Lion’s Zoo

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Starting the story on WIP Wednesday

Here’s the start of The Darkness Within, my current WIP.

Max paused in front of the elegant townhouse. What did the Earl of Ruthford want? There was never any question about Max obeying the summons. Even an occasional and remote member of Lion’s Zoo like himself would never ignore a message from their former colonel.

Still, he didn’t want to be here. He’d seen Lion a number of times since returning to England, mostly here in London, but he was never comfortable in the man’s home. Years of training and experience meant he could walk the stately halls of the wealthy and wellborn without displaying his discomfort , but all the same, he’d not breathe easy until he was back in the shadows where he belonged.

Besides, he was retired. If Lion wanted him for his old skills, he would have to disappoint the man.

He set his jaw, and climbed the short flight of steps to rap the knocker. A year ago, he would have found his way inside unnoticed—did, on several occasions. Lion had asked him to train the servants to see those who knew how to remain concealed, and they had proved good pupils.

The butler who opened the door wasn’t Blythe, who was in some sort a former colleague, as Lion’s soldier servant during the war. This one was the sort of superior creature he’d enjoy tweaking in a more cheerful mood, but today he just wanted to get the meeting over with. His facsimile of what the butler would undoubtedly call his betters was perfect. For most of his life, his survival had depended on his ability to imitate others, choosing as his model whomever would best achieve his goals, in this case, an upper class younger son.

The butler did not smile, but he at least gave a small bow, the depth precisely calculated, and marched off towards the rear of the house with Max’s card on a silver platter. In short order, Lion followed the butler back out into the entrance hall, hurrying towards Max with his hand stretched before him in greeting.

“Chameleon! Welcome. Thank you for coming.”

Max shook the extended hand. “I am always happy to see you, Colonel.”

“I’m not in the army any more. Lion will do fine,” the earl insisted, as he always did. “Come on through to my library. Would you like a brandy?” He led the way, still talking. “How have you been keeping, Chameleon?”

The library was a spacious room lined with book shelves, with a large desk in the bay window where the light was best. “Max. I prefer Max.”

Lion knew that. What was the man up to? Lion waved him to a chair by the fireplace; unlit on this warm day in May. Next to the matching chair, a small table held a book and half a glass of brandy. Lion poured another glass from a decanter, and brought it over before reoccupying that seat.

“Not Zebediah, or Zeb?” he asked.

Max raised a brow. The name by which the army had enrolled him. Curiouser and curiouser. “Max.”

“As you wish, Max.” Lion took a sip from his glass. “How have you been keeping?” he asked again.

Social chit chat? Even if Lion really wanted to know, did Max want to tell him? He gave a non-commital answer and returned the conversational serve by asking after Lion’s wife and children. The earl’s eyes lit up but he answered briefly.

“Both well, but Dorrie prefers not to bring the baby up to town in this heat.”

Clearly, Lion was still as besotted with his countess as he’d been nearly a year ago, last time Max’s path had crossed his. “I daresay you are missing them,” he ventured, inviting Lion to stay on that topic rather than Max’s own activities.

Not that he had anything to hide. Indeed, since he’d given up his profession, he’d not found anything to occupy himself. He’d toyed with buying an estate, but he knew nothing about farming and the idea of living in the country made him shudder. His only experiences with country living had been in Spain, Portugal, and France, where the landscape often hid snipers or troops of enemies in ambush.

He’d investigated various business interests to buy, and even invested in a couple—a canal they were building in Wales, a company to produce gas to light the streets of York. Investing his ill-gotten wealth was fun of a sort, but it wasn’t enough to fill his days.

He listened to Lion talk about his family, offering a remark or a question whenever needed to keep the conversation going. He could manage his part with just a small fraction of his mind, while another part catalogued the contents of the room, the available exits, the likely obstacles on each route out of the house. The rest wondered if he would spend the rest of his life living on the edge of a hair, ready for battle and calculating the odds. Even here, in the private home of a man he loved like a brother and for whom he would cheerfully give his life, he could not relax.

“Of course, you are battle-ready,” said that inner part of him that spoke with Sebastian’s voice. Sebastian was eight years dead, and his voice only a memory, but sparring with that memory had become a comfort in all the years alone, skulking behind enemy lines, as uncomfortable with the army he served as with the one he hunted.

“You were at war with the rest of the world when I found you,” Sebastian jeered, “and you were then only ten, as best as we could figure it. One of the many life-lessons I taught you was that letting your guard down exacts a terrible price. You’ll never trust anyone fully, ever again.”

