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This was for her. She could do this. She could help Sybil. And Lady Heloise. And prove herself.

“You haven’t even read the Nightingale,” Emmeline pointed out. “You said her stories were too naughty. Devil’s Night seems like jumping from the frying pan into the fire.”

“Never mind the frying pan—it’s like jumping from the tea table straight into the fire. While on fire. With fire,” Matilda added.

Indeed, Clara hadn’t read the popular, scandalous love stories sold privately to women from a select bookshop in London for one very good reason.

She had written them.

She was the Nightingale.

Matilda would fall right out of her chair if Clara admitted it. Which she did not.

The rules might be constrictive and hypocritical and unfair, but at least she knew how to use them to protect herself. No one else would. Especially were she to be revealed as the authoress. No one would believe it at first, which was part of her strategy. Construct herself a prison so tame she could run wild without anyone’s noticing. She knew something about disappearing.

But it meant that even when she became a member of a society such as the Spinsters, she was still relegated to pouring tea. Even after scaling a wall.

Fine, after dropping into the arms of a very muscular captain below. Same thing, really.

She knew that eventually some salient detail would reveal her identity as the Nightingale, and then all the doors of Society would be irrevocably closed to her. Even by the very ladies who paid good money to read her stories and whispered about them over tea. Especially by them. Popularity turned to notoriety with very little warning. And the ton loved nothing if not a fall from grace.

They would tear her to pieces.

Her family, the new earl who was a cousin she had seen twice since her parents died many years ago, would let them. He might even lead the charge, if only to keep himself out of the mud.

And so here she was, being accused of being too prim for her own books.

In front of silent, watchful Bram.

Again.

“I’m not a beauty,” she admitted. “But they won’t turn me away for that. Even if it is Devil’s Night.” She’d never been to a regular gaming hell, never mind this one. Nor a risqué house party. But she’d written about them. She’d written about a great many things she had never done. Torrid, delicious, flexible things.

“Don’t be silly,” Matilda scoffed. “You’re as pretty as anyone else. You’re just…reserved.”

In other words, dull.

Emmeline nudged Matilda, again who huffed a sigh and fell back against the cushions. “I’m sorry if I never thought Lady Clara Prescott, doyenne of proper behavior, the type to attend a notorious event hosted by a known degenerate. You needn’t act as though I’ve maligned her mother.”

But Clara knew she was perfect for this enterprise. Both because of what the world knew about her and what it did not.

“Why you?” Priya asked bluntly. She could sniff out secrets like a French pig with truffles. Not that Clara would ever make that comparison out loud. There was nothing porcine about Priya. No gluttony, no obvious excess. She was as reserved as Clara, only she wore it like diamonds.

“Because,” Clara said, “no one would ever suspect me.”

A beat of silence.

“That’s true,” Priya said.

It was true. Just not the whole truth.

“Then it’s decided.”

Bram slipped out the door without a word.

Matilda pointed at Clara with all of the roiling drama of Macbeth’s witches making their pronouncements.

“You are not wearing that matron’s cap to a Devil’s Night.”