambler. Young Selby will have to find an heiress to marry. I have heard a persistent rumour that he is married already, but if so, no one has ever seen her.”
The cousins were alike in more than looks, then.
“I do not see him,” Tolliver repeated.
“He is no longer here. Lord Selby was the reason I was late, Tolliver. I stopped him in the act of raping a young guest, and he has been escorted from the premises.”
“He is an unpleasant young man. So you know what he looks like. Did he see you?” Tolliver shot her a sharp look.
“I could not see him in the dark, and I had the light behind me. I doubt he would know me again.”
“Hmm. Well enough. He is a guest at the Diamond house, and it would not do for him to recognise you. I must go. You know your assignment. Usual reporting methods.” With no more ceremony than that, Tolliver was gone.
Prue followed more slowly, retreating into the room where the curtain muffled some of the sound.
And then Shadow was there, his eyes quickly scanning the room as he slid sideways through the small gap he’d opened between door and frame. They settled on Prue and warmed briefly, the bland mask he made of his face lifting for a fraction of a second. He was pleased she was here?
Before she could be sure, the mask was back in place.
“Mist.” Just that one word, with no inflexion. Her code name.
“Shadow.” She copied his toneless voice.
“Do you have a minute to talk?”
Prue had no reason to refuse, except the conflicting irrational desires to throw herself into his arms and to run as far from him as she could. She returned to her chair by the fire.
He crossed to the table. “Drink?”
She shook her head. She had not finished the drink she had started. She reached for it before Shadow could hand it to her. She didn’t need the touch of his fingers to know he still had the power to turn her bones to jelly. And as bad as it had been before the night they fell into bed together, it was ten times worse now.
“How have you been?” Shadow asked.
“Busy. Well.” Restless. Longing for something she could never have. “And you?” she asked.
He was thinner than he had been five months ago, with tired lines around his eyes. Had he been ill?
“The same,” he told her. “Busy. Well.” He moved as if to stretch his hand towards her, then changed the gesture to rub his head, shifting the footman’s wig to a precarious tilt. “Stupid thing. I forgot it for a moment.”
Prue fought to hold her hands at her sides, to keep her body relaxed, to stop herself from reaching to straighten the wig or, better still, to rip it from his head and cover his face with kisses.
Shadow reached out his hand but stopped before touching hers. “I saw Tolliver. You are on a job?”
Prue nodded. No point in denying it. “I am.”
“Me too. A private commission. Here in London.” For Lady Georgiana? Prue narrowed her eyes. She did not believe in coincidences.
“I will be working in London, too,” she said.
“Perhaps we could—” he started, but broke off.
“I will be living in,” she told him. She could not make herself vulnerable to him again.
His hazel eyes intent on hers, he began, “Mist, about that night…”
She interrupted him. “Don’t.”
“Do I owe you an apology?” he asked. “I thought you wanted…”
“I do not wish to talk about it. I should go.”
He made no move to stop her as she backed towards the door. For five months she had taken assignments in other cities, trying to forget that one night when she had been his and he had been hers. And she was still his, though she would die rather than let him know it.
Which meant staying away from him, for he was an expert investigator and would soon discover her unrequited longing. But London was a big city, and they both had assignments. Surely they need not cross paths?
But she did not believe in coincidences. Lady Georgiana and Miss Diamond were friends. What were the chances that Shadow’s investigation and hers were two sides of the same coin?
This case had too many links to the past. Not just the doomed affair between her and Shadow. Shadow did not know the dissolute Earl of Selby was related by marriage to her sister. Nor that she had guessed his relationship with the Duke and Duchess of Haverford, whose younger son was a suspect, and whose older son was Tolliver’s informant. Prue had her own reasons for being wary of the duchess, but nonetheless took the occasional commission from her, and she had once known the Haverford’s older son, Lord Aldridge—had known him very well indeed.