“Enough about me,” Lion said, silencing the old ghost as the rest of Max’s mind came to attention. “You don’t want to talk about you, so let me explain why I asked you to visit. Remember Squirrel?”

Lieutenant Stedham had been dubbed Squirrel for his ability to scavenge whatever was needed by the motley band of exploring officers who served under Colonel O’Toole, now the Earl of Ruthford. With their commander already known as Lion and a Fox, a Bull, and a Bear in the line-up, they all soon gained animal nicknames. Lion’s Pride, one wag dubbed them, but another claimed they were more Zoo than Pride, and the name stuck.

“I remember Squirrel,” Max admitted. Young, eager, and with an optimistic outlook that even five years of a brutal war could not suppress.

“He has gone missing. He has not written to his sister for more than five months, and her most recent letters to him have been returned as undeliverable.”

Max lifted his brows. “You want me to find him?”

“If you are not too busy. It is not like him, Max.”

That was true. Max could see the boy in his mind’s eye, sitting close to the flickering light of yet another campfire in yet another godforsaken hollow of yet another bleak mountain, penning yet another letter to the much older sister who had raised him. He didn’t bother to protest that hunting men was no longer his job, and England not his hunting ground. He would do this for Lion. He would do it for Squirrel, whose cheerful outlook had intrigued as much as annoyed him. Above all, he would do it because a hunt might stave off boredom for the few days or weeks it took, and it was unlikely to involve killing someone. Max didn’t do that anymore.

“What can you tell me, Lion? Where do I start?

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Scandal and risk on WIP Wednesday

Scandal is part of the stock in trade of a historical romance writer, and particularly the writer of Regency and Victorian novels, whose stories are set against a rigid, if hypocritical, standard of publicly moral behaviour. If my characters didn’t ignore it, or be accused of ignoring it, my stories would be a lot shorter! Here are the hero and heroine of One Hour in Freedom, ignoring social norms. Or are they?

After she was ready for bed, Ellie sat in a chair by the fire, waiting. He had stopped in the hall as Mrs Blythe showed them to their rooms. From the look in his eyes, he had thought about kissing her, but had changed his mind. Why? Were they still estranged? Was she a fool to hope they could be together again? Surely he had the same questions.

After half an hour, she decided that Matthias was not coming. Does he not realise that they needed to talk? They had both been given rooms in the guest wing, and were the only occupants. Furthermore, when they had come up together after the meeting with Max, she had seen which room he had entered.

Well then. She let herself out into the dim hall and counted doors until she reached the one Matthias had been given. Light still shone under the door. Good. That made things easier. She knocked and listened for a response from inside the room.

The door swung open, and Matthias stood in the opening, his neutral expression dropping for a moment to reveal surprise, then delight and lust, before he reimposed control over his features.

He stood to one side. “Ellie. Please come in.” The huskiness of his voice sent her body humming, as did his state of dress—or undress. He had wrapped a towel around his waist to open the door, but—apart from that scrap of fabric—he was naked.

She swallowed against a suddenly dry throat and walked past him into the room.

“Give me a moment,” he demanded. He went behind a dressing screen. He is quite correct. We need to talk. Ellie took a deep breath and attempted to distract herself by cataloguing the contents of the room. A bed. A couple of chairs by the fire, one of which had a half full glass on the little table beside it. She sat in the other chair, and continued her examination.

A clothes press. A side table under the window. Another by the door. Very similar to her own room, so probably a washstand and some pegs for clothes behind the dressing screen.

Where Matthias was presumably armouring himself against her lustful eyes by hiding his glorious chest and strong legs under clothing. But the sight was graven on her eyeballs, and her efforts to think of something else were not working.

He emerged in a pair of trousers, with a shirt worn loose over the top. “Still undress,” he said, “but not quite as scandalous.”

“Not scandalous at all, under the circumstances,” she pointed out.

“Yes, but the household doesn’t know that, do they?” he argued. “Do you want a whisky, Ellie? Lion brings it down from Northumberland. They brew it in the hills there.”

“I have never tried whisky,” Ellie admitted. “Perhaps just a little. As to the scandal of my presence here, or not… that is one of the things I wanted to talk about.”

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Tea with the duke

“Mama,” said the Duke of Haverford, strolling into his mother’s private parlour, “I have come to ask a favour.”

