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“She refuses to accept that anything is wrong other than her foot.”

“But your colleague believes otherwise?”

“She didn’t tell you? Pridmore told her she was seriously ill.” Newberry came away from the mantel and sat opposite her. She hoped it was a sign that he was letting go of his anger. “He suspects, as I do, that she has the shaking palsy. A fellow named Parkinson identified it in a paper about twenty years ago. There is a better understanding of the disease now, of course, but no cure.”

Viv’s spirits sank under the dreadful news. For the Traveling Viscountess to be confined, to be unable to move freely in the world was a terrible fate. “Is there nothing that can be done for her?”

“The French have developed ways of relieving some of the symptoms.”

“Like carriage rides?” Viv poured a cup of tea and offered it to him.

He took the tea. “Did she give you her opinion of that idea?”

Viv nodded. “What is the thought behind the rides?”

“Apparently, vibrations can calm the tremors, even for several days. But the disease is progressive and ugly. Over time it takes away the voluntary control of muscles. There’s much more to be studied, including the effects on the brain.”

Viv took up the teapot, seeing in her mind the spilled chocolate on her ladyship’s dressing gown. “What does she need?”

He put down his cup and answered, his gaze cold and hard. “She needs a great deal of care and compassion and a companion who is present, not gadding about London with her betrothed, if indeed he is your betrothed.”

Viv put down the teapot. “You doubt him?”

“The only E. Larkin I can find in London is an Edmund not an Edward and he’s a married greengrocer in Islington. So, I doubt that your Mr. Larkin is the Duke of Wenlocke’s secretary or book dealer or whatever he claims to be. Whoever he is, what matters is that you’ve had entirely too much freedom to run about with him. I never thought I would side with the Strydes, but since that man arrived, you’ve neglected your duties shamefully. Perhaps you only took employment to find yourself a husband.”

Viv’s anger rose in response to his, but she did not attempt a defense to which he would not listen. He did not understand the writing fellowship that she and Lady Melforth had shared. He did not understand how they had laughed together and how telling stories and finding the right words had been a shared venture. He did not understand how finishing the book was a way of supporting Lady Melforth.

He rose again and returned to the mantel, leaning an elbow on it, staring down at her. In his angry countenance, she hardly recognized the ally she had relied on for months. “I’ve read the introduction to your so-called guide for ladies,” he said. “Apparently, you have no idea of the behavior proper to a lady or of the sphere in which a lady belongs.”

Viv wondered if he understood that he was condemning Lady Melforth as much as he was condemning Viv. It was time to end the conversation. She rose. “The manuscript of the book, written under her ladyship’s direction and with her full approval, goes to the publisher this afternoon. I am now free to attend fully to her ladyship’s other needs. If you have anything to add to her regimen for her comfort, it will be done.”

She turned and moved to the door, looking back only to say, “You’re wrong, you know. Whatever you have come to believe about me, I have met Mr. Larkin’s duke, and there is no doubt that they are bound together by the closest ties.”

By the time she reached her room, Viv shook with suppressed anger. Her world had gone mad. No one was who she thought they were. She had apparently mistaken everyone’s character, even Newberry’s. The doctor was not the friend she had assumed him to be. Lady Melforth was changing before Viv’s eyes perhaps because of her illness. Even Sarah had altered. And Lark remained the biggest mystery of all. She had defended him against Newberry’s attack, but she did not understand how both the rough, bearded man from the darker regions of London, and the lofty Duke of Wenlocke could claim a hold on him. One minute Lark was her easy gentleman companion, the next he was lost in contemplation of the Penitent Woman’s Hospital, which held some meaning for him.

She needed to settle her mind, and finish the last bit of work on the book. She had promised Lady Melforth not an hour earlier that she would get it done today. Now it seemed even more vital that their guide be published. She crossed the room to her desk, and stopped dead.

Her desk had been cleared. The manuscript, which Viv had arranged in neat piles, one for each chapter, and a pile each for the front and back matter of the book, was gone. Not even the chapter on the Green Park, to which she meant to add her notes, remained. There was a scrap of paper with a note in Sarah’s hand. DON’T WORRY. I’VE TAKEN IT ALL TO DODSLEY AS LADY MELFORTH WANTED.

*

Wenlocke gave some last order to his coachman and climbed into the carriage beside his wife. Whatever their plans for the evening had been, and Lark had not thought to ask, the duke and duchess had entered fully into the scheme of recreating Lark’s experience of losing his mother. Across the coach from Lark, the duchess made a shadowy female figure. For the memory experiment, she had subdued her radiant beauty, dressing somberly in an old gray gown, blue wool traveling cape, and a black bonnet that obscured her golden hair and pale face. She wore a pair of rings on her right hand.

“Ready?” Wenlocke asked, taking his seat beside his wife, and glancing at Lark.

Lark nodded, a mad hope surging in him that the memories would come at last. He would either go to Viv a gentleman or part from her a thief.

Wenlocke knocked on the roof to signal the coachman, and the carriage rolled into motion. The duchess lay her head against the duke’s shoulder in feigned sleep.

Lark, too, closed his eyes and leaned back against the squabs, letting conscious thought go. Against his closed lids, light flickered from gas lamps. His body rocked with the steady motion of the coach. Street sounds faded in and out of notice. His mind played with snatches of conversation from the long afternoon of talk about their early days together.

Lark had sold his shoes and coat and acquired a rusty knife before he met the gang of boys led by Wenlocke, who was then simply Boy, Robin’s name for him. In those first weeks in the streets, Lark had learned to say little to avoid being marked as soft, as prey, and above all to avoid being collared by bigger, rougher men. He had moved west through the city, seeking familiar streets, away from the docks where he had wakened alone. Wenlocke told him that on the first day he had noted both the quality of Lark’s remaining garment, a pair of wool trousers, and the smell of the docks that lingered in his hair and clothes. The gang had offered him food and showed him how they moved unnoticed on the rooftops of the rookery they called home. Lark had slept warm that night for the first time in weeks. He soon abandoned his search for his past life.

Now memories of those days swirled in Lark’s mind as the coach rolled on. Streets and turnings became indistinct, the well-mapped London of his waking searches became shifting shadows, shafts of light, and spells of darkness. He let his hands fall slack against his thighs, let his head sway to the motion of the coach, emptying his mind, becoming again a drowsy child safe in the company of his parents.

The journey lasted minutes or hours before the coach made a wide turn and slowed to a stop, the horses blowing slightly, harness jingling, leather creaking. Lark opened his eyes to dark figures in motion, low male voices, and the woman being half-lifted from the coach, her body listless. One of her boots caught against the doorframe. She made an incoherent murmur, and the men carrying her lifted her slightly to pass through the door. For an instant the figures blocked the open carriage door, plunging the interior in darkness. When they moved, light broke through, and Lark saw the hospital behind its iron railing.

Somewhere deep in his head a man’s voice spoke. “Don’t drop her, for God’s sake, Sneath.” Another voice replied. “Not this cargo, eh Cap’n. Worth ’er weight in gold she is.”