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“Did you rely on chance that I wouldn’t?”

She sniffed, as if doing so could withdraw the burn that had started on her cheeks.

“I bear some risk here, as well, Miss St. Quinton. I should like to know what you’re dragging me into.”

“I suppose that’s fair.” It was entirely fair. Absurd in its sensibility. She had blackmailed him; he asked only to understand why. “It’s the Iphigenia I’ve come to see. I’ve read about its recapture in the papers, and I’d like to make a study of it before it’s repaired and recommissioned.”

Not all the truth, but not a lie, either. His eyes narrowed and she plunged onward, hoping to redirect the line of questioning to come. “My parents would never have agreed to bring me, had I asked. That is why I … commissioned your assistance.”

The two lines reappeared between his brows. “Why should your parents object to such a thing?”

“They have their reasons.” She was talking quickly, sounding less composed with each passing sentence. “Personal, perhaps insensible ones. I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

“There are few things I understand better than insensible parents.” He wore a wry half smile. “‘Understand’ doesn’t quite suit. There are few things I accept more readily.”

His father had been at the Miltons’ ball; a smiling man of short stature, whose son bore no resemblance to him. She knew nothing of his mother.

The carriage stopped. A peek behind the curtain showed the Thames flowing up ahead, and sunlight breaking through the gloom that had been overbearing in Mayfair.

“He’s paying the toll for the bridge,” Mr. Balfour said, making no move to absorb the view for himself. “It won’t be long now.”

She let the curtain fall. “Do the hospital’s men, these pensioners, not wish to make homes of their own?”

One corner of his mouth lifted along with his eyebrows. “I’m sure many do. And some do have the means—Out-Pensioners, they’re called. My business partner happens to be one of them.”

“Truly?”

He had been fiddling with the seam of his breeches, but his hands stilled and he uncrossed his legs. “It should be only a few minutes more.”

She would not be offended by his coldness. He was serving the role she’d put him in. She had asked for transportation and discretion, not conversation. Not to know him and the intricacies of his private life.

They passed the remainder of the drive in silence, even when the carriage was permitted to pass the monstrous iron gates enclosing the hospital grounds. A blue-coated man had admitted them and given direction to the coachman, but Sophie realized, as she disembarked from the vehicle, that the place was swarming with duplicates of that same uniform. Tricorn hats and blue coats and bright stockings.

Her hands balled into fists. She hadn’t accounted for so many of them. The effect a single lieutenant’s dress had had on her at the Miltons’ ball—

Yes, and that was a fleeting moment of weakness, not to be repeated.

“The gatekeeper knew nothing of the dockyard’s schedule.” Mr. Balfour came to stand beside her. “Let’s begin here; I’ve someone I can ask about your ship.” He gestured toward the pale building looming before them.

The structure was impressive, even after having lived the last month surrounded by Mayfair’s finest architecture. Thick, sand-colored columns held vigil over the building’s façade, and classical adornments capped the windows and doors. Everything had been done on a massive scale.

What had she been expecting? A modest place, struggling to maintain basic cleanliness of its grounds? This structure had more in common with the Duke of Wellington’s Apsley House than her idea of a hospital, and it was only the first building she had seen. In the distance, the top of a shining dome and gilt weathervane were prominent, promising expansive grounds yet to come. The sight sent a chill down her spine.

She was out of her depth completely, miles from home with a stranger she had no reason to trust apart from gut instinct. No one knew where she was.

An older man with white muttonchops showed them into the building and they were greeted mercifully, and instantly, by darkness. For a moment, Sophie saw nothing, hearing only the clatter of her footsteps on tile, but the open parlor gradually came into view. Vaulted ceilings and a single, north-facing window. A long corridor riddled with closed doors and a flurry of dust motes winking in the air. It smelled exactly how one might expect such a large building, run and cleaned exclusively by men, to smell—faintly musty and undisturbed, but in an aged, casually reverent sort of way.

“I’ll only be a moment. Won’t you have a seat?” Mr. Balfour looked at her, already half turned away. A row of matching Windsor chairs lined the room’s walls, the wood stain darker on some than others.

“I’ve sat long enough, thank you.”

He nodded curtly and set off down the corridor.

It might have been five minutes or a quarter hour that she ambled the room’s edge, studying the paneled walls and repressing the growing urge to sneeze, when a door slammed from within the corridor. Sharp, clicking footsteps echoed, growing louder. When Mr. Balfour emerged, his hair was more tousled than she had remembered it being.

“Sorry. I had some trouble finding Crofton.”

He was at her side in two strides, his fingertips lightly grazing the back of her arm. There wasn’t time to dwell on the warm tremor that branched out from his touch, or the fact that it seemed to settle her pulse, even if just marginally—