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“Oh, do you want it back, my lord?” She was plainly reluctant to part with her treasure.

“Tonight, Miranda.”

“Don’t encourage ‘er, yer lordship. She’s got ‘er work to do,” Kirby said sternly.

Hazelwood looked into a pair of sweetly imploring eyes and shook his head. “Miranda, pay close attention to the parts that will teach you to steer clear of charming rogues with bad intentions and not a groat to their names.”

“Don’t worry, about me, Lord Hazelwood. I’m not a flat.”

“See that you don’t turn into one when some silver-tongued idiot starts an ode to your eyes.”

“As if I would fall for poetical nonsense.”

“Good girl. And don’t forget the book is for a case.”

* * * *

After coffee and a brief debate about which should be the first of their errands, Hazelwood agreed to take Jane on a late-morning trip to the bank. There, in a private meeting with Violet, Jane turned over her father’s letters for safekeeping and arranged to send letters of her own through the bank. When she and Violet ended their conference, Violet reported that her grace, Lady Penelope Frayne, had invited them to a select dinner party.

Hazelwood once again drove the curricle. He claimed she had no need of her chaperone to visit her grandmother. He drove with careless confidence, never flinching as approaching drivers rushed into the shifting openings in the throng. A pewter sky pressed down on the chimney pots and slates, but no rain threatened. Instead, London had turned beastly cold with patches of slick black ice on the streets and people slipping as they passed, some wearing no more for warmth than hats and long wool scarves wrapped around their throats.

Jane had not remembered how many horses there were in London. Even English persons of low condition appeared to think nothing of hopping onto a horse’s back or whipping an animal drawing a laden cart. In the desert cities where her father traveled, it was a high crime, punishable by death, for an infidel to ride a horse, and though he disguised himself as a believer, her father never rode a horse in the East.

She clutched the edge of the high seat, and thought about the likelihood that they would be followed again after the invasion of her room the night before. She still wore the borrowed bonnet that impaired her vision. They passed close enough to persons on the flagstones for her to touch the rabbits dangling from a stick across a hawker’s shoulder or to snatch a ginger cake from the head-top tray of a man selling them. None of the passersby appeared to note or follow them.

She had lain awake thinking about the intruder and what he had wanted, and she’d concluded that he must want the names of her father’s hosts as he traveled on his secret journeys across Asia. If she possessed that information, it must be in code either in his letters or in the book he had given her through his bankers. His letters were now safe in Hammersley’s Bank, and she would guard the little book with her life.

The government believed her father’s last journey had taken him east from Halab and south along the River Oxus to his inevitable death in some hostile caliphate on the road to Afghanistan. But Jane believed he had traveled north to Tabriz and Baku and made his way across the great sea to the steppes and the road to Askabad in search of the Russian engineers laying plans for a railroad that would take them deep into the belly of Asia and allow them to take Merv. She pictured him along his route, stopping for the night with other travelers, sitting around a fire, drinking black tea with the old men, a lump of sugar between his teeth to sweeten the bitterness.

She felt that telling Lord Chartwell she believed her father was alive had been a mistake. Now an enemy wanted to know what Jane knew, and that meant whoever betrayed him still had access to Foreign Office information.

“Do you think anyone follows us today?” she asked Hazelwood as they passed through a narrow gate, leaving the Strand behind.

“If we’ve acquired a watcher, we probably won’t spot him until we reach your grandmother’s neighborhood, where he won’t have the crowds for cover. By the way, what is your grandmother’s ailment?”

“I don’t know, and you’re changing the subject.”

“She’s chosen her address well for a lady in ill health. Her neighbors on Conduit Street are London’s most fashionable doctors.”

“Fashionable doctors? Wouldn’t a genuinely ill person seek an effective doctor?”

“Not in London.” He turned another corner. “We’ll make only a brief call.”

“Are you opposed to maintaining close family relations?” she asked as they crossed a wide, open square in which every sort of vehicle and several flocks of animals mingled like the churning waters under a dam. The height of their vehicle made them visible above the crowd. She almost missed his answer as she turned to scan the sea of bobbing headgear around them.

“Not at all. I’m sure there are families in England in which warm and genuine affection prevails. I’m opposed to leaving horses standing long in cold weather.”

She studied his profile and noted the tightness of his jaw. “What did happen between you and your family? You might as well tell me. Someone will.”

“Let them,” he said. “Nothing’s more boring than a man sharing his grievances.”

She looked at him again. For a minute their eyes met, his that rare green like cool, shadowed grass. “I should think you’d like a chance to dwell on your faults.” It was almost the first thing she’d noticed about him, his capacity for self-mockery. She’d not met a man like that before.

He laughed. “A true leveler. You’re dangerous, Jane. You see right through me.”

They passed uphill to the north leaving the square for a narrower street. She turned back again, obliged by her bonnet to twist in the seat. “And, do you think, we might now be able to tell whether we’re being followed?”

“More likely we’ll catch a common pickpocket. The girls are notorious.” He gave his full attention to the traffic.