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He sang another phrase to be sure. The notes rose into the warm night with the same ease they always had. No rasp appeared. No divine judgment cracked through the melody. His voice remained clear enough to embarrass him.

He kept singing anyway. Perhaps corruption required patience. The melody moved through his chest, and he let the song spend itself one phrase at a time. That, at least, he understood. Use the thing until nothing remained. Empty the glass. Finish the operation.

He was halfway through another verse when leaves rustled behind the trellis. The lake reflected a woman between the roses, white skirts where no white skirts had been a moment before, a dark head moving cautiously behind him.

Louise.

His mouth continued shaping the song. He could have stopped. He should have stopped. Singing had always been private, a leak in defenses he otherwise maintained with professional care. Yet he heard her settle and chose the next phrase anyway.

Then Louise sighed.

Rodrick closed his eyes. "If you intend to pursue espionage as a career, Princess, white is an unfortunate choice for clandestine work."

The bushes became very still.

He kept his gaze on the lake. "You will also have to learn to control your breathing. That sigh could have betrayed Wellington at Salamanca."

Louise emerged from behind the roses. "I wasn't spying on you."

"No?" Rodrick rested one shoulder against the trellis. "How disappointing. I had hoped my methods were finally proving contagious."

Her hair had come loose over her shoulders, the moon had turned her gray eyes to silver, and the white calico made her look less like a woman out for an evening walk than some unfortunate offering abandoned at the altar of a pagan god.

"I went walking." She glanced beyond him toward the dark sweep of fields. "I have never been this far into the countryside before. I heard you singing and came toward it."

He nodded. "You could not resist investigating how a duplicitous spy acquired the voice of an angel. Disturbing, isn't it? One naturally expects moral corruption to affect the lungs."

Her brows drew together. "You are making no sense."

"Quite possibly. The theology may be beyond the comprehension of a Corsican princess." He turned his eyes back to the water. "You were spared a Jesuit tutor filling your childhood with elaborate theories about eternal consequences. Another advantage of a Bonaparte education."

"I did not have any tutor." Louise came to the trellis and leaned against it beside him, close enough that her fair skin brushed the black cloth of his coat, and just like that another part of Rodrick promptly stirred in response. At this rate, the moon would have rather more than his singing to answer for.

He considered telling her this was another breach of her prohibition on touching. Perhaps he ought to establish a rule of his own—no interrupting a man's attempt at self-condemnation while standing within arm's reach in white calico and looking as though moonlight had been invented for the purpose.

"Hélène and the others and I learned English by reading Shakespeare. Does that count?"

"What I would have given for Shakespeare as my moral instructor. Murder your king, speak beautifully afterward, blame a prophecy. Far more practical." He caught himself before the thought traveled farther. "Never mind. You have heard the performance. You may now return to the house and report that the villain possesses unexpected accomplishments."

"If a tutor filled my head with nonsense, I would have punched him."

He laughed. Poor Father Matthieu. Forty years of Jesuit education reduced at last to a problem Louise Bonnechoix proposed to solve with her fist.

"If only theology yielded so readily to violence," he said. "Matthieu believed a man's deeds marked his soul. Continue doing ugly things long enough, and eventually whatever came from inside would become ugly too."

Water touched the bank with a faint, repetitive sound. Insects worried at the roses, and somewhere across the lake a night bird called. Why had he not kept his mouth shut?

She touched his hair, and he could no longer breathe.

His head turned sharply. "If you are searching for horns, I should warn you they retract in moonlight."

"You have a beautiful voice."

Her fingers left his hair, and his scalp protested. Since when had it turned sentient?

"I was enjoying it until you started talking." She looked past him toward the lake and the fields beyond it. "I've never seen so much sky before. In London there is always something around you. A wall. A roof. Another street. Here it just keeps going. It made me feel very small. Then I heard you." Her shoulder touched his again. "It made the night feel less large."

His stomach contracted. He had asked the night for condemnation and received, instead, Louise telling him that his voice had made her less afraid.