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“What—do you mean you were sacked?”

She smiled, her dimples showing. “One tantrum about the danger here in London, the threat of poison in every mouthful, and he could not wait for me to be gone. For a man so fretful of his own health, he cares nothing at all for the welfare of his servants.” Harry started laughing. “I did not receive a reference, of course,” Angelique added with a dramatic sigh. “What a pity.”

“You’ll never be a nurse again.”

Angelique pulled a face. “I pray that is so. It is a most disgusting employment, tending another’s body.”

Still chuckling, Harry surveyed the room. The house had become disorderly, with people moving through it at all hours of the day, changing clothes in a rush, occasionally catching some sleep or a bite to eat. None of them spent much time straightening up, not even Lisette. Angelique’s bedchamber looked as if a theater wardrobe had exploded, with wigs lined up on the dressing table beside the cosmetics and somber nurse’s attire piled alongside revealing courtesan’s clothing on every chair. “Bit of a mess we’re leaving here.”

She shrugged it off. “I am not paid to clean.”

“No, of course not.” He shifted his weight. “So Brandon will leave his post, too?”

“I suppose. He has not enjoyed being sent out on the carriage.” She held up a particularly plain dress and scowled at it. “I should burn this one,” she muttered, then tossed it into the trunk anyway. “But you—apparently you have taken a liking to your job. Shall you ask Stafford if he has need of more clerks?”

He grinned half-heartedly at her teasing. “Not at all. Crane is leaving within the fortnight for his country estate. It seems less noteworthy if I quit his service then.”

Angelique shrugged again. “As you like. Crane keeps you busy, yes?”

“Usually. Oddly, today he was ill and sent me home. And I am not sorry,” he said, seeing her mouth curve. “I’ve never been so bored in all my life as when copying his letters.”

She laughed. “Bored is sometimes the best one can hope for. You could be fondled and touched by drunken men on a nightly basis.” She held up one of her more garish wigs in illustration.

“I might prefer it to fruit trees and bulb propagation and rose bed care. I’ve learned far more than I ever cared to know about gardening in these last weeks. Horticulturalists are lunatics, I tell you. Even today, so ill he couldn’t even upbraid me for being a quarter hour late, Crane dictated pages and pages of instruction for his head gardener. Prune the Syringa reticulata and crop the Lilium candidum... It never ends.” Harry shook his head.

“Crop the lilies?” Angelique said scornfully as she wrapped a bonnet before packing it in a hatbox. “The English, they think they are such gardeners. Crop the lilies now, just as they enter their prime, before they bloom? What a waste. If they are cut too close, they will not grow back.”

Harry lifted his head. “He said to crop it close and low.”

“He must not wish lilies in his garden. It will surely kill them.”

Harry stared at her, his mind racing. Cutting the lilies... before they enter their prime... it will surely kill them...

Lilies are the badge of the Dunmores... echoed Mariah’s voice in his head. The lily for purity... the lion for England... Edward the third was a distant cousin... A comment here, a fact there. In an eerie procession, unrelated bits of information marched into order and spelled out the answer he’d been searching for all along.

Stafford had been right—and very, very wrong.

“Bloody Christ,” he said numbly.

Angelique looked up from her packing. “What?”

“Go.” He crossed the room. “Go to Stafford, now. Tell him it’s Crane... Crane’s the one directing the radicals—and Doncaster is their target.”

She looked at him with alert, unblinking eyes. Harry seized her arm and shoved her ahead of him toward the door. “Hail a carriage—send Ian—tell him to bring a dozen men, Coldstream Guards, to Doncaster House⁠—”

Angelique stopped, looking at him as if he’d gone mad. “Harry, what are you saying? It cannot be! They have caught the villain—the cook⁠—”

“It is. I don’t know if the cook is part of it or not, but this—this is the danger now.”

“How do you know?” she demanded, stubbornly blocking the doorway.

Harry swore, running both hands through his hair. “The lilies are Doncaster—they’re on his arms. Doncaster would be the radicals’ worst nightmare: he’s a shrewd politician who’s friendly with both Whigs and Tories, he’s descended from royalty himself, and he’s dedicated to supporting the king while still sympathizing with the people. The radicals want the government—the whole bloody monarchy!—to fall, and if Doncaster forms a new government, it won’t.”

“So? Why would Crane care? He is also from an old family.”

“He’s eighty years old,” said Harry bluntly. “His time is past. He thinks Liverpool is an ass and Castlereagh is a jumped-up country lawyer. When I said the death of Liverpool would throw the country into turmoil, he said it wouldn’t be anything England couldn’t survive. I think he wants to see a revolution, to prune away the deadwood so something new can grow.”

“You must tell Stafford,” she said, her voice low and her eyes glittering. “He set us to protect this man you accuse.”