Page 1

Chapter 1

“Are we finished?” Charles Davenham asked, one dark brow raised. He stood in black evening wear before a cheval glass in his dressing room, enduring the satisfied scrutiny of his friend Peregrine Pilkington and a severe, brow-knitting frown from Oxley, his valet. Perry had added an alarming number of items to Charles’s ensemble and now considered the effect of an emerald stickpin in the flowing folds of Charles’s neckcloth.

The candles flickered in a slight draft, and Charles recalled the open window over the desk in his bedroom. Outside, the wind was rising for the first gale of the season. It would pour soon, and he preferred to get to his quarry before the skies opened.

“Perry, you are enjoying this too much.” It was Perry who had come up with the idea of the extravagant waistcoats as a disguise.

“Am I?” Perry asked.

A row of fobs and seals dangled from the rather exotic persimmon-colored waistcoat Perry had insisted Charles wear. “I’ll jingle like sleigh bells when I walk.”

“The point is, dear boy, to distract the marchioness with your finery—rings and farthingales and things.” Perry circled a fine, thin hand in the air. “Besides, it’s your fault we have to rely on sparklers. You’ve too much muscle on you. Can’t disguise your shoulders.”

“I asked you here for your help with the woman’s family tree. You’re the expert in aunts, uncles, and third cousins once-removed. I’m counting on you to spot any flaw in the lady’s credentials.”

Oxley, who had voiced no disapproval of Charles’s sartorial choices for nearly a decade, shuddered and turned away from the waistcoat with a tray of jewels Perry had earlier rejected.

Perry stopped him. “Rings. We need rings.”

With a sigh, Oxley held out the tray.

Charles groaned.

“You think the marchioness is the one the Foreign Office is after?” Perry asked, holding out two rings—a cabochon ruby and a square-cut diamond.

“Who else?” Charles slid the rings onto the fingers of his right hand. They had belonged to his father, but Charles had worn only the signet he inherited with the title, Viscount Wynford.

“Are you going to expose her at midnight? The way a masquerade ball ends when the hostess invites everyone to tear away his disguise?”

Charles shook his head. “I can’t act without proof. Look at her family tree again, Perry, and tell me whether there’s any chance the woman is who she claims to be.”

Perry picked up a piece of yellowing parchment from a side table. “The thing is in bleeding French. How am I supposed to tell one frog from another?”

“Tell me where the likely forgery is, and we’ll investigate further.” By we, Charles meant his fellow analysts working for the Foreign Office.

Charles turned from the mirror to look over Perry’s shoulder at the document, a page torn from a Bible. It had just come into his hands, and he was eager to see whether it shed any light on the marchioness’s past. She might be who she claimed to be, a distant cousin of Charles’s late mother, now restored to her lands and titles in post-Napoleonic France. Or she could be, as he and two Foreign Office colleagues suspected, a Russian spy borrowing a lapsed identity to position herself in London society to receive and pass along the government’s secrets to the Russian agent Zovsky in Paris.

Ever since Napoleon’s fall, Russia and England had been circling like two pugilists in a ring, measuring each other’s reach and power. Each country had agents in the other’s capital. Russian agents, trained in deception, trolled the political and social waters of London in search of weak, indebted, or unprincipled members of fashionable society who could be persuaded to offer secrets to the Russians for a price.

In the spring, British counteragents had made a small crack in a ring of spies that had been operating in London for some time. With the arrest of the popular émigré Count Malikov and the death of his chief courier, Sir Geoffrey Radcliffe, they had slowed the flow of information to the Russians. No one in the Foreign Office, however, doubted the Russians would try again, and when Malikov died in prison under suspicious circumstances, and the French marchioness appeared claiming to be related to Charles, it had been natural for Lord Chartwell of the Foreign Office to approach Charles for the mission of exposing her. It would be his first mission in the field.

The timing was not ideal, as Charles knew he could count on Perry to remind him.

“So if you don’t expose the marchioness tonight, you won’t go home for Christmas,” Perry said, holding the document closer to the light.

“Can’t,” Charles insisted. “Not when we’re so close to cracking the spy ring.”

Perry frowned and lowered the parchment back to the table. The writing was small, the ink faint, and the document much amended with dates added for marriages and deaths.

Charles could see Perry’s eyes in rapid motion, a sign his friend’s nimble brain was at work. In Charles’s opinion, Perry’s parents had a great deal to answer for in the upbringing of their only son, starting with his christening. One did not name a boy Peregrine Pilkington and then send him at the tender age of eight to an English public school, no matter how ancient his pedigree or how fat his papa’s wallet. A brilliant student, Perry had refused to fight any of the aristocratic ruffians who had mocked him mercilessly. It was Charles who had developed a punishing left hook in the service of his friend’s honor. It was what he did. He protected. He couldn’t help it. He’d been protecting Octavia ever since he’d cradled her in his arms under a reeking pile of fishing nets on the French beach where rogue soldiers of the great nation had murdered their mother.

Charles’s sister, Octavia, now twenty, was the one reason he might be persuaded to postpone his pursuit of the marchioness. He never missed Christmas at home with his sister. It was a pact he’d made long ago and never broken. He and Octavia even had a name for their particular form of the annual holiday. In an unguarded moment, he’d confided as much to Perry.

Charles wasn’t sure exactly why Christmas always seemed so flat at Wynford Hall, but it did. Perhaps it was the vicar with his objection to merriment of any kind and specifically to mistletoe, which he tried to ban from all the neighboring houses as a druidical practice inconsistent with proper English worship.

Charles thought the absence this year of an elder brother might make Christmas easier for Octavia to endure. The family’s neighbors, the Greshams, whose son Horace had been a third party to many of Charles’s and Octavia’s Yuletide adventures, had extended their usual invitation to the season’s festivities.

Perry straightened and tapped a line of the marchioness’s family tree. “If there’s a weakness in the lady’s pedigree, I’d say it’s right here. According to this tree, your marchioness shares a great-grandparent with you. If the fourth earl’s daughter, who married into the Delatour family, had a son who lost his life in the Terror, then your marchioness is your second cousin. See this line here.”