He was almost to the top, his fingers reaching out to the ledge when he heard the crack of a pistol being fired below. He didn’t have time to pivot, to look, when the gun fired again and he felt a searing pain in his leg.
His fingers slipped and he toppled backward. He was falling, falling, and then the ground was there, hard and unforgiving beneath his back. His head bounced off something and the world began to swim, his ears ringing as he struggled to sit up despite the pain that seared through his entire body.
“Oakford,” he grunted, rolling slightly.
The surgeon was on the ground behind him, splayed out and still. Dead, Lucas realized through his fog. The first shot. It had struck Oakford. He rolled to his front and was unable to keep from crying out in pain as he belly-crawled toward his friend. A man he’d known since his first days in the War Department. A man who’d saved his life more than once.
He wasn’t more than a foot from Oakford when there was a third shot that rang out from behind him. He felt the bullet slice through him and collapsed against the ground. The world was spinning, becoming black. There were voices around him now. He recognized they were the voices of the men who had attacked them. Killed him. He could handle that.
But that they’d killed Oakford made his last moments pure agony.
“Why—” one voice said, slow and like it was coming through a deep ocean.
“You—no—bastard,” the other voice replied, just as unrecognizable. Lucas lifted his head in one last attempt to see what supposed friend had betrayed them all, but the world spun as he did so and then went entirely dark. The last things he experienced were loud pops and then nothing.
Chapter One
Fall 1811
Diana Oakford stood at the low table in her kitchen, binding bundles of plants with twine. She hummed as she did so, keeping a rhythm that made the work go by steadily. She liked the practice, actually. It cleared her mind, doing this repetitive thing.
It kept her from thinking too much about painful subjects that were best left unpondered. Subjects that would likely drop her to her knees if she allowed them to haunt her. She pushed even the hint of them aside now as she worked and refocused herself on the task at hand.
She became so lost in the act that she jumped when there was a light knock at the door she’d left open behind her.
She pivoted and gasped as she found that her visitor was none other than the Earl of Stalwood. Her hands shook as she set her herbs down and stared at him. How well she knew him and how little at the same time. The man had been an old friend of her father and had come in and out of their home for as long as she could remember. But he was also the spymaster for the War Department, as secretive as he could be kind. A man who had taken her father away on more than one occasion until one horrible day when she’d been told he would never return again.
She hadn’t seen Stalwood since the private memorial service for her father in London more than six months before. Seeing him now brought back a rush of painful emotions that she fought to rein in before she spoke.
“My lord,” she managed to squeak out as she moved toward him. “I-I did not expect you.”
He inclined his head. “Perhaps I should have sent word of my impending arrival,” he said. “To be honest, I feared you would not receive me if you knew my intentions. I feared a great many other things, as well.”
She wrinkled her brow at his cryptic remark and then motioned him into her kitchen. “I would not turn a friend of my father away. Please, do come in. I’m afraid I can only offer you a seat at my kitchen table, for I do not have the fires lit in the parlor.”
“That will be more than enough,” he reassured her as he entered the room and took a seat at the table where she’d been working. She hustled to move the bound piles of herbs aside and he smiled up at her. “You are like him.”
She hesitated as she turned away. “Mmmm. Not exactly like,” she said. “May I get you some tea?”
“Yes,” he said, and was silent for a few moments as she stirred the fire and swung the heavy pot of water over the flame. She felt his eyes on her, though. Felt him watching her. Her stomach coiled in anticipation of whatever he would say next. “I need your help, Diana.”
She froze in her place, staring into the dancing flames for a long moment before she faced him at last. His expression was impassive and unreadable. So like her father. Spies were like that. She had always hated not knowing what was in Papa’s heart. Not being able to see if he shared her pain when there was loss or damage in their lives.
It had always made her feel so very alone.
“My help,” she repeated softly, unable to keep the tremble from her voice.
He nodded slowly. “Yes. We have an injured spy. Badly hurt in the field some time ago. We’ve been fighting as hard as we can, but he has not healed as fully as we’d like. We need a better healer.”
“You have not yet found a replacement for my father as surgeon?” she asked, folding her arms though that wasn’t any kind of barrier to what this man’s words inspired in her.
Stalwood’s expression flickered, and for half a second she saw all his grief. “No,” he said, emotions gone again. “There will never be any replacing him, I fear. The men who trained under him are good, of course, but they are only shadows of him. I cannot reach out to anyone outside our circles for fear they would be put in danger by our secrets. Or would not understand the delicacies of working with spies.”
She lifted her chin. “And you think I do?”
“I know you do.”
She flinched and turned back to the fire. She wrapped a cloth around the heavy kettle and poured it out into the more delicate teapot slowly.
