This was not the first time that Eleanor, the Duchess of Winshire, had sat down to afternoon tea with Mrs Moriarty. The young woman was the daughter of an excellent family, but had been ruined—by the rules of Society, at least—several times before she was out of her teens. 

She had hidden in the slums to escape from the murderers of her parents. That was the first count against her. Eleanor had heard the cats among her peers saying, “Of course one cannot blame the child, but she survived on the streets for two years. Heaven knows what she did to feed herself. Any proper young lady would have been dead in a week.” 

Eleanor, of course, admired Mrs Moriarty for her courage and her resilience.

The second mark on her copybook was her uncle, who had taken her from the slums and, instead of retrieving her reputation and seeing her reestablished in Society, had taken her to Spain to follow the army. Rumour had it she had been a spy and worse. Those who raked for scandal never worried about whether rumour was correct or an outright lie.

Then, when she turned up in London again this summer, she was somehow involved in a vast criminal enterprise. It did not matter to the gossips that she and her husband had been instrumental in bringing down said criminals. Ladies, they said, did not involve themselves with such things.

The final count to her demerit was that her husband was a commoner, a former street boy and current Supervisor with the Thames River Police. A wife took the status of her husband, and so Mrs Moriarty could safely be ignored.

Not by Eleanor, she could not. Eleanor found her to be an estimable young woman.

“Let me pour you a cup of tea, my dear,” she said to her guest, “and tell me more about your place for an agency of hired guards. Moriarty Protection, I think you said.”

Eleanor’s guest is the heroine of One Hour in Freedom, published yesterday.