“What’s Lord Everly’s roof like?” Emma asked. “Nice and quiet, I imagine.”
“Not as quiet as you’d think. Not as private, either.” Sophia peeled her black tunic over her head. “As it happens, Lord Everly’s neighbor saw me up there and chased me from one end of Londonto the other.”
The other girls looked at each other, then back at Sophia. “Chasedyou?” Emma asked. “No one ever chases you. Not for long, anyway. Is Lord Everly’s neighbor a racehorse?”
“No, he’s a Bow Street Runner.” Sophia hesitated. “He’s, er…he’s Tristan Stratford.”
Two mouths dropped open at once.
“The Ghost of Bow Street?” Emma breathed. “Lord Everly’s neighbor is the Ghostof Bow Street?”
Sophia sighed. “Unfortunately, yes. If I’d known, I never would have climbed onto Everly’s roof in the first place.”
“Who in the world is the Ghost of Bow Street?” Cecilia looked from Emma to Sophia with a puzzled frown. “I’ve neverheard of him.”
“Only you would ask that question, Cecilia.” Georgiana leaned over and grabbed a gossip sheet from the table beside the bed and handedit to Cecilia.
“I don’t care a whit for the gossip. It’s a waste of…” Cecilia’s voice fell away, the rest of her lecture left unsaid as she stared at the drawing in front of her. “That’sthe Ghost of Bow Street? My goodness.”
Emma took the paper from Cecilia and stuck it under Sophia’s nose. “That’s him? That’s the man who chased you?”
Sophia glanced down at the page. Yes, it was him, all right. The drawing hadn’t properly captured the slash of his cheekbones, the sternness of his lips, the severe, aristocratic elegance of his face, but there was nomistakinghim.
For better or worse, he wasn’t the sort of man one forgot. “Yes, that’s him.”
Emma gave her the slightly crooked smile that made every man she came across her devoted slave. “I would have lethim catch me.”
Sophia thought of his cool gray eyes and the pressure of his hand against her mouth, and a shiver tickled down her spine. “No, I don’t think you would have. Not if you’d seen him for yourself. But never mind Lord Gray. Come, Cecilia. I want to hear aboutthe banditti.”
Cecilia opened the book and read to the end of the first chapter, then she turned down the lamp and they tucked themselves into their beds. Her friends were soon asleep, but Sophia lay awake for a long time, listening to the soft sounds of peaceful slumber around her.
Ghosts and headless corpses, swooning virgins andbloody daggers…
A man lying in the dirt in St. Clement Dane’s churchyard, his life’s blood gushing from his slit throat, and Jeremy, an innocent man—no, a boy, really—taken up for the crime, and facing a ghastly death at theend of a noose.
Do you suppose youcan outrun me?
Sophia tugged the coverlet tighter around her shoulders, but she couldn’t suppress a shudder at the memory of those huge hands gripping the wrought iron spikes, the pale scars on his knuckles, the icy challenge inhis gray eyes.
I’d be disappointed indeed if you didn’t leadme on a chase.
She rolled over onto her side and squeezed her eyes closed, but sleep eluded her until at last she threw the coverlet back and creptto the window.
The rain had returned. The street below was damp, but aside from the muted patter of the drops on the pavement, all was silent and still. Sophia stood there for a long time, staring into the darkness before drawing the drapes across the window with a determined tug. She returned to her bed, and this time when she closed her eyes, they remained closed.
She was no swooning virgin, and she wasn’t afraid of ghosts.
Chapter Four
That night, Tristan dreamedof graveyards.
It began quietly, as dreams often do—quietly enough the dreamer is deceived into thinking he’s found a warm, safe cocoon, just before he’s hurled into a nightmare.
In the dream, he was alone in a graveyard, wandering among the headstones under the watchful gaze of a pair of sightless stone angels. Their wings were spread wide, the feathery tips joined over the arched doorway to a white marble crypt gleaming dully inthe moonlight.
He’d come to the graveyard to fetch someone, to save her from some terrible but unknown fate, but each time he drew close enough to catch a strand of her long dark hair, she melted into the fog hanging low over the headstones. He might have wandered from one headstone to the next for an eternity, chasing that cool, transparent mist if he hadn’t stumbled and fallen to his knees.
He’d trippedover something—
