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At the end of the lecture, Ned Luxborough led the young gentlemen to join Anne and Camille in a laughing group, except for John Jowers. He stopped as Octavia and Harriet prepared to exit their row.

“Brilliant lecture, Miss Davenham. Did you like it?” he asked.

Octavia, her head held unnaturally high, said, “Hardly.”

“Well, perhaps you’ll like the next one better.” Mr. Jowers bowed and joined his friends.

“The next one?” Octavia looked at Harriet.

“There will be six,” Harriet said firmly. “All attended by young gentlemen.”

“Oh.” Octavia straightened her shoulders. “Then I must attend.”

“Perhaps you would prefer dancing. If your brother can spare you, would you like to join the Luxboroughs at a gathering tonight?”

“Dancing? Oh yes.” The girl cast a wistful glance at Anne and Camille and their friends.

“The guests will be closer in age to your ideal than your brother’s friends.”

“It’s sad, isn’t it?” Octavia said, as they descended the stairs. “I suppose Charles was quite handsome in his day.”

“His day?”

“When he was one and twenty and came into his title, I think there were ladies then who wanted to marry him. But now that he’s one and thirty, I don’t suppose he will ever marry.”

Harriet choked back a laugh. Octavia’s notion that her brother, surely one of the most eligible bachelors in London, had entered his dotage explained a lot. The girl was unlikely to confide in a brother she regarded as past hope of marrying.

They reached the street, and Harriet was beginning to wonder where Perry had got to and how she was to convey her guest home when Octavia said, “Look, there’s Charles.”

Harriet followed Octavia’s gaze down Albemarle Street to a building she rarely considered. It was near enough to the Royal Institution that she’d passed it often. She had hardly given it much thought other than to sympathize with whoever was wishing for its completion. It was a neighborhood eyesore in a perpetual state of renovation with scaffolding and flapping canvas sheets across a portico that jutted out into the walkway. She just caught sight of Wynford as he ducked under the canvas.

Then Perry was there. “Sorry to desert you so long,” he said. With his perpetually youthful face he had the look of a guilty schoolboy. “Needed Faraday’s help.”

“Perry,” said Octavia. “What is Charles doing in that derelict old building?”

Perry glanced at the building Octavia indicated and shrugged his shoulders. “It’s some sort of club or other. I believe your brother is one of the...investors, trying to get the place going. How was the lecture?”

Harriet thought Wynford an unlikely investor in a club, but Perry had turned Octavia’s thoughts. She answered with a surprising grasp of what they had heard and talked unaffectedly to Perry while they waited for their carriage. Harriet took note of the girl’s natural, unconstrained manner with an old friend whom she did not regard as a potential husband, so different from her stilted conversation with John Jowers.

* * * *

The Marchioness de Tonnelier was not a woman to be overlooked in a crowd. The particular crowd in which Charles found her had assembled in the Duchess of Huntington’s long gallery for the unveiling of a new painting the duke had acquired.

More handsome than beautiful, with smoky dark eyes, red lips, and no attempt to disguise those imperfections of hair and face that mark a sexually confident woman, the marchioness had a distinctly French air about her. Nothing was wrong with her figure in a gown of rich ruby silk that bared her white shoulders. The one unanticipated aspect of her appearance was her size. The top of her head below the black plumes of her satin toque just reached the stickpin in his cravat. The contrast between the childlike body and cynical face was striking. Charles guessed her to be a few years older than his own thirty-one years.

Apparently, a spy did not need to blend in or seek the shadows. The boldness of her appearance, much as it repelled Charles, seemed calculated to draw men to her side. At such a gathering, many of the available men had ties to the government. He watched to see which man appeared to be her target.

As he stood contemplating his opening move in the game to unmask her, Perry strolled his way, a glass of wine in hand.

“Hello, you look...” Perry glanced at Charles’s striped green-and-gold waistcoat. “Vivid.”

“If I fail to expose the marchioness, I think I should ask Astley for a job in his circus.”

Perry nodded. “Should do the trick then. The marchioness will never suspect you of deep intellectual powers.”

“If she’s willing to talk to me at all in this getup. Did you find out anything more about her connections to my family?”

Perry shook his head. “Faraday suggested a chemical test of the paper and ink to see how old they are.”