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"Come back to me, Isabelle. If we mean to get into the Richmonds' ball, I need more than this magnificent sulk. Brussels is presently bribing, flattering, and manufacturing kinship with the Lennoxes. One dowager has already offered her firstborn. Give me a smile before someone more desperate earns our invitations."

Louise managed something that showed teeth.

"Better. Though perhaps less so if you don't intend to bite the first person who speaks to you. Then again, who knows? Biting might do the trick. People are doing remarkably strange things to get into that ballroom."

"Are they willing to kill for them?" she blurted.

He stopped her. "What has Talleyrand told you to do at the ball, Louise?"

Louise's pulse stumbled. His gaze searched her face, and now, as ever, it was as if the stage lamps had found her, animating her and pushing the numbness back into the shadows. The lamps would go out, wouldn't they? Once he discovered what she had to do? Suspicion she could bear. Mockery she understood. Even contempt would give her something to fight. But she had begun to depend upon the reluctant flare of admiration in his eyes, upon the sense that when Rodrick looked at her, the lamps rose. What would she do if he learned the truth and the light went out?

A champagne glass was suddenly in her hand. Louise did not remember taking it from the tray. Bubbles rose through the pale liquid and burst at the surface.

She watched three disappear. "I need to be there, Rodrick. And so do you."

Her husband nodded, cold and understanding, then led her to the gaming table.

Lord Trent sprang to his feet, the nimble movement at odds with his corpulence, and shook Rodrick's hand. Lady Trent flicked cards like a bored conjurer, letting them whisper against one another. Lamplight reflected off her short-cut military jacket, the gold epaulets glinting like miniature suns perched on her shoulders. She lifted her eyes, and then, almost lazily, her smile widened.

Louise had worn a military coat. She had worn it on a road in France, carried her father's flag in it, fought in it, and stood in Charleroi while de Brissac told her Napoleon himself would pin the Légion d'honneur upon her breast.

Now she wore silk. What sort of garment was more dangerous?

"The cards are dealt," Lord Trent announced. "Shall we say a pound a point to start? I find it focuses the mind."

Once seated, Louise lowered her eyes to her hand. Red. Too much red. Jack of hearts. Queen of spades. Another heart. They said women of Napoleon's court amused themselves by reading fortunes in cards. If that was true, what did her cards mean? The symbols softened at their edges. She blinked, but the red continued bleeding into the white until hearts and diamonds became shapeless stains beneath the candlelight.

Across the table, Rodrick spoke to Lord Trent about horses. The conformation of the cavalry steed compared with the hunter. Lord Trent's face opened like a window in spring.

Rodrick sounded knowledgeable without appearing earnest, amused without surrendering control. She knew the pauses now. Knew the slight lowering of his voice before he said something designed to make another person believe they had reached the conclusion themselves.

She wanted him to turn that voice toward her. She wanted his knee to touch hers beneath the table by accident. Louise drank again.

"Have you heard?" Lady Trent said, setting down her cards. "Napoleon's daughter is in Brussels. A ballerina from Covent Garden, can you imagine? They say she rode with the chasseurs. Disguised as a young officer."

Blood came rushing to her face, and she could not breathe. Her chair scraped against the floor. The champagne rolled in her stomach. She caught the edge of the table until the room steadied.

"I beg your pardon," she said. "I require a moment."

The retiring room stood at the end of a long passage, its door ajar. She slipped inside and crossed directly to the mirror above the marble basin.

The light revealed everything. The flush along her cheekbones, the faint sheen of perspiration at her temples. Her pulse beat erratically at the base of her throat, as though she had just stepped off the stage after a demanding variation.

She drew in a breath. This was war. Tomorrow she would cross another threshold, one that did not permit hesitation. She would kill a man for France. Soldiers had done as much every day since the Revolution.

Not like this. In cold blood. Dishonorable.

Her jaw set. It did not matter how it was done. The outcome mattered. The purpose. She would serve her father. She would prove her loyalty.

And then she would be free of it.

Free of England. Free of pretense. Free of her spy.

You will not see him again.

It was as if a dagger had pierced beneath her ribs, and she cried out.

Her hand came up and struck her own cheek, the sharp contact cutting through the swell in her throat.