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And after she set it on the corner of the table where it could not be missed, she pulled the bell.

Her maid appeared within two minutes.

“My coat,” Juliet said. “And be quick about it.”

The clock on the mantelpiece read a quarter past two.

The maid hesitated. “Are you stepping out, Your Grace? His Grace had said you should wait inside.”

Juliet ground her teeth together. She had also wanted to stay here, but now she knew Eloise wasn’t coming back…at least, not until she went to find Penhurst herself.

“It is all right,” Juliet said. “I will not be gone long.”

The maid still did not move.

Juliet crossed to the corner of the table and picked up the sealed envelope. She held it out. The girl’s eyes moved between Juliet’s face and the envelope, like someone doing rapid, uncertain arithmetic.

“I have received information that may help us find Eloise,” Juliet explained, keeping her voice level and unhurried, giving it nothing it could feed off. “I need to follow it. If I bring anyone with me before I am certain, and I am wrong, I may put the child in more danger. Do you understand what I am telling you?”

The maid swallowed. “I think so, Your Grace.”

“Good.” Juliet set the envelope in the girl’s hands and waited for the fingers to close around it. “If I am not back in one hour, and I do mean an hour, not an hour and five minutes, not an hour and ten, you will bring this envelope to His Grace himself, and you must put it into the duke’s hands, in person.”

The maid looked down at the envelope. She looked up. She pressed her lips together. “Yes, Your Grace,” she said.

Juliet buttoned her coat to the throat, pulled on her gloves, and left without looking back.

She did not take the main staircase. She went through the servants’ passage on the ground floor, past the kitchen where Cook had her back to the room, and out through the side door into the yard.

Rain met her immediately, cold and hard against the brim of her hat. She went through the mews gate, turned east toward the road, and had a hackney in under three minutes.

She gave the driver the address. He looked down at her from his box with the measuring look of a man with views he had decided not to voice.

“Quickly, please,” she said, and he put the horse forward.

London changed around the carriage as they moved away from Grosvenor Square. The wide white-fronted streets of Mayfair dropped away; the pavements narrowed; the buildings pressed closer together until they ran in continuous walls on either side.

A coal-seller at the mouth of an alley. A woman with her head down in the rain.

Boys running through the street as though it were dry and sunny, because boys always did.

Juliet kept her hands flat on her knees and her eyes on the glass, and she counted the minutes against the clock she had left behind in the library.

A quarter past two. She had less than one hour.

The carriage stopped at the mouth of a lane too narrow to continue. She paid the driver and got out into rain that had no interest in her circumstances.

Number seven had a green door, the paint blistered in one long strip down the right side, and the brass knocker gone brown with neglect. She knocked twice and waited. The street was quiet, the buildings close, and a gray cat watched her from the opposite sill with the flat attention of a creature that had seen considerably worse.

A man opened the door. He was broad across the chest, and his eyes moved over her from head to hem with a watchfulness that had nothing of a footman about it. He stood aside without asking her name.

The hallway was narrow and poorly lit: one unlit sconce, a side table holding a vase with no flowers. A smell of coal smoke and something damper underneath. The man led her to the door at the end of the hall, knocked once with the back of his hand, and pushed it open.

“Juliet,” he said, and stepped clear.

Penhurst was at the fireplace. He turned when she came through the door, and his face settled into an easy warmth, as though she had arrived at the expected hour for a call he had been anticipating with real pleasure.

“Your Grace.” He inclined his head and extended one hand toward the armchair nearest the fire. “Come in. Please, sit.”