”Sit down, Anthony, and let me pour you a cup of tea,” the Duchess of Winshire replied. Since she abandoned widowhood to marry again, she did not see nearly as much of her son as when they lived in the same house. “What can I do to help you?”

Haverford accepted tea, prepared just the way he liked it, and two of the three tiny iced cakes that his mother adored. She had a standing order with Marcel Fournier, the proprietor and chef at Fournier’s Tea Rooms. Haverford thought of suggesting that his darling wife also placed such an order. They really were delicious.

Mama waited patiently until he had eaten the first cake, then raised one eyebrow in question. “It is for Lion, Mama—the Earl of Ruthford. Or, rather, for one of his exploring officers and the man’s wife.”

“Is this to do with that man who calls himself the Kingpin?” Mama asked. “Dorothea, Ruthford’s countess, was telling our ladies about it just a few days ago. Lion and his men think the villian is one of us, Anthony. Dorothea wanted to know the names of men who had suddenly came into money without a known source.”

“It is the same case, Mama. They have reason to believe that Lady Blakeley is involved in some way, and they want to set up a situation in which they can talk to her without the villain knowing. The couple I mentioned? The Kingpin is threatening their child.”

Mama was too polite to snort, but her expression said clearly that she thought the plan misguided. “I am quite prepared to believe that Margaret Blakeley is involved in villainy, but I very much doubt that she is a minion. That woman doesn’t take orders from anyone.”

“Be that as it may, the plan is to give her a titled neighbour who invites her to tea. Something quite normal and casual that neither she nor any of her friends will regard as suspicious. They need a genuine person. Someone who is in Debretts but isn’t well known in London, preferably isn’t in England ,and won’t mind if Lion’s man’s wife pretends to be her.”

“That is easy,” replied Mama. “Eloisa Ormond. My second cousin on my mother’s side. She has not been in England since we were girls. Her father married her off to the Earl of Ormond the year before I married your father, and lived in Scotland until she was widowed ten years ago. She has been travelling ever since. Her last letter was sent from a place called Bali, which is, apparently, in the East Indies.”

“Cousin Eloise,” the duke repeated. “Mama, that is perfect.”

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Tea with Mrs Clifford

The innkeeper could not be more apologetic. There had been a misunderstanding. He had not been expecting Her Grace until the next day. The letter requiring a private parlour to be set aside for her comfort for an hour in the afternoon specifically said Thursday. He was terribly sorry.

Eleanor listened as her major domo conceded that they were a day early, but demanded the private parlour anyway.

“But I cannot turn out the lady currently using it,” the innkeeper protested. “She is elderly, and not too well.”

The major domo was of the view that his great lady’s convenience superseded the needs of anyone else, so it was time for Eleanor to intervene.

“If your guest would be kind enough to share the parlour for an hour, I shall do very well,” she said. “And if not, you might perhaps have a bedchamber I could use?”

The innkeeper looked even more worried, and no wonder. Eleanor’s impetuous decision to bring her plans forward a day had landed her in this town on the day some sporting event was about to take place. Her major domo was not prepared to discuss the nature of the match, so Eleanor assumed it was boxing or something equally unfit for the gentle sensibilities of ladies.

Fortunately for the poor innkeeper’s peace of mind, the lady in the parlour proved willling to share, and Eleanor spent a pleasant hour with her feet up, a nice hot cup of tea, some delightful ginger biscuits, and the company of Mrs Clifford, the original occupant of the parlour.

Eleanor knew who Mrs Clifford was, of course, but did not embarrass the lady by mentioning it. And she was a lady, by her behaviour. Indeed, as mistress to the recently deceased Marquess of Raithby, she had been more faithful to the gentleman over thirty or more years than the marquess’s wife. Kinder to his children, too.

Eleanor said none of that, but simply talked about the purpose of her trip. “My foster daughter’s confinement is fast approaching, and I completed the last of the obligations that kept me in London, so I wished to wait not a moment more. I must beg your pardon for intruding on your peace. It is entirely my fault for leaving early.”

Mrs Clifford raised a hand in demurral. “It is my pleasure to have your company, Your Grace.” She paused, then confided, “I am also travelling to see a beloved relative. My sister’s child. She lives in the village where I spent my childhood, and I wish to see it and her one more time before…” She trailed off, but Eleanor could finish the sentence in her own mind. It was clear that Mrs Clifford was very ill.

“Do you have far to go?” Eleanor asked, and discovered that the other lady was going all the way to the Wirral Peninsula in Cheshire.

