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You should not be here! The words stuck in his throat. While worry and a sense of failure warred with the sheer, uplifting gladness in her presence, he watched her take in the prisoner. She didn’t look right. She was too lumpy around the middle and wore some bizarre shawl tucked into her—his—old breeches.

“You managed without me,” she remarked, and her apparent insouciance somehow lent him the added strength.

“Who the...?” began the prisoner.

“My wife,” Piers said. The other man’s jaw dropped, his eyes all but popping. “April, meet jailer number two. Number one is on the loose—with our money.”

“I know. I saw him. I thought he was Darcy. He isn’t. He’s Cauldwell.”

Chapter Eleven

“Cauldwell,” Piers repeated. The genial, humorous stranger dining with Haggs, impressed by his methods of turning around the stagnating Petteril lands. He had seemed so excited, and Piers, recognizing a fellow spirit, had been so glad to help him. He’d imagined it was the beginnings of a friendship.

At least it wasn’t Jeremy Gadsby.

Piers straightened his shoulders. There was no time for anything else. “And he’s gone home. Haggs must know where he lives. Come on, let’s get out of here so we don’t get in the way of the runners. I take it Stewart did win their co-operation?”

“Oh yes,” April said, taking his arm under the prisoner’s open-mouthed gaze.

“’Ere! What about me?” the prisoner whined, his voice rising in panic behind them. “Cut me loose, mate—I never harmed a hair on your head! My lord!”

They ignored him.

“I brought you trousers,” April said, indicating those drooping around her legs as they walked to the front door. “But you don’t seem to need them.”

“Sadly, neither pair really goes with the coat.”

She gave a choke that was only half-laughter and suddenly pressed her forehead hard into his arm.

Emotion closed up his throat. “April...”

But the weakness only lasted an instant before she released him and whipped something from her pocket. “I also brought you these, in case they were useful.”

They weren’t, of course. They were his old reading glasses, the ones he had worn as the dangerous clerk, and he could barely see where he was going through them. He put them on anyway, with a flourish. They could still rescue the plan, make it work. Or at least bring him some luck.

And then he was outdoors, breathing the somewhat fetid air, footsteps echoing in the eerily silent street. Side by side with April, his spirits revived by the second, just because he was free, and she was with him.

They must have looked a very bizarre pair. Neither of them cared. They were in too much of a hurry.

They hadn’t got very far up Saracen Street before they heard the sounds of a door being battered in behind them. The runners had come for jailer number two. They would find Petteril’s cravat, maybe his boots, his hat, his pantaloons, maybe even the missing quizzing glass. And the drugged beer, of course, if it hadn’t been knocked over in the fight...

“It’s not enough,” Piers said abruptly. “We have to get Cauldwell.”

“We will.”

He could not let her come. She must already have been away too long. She had to go home to the child, their son...

“What shall we call him?” he asked.

As always, she caught on to his intention, his mood. “Piers?”

“Too confusing. What about George, after little Georgie? And the king?”

“Or Charles after the Young Pretender.”

“If you want kings, why not a more exotic one? Montezuma? Rameses?”

“Charlemagne!” suggested April, who had been reading a book about him.