“I am travelling a day and resting a day,” she assured Eleanor. “I shall see Rosabel one more time, and I shall be happy.”

Eleanor’s maid popped her head around the corner of the door to let Eleanor know the carriage was ready. Eleanor stood, and could not resist saying, “I hope the rest of your journey goes well, Mrs Clifford. And may I express my sincere condolences on your loss? Raithby was a great man.”

Mrs Clifford’s raised her eyebrows but smiled. “He was, Your Grace. He was.”

Mrs Clifford is a secondary character–and a scandal–in Grasp the Thorn, published tomorrow.

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Exploring officers

Lion’s command includes a group of exploring officers, whose job it was to collect information about enemy movements. They would have denied being spies. Spying was considered underhanded and dishonourable, and simply not the way that a British gentleman acted. Indeed, while several government officials are known to have run spy networks both within Britain and overseas, Britain didn’t have an official department for spies until the 20th century.

In real life, as opposed to books, Exploring officers in Wellington’s army worked for the Intelligence Branch of the Quartermaster General’s office. They operated on their own or with one or two local guides. Their task was to collect first-hand tactical intelligence by riding to enemy positions, observing and noting movements and making sketch maps of uncharted land. It was a dangerous job and they had to be fit, good horsemen, and ready to escape at any moment. They wore their uniforms at all times (at least in theory), because they were officers, not spies.

The famous exploring officer Lieutenant Colquoun Grant was captured by the French while in uniform, and treated as an officer. Grant gave his parole, which basically meant he agreed to not try to escape. However, he discovered that the French general whose prisoner he was had written a letter that said  ‘His Excellency thinks that he should be watched and brought to the notice of the police’.

In other words, the French consider Grant a spy, to be dealt with by the police and not the army. Grant decided that the French had broken their agreement so his parole no longer counted, and he escaped.

Another job of the Intelligence Branch was intercepting letters, such as those sent from French generals to their officers.

They also collected information from networks of local spies. In my books, I have my exploring officers joined by a Greek spy and his niece, who claim to working with the British because the British are the enemies of the Turks.

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Spotlight on Grasp the Thorn

Grasp the Thorn

An accident brings them together. Will a scandal tear them apart?

Bear Gavenor has retired from war and built a business restoring abandoned country manors to sell to the newly rich. He’d like to settle in one himself and raise a family, but the marriage mart is full of harpies like his mother.

Rosa Neatham’s war is just starting. Penniless and evicted from her home, she despairs of being able to care for her invalid father. When she returns to her former home to pick his favourite flower, she is injured in a fall.

Bear, the new occupant of the cottage, offers shelter to her and her father. When scandal erupts, he offers more. He wants a family. She needs a protector. A marriage of convenience will suit them both, and perhaps grow to be more.

When secrets, self-doubts, and old feuds threaten to destroy their budding relationship, can they grasp the thorn of scandal to gather the rose of love?

Excerpt

Rosa blushed, and allowed him to capture her hands.

“Yes, I will marry you, Mr Gavenor.”

He bent from his great height and brushed her lips with his. “Then you had better call me Bear, as my friends do. Or Hugh, if you prefer. My great aunt used to call me Hugh.”

“Hugh, then. Thank you, Hugh. I shall try to be a good wife.”

He kissed her again, another butterfly touch of the lips, then put his hands on her waist and lifted her to sit on the dresser. Now her face was level with his.

“That is better,” he murmured against her mouth. Then his lips met hers again, not a mere brush this time, but a gentle and inexorable advance, setting her lips tingling and taking her breath. His hands slid behind her, pulling her against his chest, so he stood between her open knees, his body pressed tightly to hers.

No, just one hand hugged her, for the other came up behind her head, and tipped it slightly, holding it in place as his lips moved against hers and his tongue swept the seam of her shut mouth once, twice, and again. He hummed with satisfaction when she parted her lips a little, letting his tongue dart inside, and her whole body hummed with pleasure.

Pelman had subjected her to a kiss once; an awkward, embarrassing thing, with her twisting to escape and him boxing her into a corner and pawing her body while he slobbered on her face. The new Lord Hurley, who had also propositioned her when he first arrived at the Hall, had respected her refusal. In fact, he had rather avoided her, and had left again not long after the will was read.

Pelman laughed when she said ‘no’ and waylaid her when she was alone. It had, until now, been her only experience of the pastime, and she had not seen the appeal.

It was very different being the focus of Bear’s undivided attention, the recipient of his tender passion.

She lost herself in the new feelings, grasping his shoulders to bring herself closer to his body, trying her best to imitate the movements of his mouth and tongue.

He pulled away, and rested his forehead on hers, still holding her close. “We had best stop, Rosabel. You are to be my wife, and worthy of all respect, and I have no intention of tupping you on the kitchen dresser. At least, not until we are wed.”

Rosa reluctantly let him go, and he stepped back a little so he could lift her down to the floor. She was pleased to see he looked almost as dazed as she felt.

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Background characters on WIP Wednesday

You’re absolutely right. All of you who think I fall in love with my background characters are correct. But they are such fun! For example, how about Mrs Able and her kids in Grasp the Thorn?

Once out of the gate, Miss Pelman turned uphill, towards the village centre, and then almost immediately down a little narrow side street with four terraced houses on either side. They looked to be of the same vintage and type as the hovels at the bottom of the hill, but in much better condition, and lights flickered behind the downstairs window of each.

Miss Pelman stopped at the second house on the right and mounted the three steps that took the doorway higher than the muddy road. How many people lived here? The cacophony behind the door suggested at least a score: a baby crying, children shouting, and a couple of adult voices pitched to be heard above all the rest.

A knock brought an immediate response: a child’s voice retreating as it shouted, “Mam, Mam, someone’s to door.”

The door opened, just enough for a half-grown girl to insert her wiry body in the gap and examine first Miss Pelman and then Bear with eyes that were twenty years older than the rest of her.

“We’re here to see your mother,” Miss Pelman did not waste courtesy on the children of the poor. “Take us to her.”

The girl let the door swing open and led the way a few paces down the narrow, cluttered hall to a parlour door. Five children of various ages and sizes tumbled up and down the stairs leading to the upper floor, playing some complicated game that required frequent pauses for negotiation of the next move. In the parlour, more children draped themselves across the furniture, sat against the walls, or lay on their stomachs on the knotted rag rugs.

A lushly built woman, not old enough to be mother of all these children, let the suckling infant she held detach itself from her nipple, and reached for the wailing baby that one of the older girls held. Another girl scooped up the little sprite who had finished his or her meal, and skirted Bear to whisk it out of the room.

The nursing woman watched Bear with a sardonic eye, as if daring him to comment on her exposed, full breasts. He kept his face impassive as the baby in her arms bumped blindly against her bare skin. She thrust her nipple into its wailing mouth, silencing, at least, that source of noise.

“Mam Able, it’s Miss Pelman and a gentleman,” the door opener announced. She wasn’t looking at the nursing woman and Bear turned to see who was being addressed.

Half screened by children, another woman watched them from one of the couches. She was much older. The first woman’s mother, perhaps? They shared the same eyes, though this second woman had run to fat, with several chins, a bosom like the prow of a ship and arms like young oaks. Above her broad face, hair an unlikely shade of orange stuck out in a parody of a fashionable coiffure.

“Wha’ might Miz Pelman ’n a gen’leman want of Mrs Able?” she asked, tipping her head to one side in question.

Miss Pelman drew herself up to announce, “Mrs Able, Mr Gavenor is a great friend of my brother’s, and he has need of your services.” She ignored the nursing mother as if she were not in the room.

Bear regretted his keen sense of smell, which detected urine-wet child, heavy sweat, and an overlay of juniper. Gin, probably.

“Lying in, laying out, wet nurse, or sick-bed nurse? Only, if you need a wet nurse, You’ll ’ave to ’ave Penny.” She gestured to the woman feeding the baby, explaining, “Me dugs ’ave dried.” Miss Pelman glanced in the direction of the gesture and as quickly looked away.

“Sick-bed nurse,” Bear told her. “Just for the night, until the daughter can make other arrangements.”

“It is Neatham,” Miss Pelman explained. “But Mr Gavenor is paying.”

Mrs Able pursed her lips. “Just tonight?”

Bear nodded.

“Two shillings by the night. Extra if he soils himself.”

Highway robbery, but undoubtedly anyone with this many mouths to feed needed the money. “Half now, half in the morning.”

“And dinner from the inn and a pint of porter.”

He would pass the inn on his way back to Rose Cottage. “I will pay to have it sent. Enough for Mr Neatham, too.”

The sick-bed nurse hoisted herself from her seat. “Penny, they’re all yours,” she announced.

Penny cast her eyes upwards, though whether in prayer or protest, Bear couldn’t say. “I’ve someone I promised to meet tomorrow, noonish,” she warned.

“I’ll be back by then, or Sal can watch them.”

Mrs Able left the room to a chorus of “Night, Mam,” and pulled on some men’s boots in the hall while the children on the stairs stopped long enough to add their good nights.

Then she covered her head and shoulders with a blanket before leading the way back across to the Pelman’s street and to the entrance of a steep flight of steps that led down to the hollow where the Neathams’ new abode wallowed in its pond.

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Spotlight on Chaos Come Again

Hurrah! Chaos Come Again, the first novel in Lion’s Zoo, is out in the wild! Released 20 June.

Here’s an excerpt to whet your appetite.

Their lovemaking that night had an edge of feverish desperation, but by morning Lion had woken in a more philosophical frame of mind. “Perhaps the earl did me a favour,” he said, when she asked him how he was. She had woken in his arms, as she had every night since Gretna Green.

“How so?” she asked.

“He would never have let me go into the army had I been named his heir when I was a boy.” His smile was grim. “Or he would have asked for me to be given the most dangerous assignments so I was removed from the way of those with purer blood. Either way, the career I have had is my own.”

He rolled her, then, so she lay flat on the bed with him above her, his legs stretched between hers, his weight held on his elbows. “But I have cheated you, Dorothea. You thought yourself safe from marriage to a nobleman, and now look!”

“You are still my Lionel, and I am your Dorothea,” she reminded him. “For your sake, I will make the best of it.” She had puzzled it out for herself last night, while Lion was pacing the room, despairing over the loss of his military career. Indeed, he had lost more than her, since the earl’s heir she had inadvertently married was the man she wanted to be with for the rest of her life, whereas he would have to leave the army when his grandfather died.

Not before, he had insisted last night.

“But won’t the earl want us to stay now that he has named you his heir?” she had said.

The corners of his mouth had quirked in a wicked smile. “He has no say in where I go and what I do. I do not need his money, and nor does he have influence that will remove me from my post.”

So they were still bound for Portugal, and Dorothea was glad of it; glad of a year or two to become accustomed to marriage before they had to face the duties neither of them wanted.

Lion kissed her nose. “Are you tired of travelling? Would you like a few days rest before we leave for Portugal?”

“You are anxious to get back,” Dorothea said.

He kissed her again, a soft brush of his lips to the top of her head. “I am asking what you want,” he pointed out.

Whatever you want. But he would not accept that answer. “I would be delighted to leave Father behind, and to start our real life together.”

“Good,” said Lion. “Enough talking. All I want from you in the next half hour, wife of mine, are moans, the word more, and perhaps my name.”

And he made it so.

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Tea with a Fox

Every third Monday when she was at Haverford House, the Duchess of Haverford was at home to her unmarried godsons and their friends. Not all of them at once, of course. Sometimes only one or two felt the need to make the trek from London out to Chelsea to pay their respects to their godmother. Sometimes as many as a score all arrived in twos or threes over the two hours that she presided over the teapot.

Today, a merry group of officers on leave from Portugal had decided to visit her before returning to Portugal and their regiments. The summer campaign would begin in June. To hear them talk about the battles to come, one would think they headed off to a picnic or a fox hunt. How many of them would return whole? How many would not return at all? The long war with France had chewed up so many of the young men she knew; had swallowed some and spat the others out broken and forever changed.

She smiled and chatted, even laughed at their tales and their jokes. Eleanor was very skilled at keeping her sorrow hidden behind a pleasant visage and polite conversation.

One of the merriest officers in the group was a guest of two of the others. Major James Foxton, a handsome fellow with a full head of red hair, full of stories and sharp-witted remarks. Fox, his friends called him. Eleanor knew his great aunt, Patricia Strathford-Bowles–counted her as a friend, though Lady Patricia had been a woman in her late thirties when Eleanor was a young wife, struggling to keep her sense of self in a near intolerable marriage.

They had never spoken of it, she and Patricia. But Eleanor always went home from a meeting with her friend with the strength to endure for another day. Those years were long past. She had moved beyond endurance to finding her own power. Perhaps she could exercise it on behalf of her friend’s great nephew? Yet there was something about him that made her uneasy–an unkind bite to his words, a sneer in his stories. She needed to know the young man better in order to see her way. She also knew, from Patricia’s letters, that he was a disappointment to his mother and his elder brother, who was now viscount in their father’s place. Yet Patricia had never said why.

“Major Foxton,” she said. “Come and sit by me, please, and let me pour you another tea while you tell me about yourself.”