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“Surely, my case is different, as I am now the innkeeper.” Lucy watched Margaret for any sign that her dearest friend was on her side in the matter, but Margaret seemed intent on cutting a piece of tongue into the smallest possible bites. Margaret had been an instructor at Mrs. Thwayte’s Seminary for Young Ladies in Hammersmith until she left to become the companion of the twins’ elderly mother, Lady Eliza Fawkener. It was Margaret who had introduced Lucy to the twins and the Back Bench Lending Library group.

Cassandra pushed her untouched plate aside. “What you are, Lucy, is a woman of...property. You’ll sell the inn of course,” she announced.

“Sell the...inn?” Lucy had almost said sell my home, but she could see that her friends would be deaf to the claims of such a home with its noise and bustle, its rustic furnishings and humble hospitality.

“Once you’ve sold, you may convert the profits of the sale into the funds,” Cassandra continued.

Lucy looked at the three solemn faces, alike in their expressions of certainty. Behind them the forsythia branch hid the wallpaper. They, too, had a plan for hiding any flaws Lucy might possess as she entered their world, such as being the daughter of a former pugilist who kept an inn.

At school, a girl named Amelia Fox had been the self-proclaimed expert on origins. “Your origins are your destiny,” she would say, as she rated each girl’s family ties. In Lucy’s case Amelia had proclaimed that nothing could be done about her father, and it was just as well that nothing was known about Lucy’s mother, because surely nothing good could be known. Now Lucy’s friends invited her to shed her questionable birth forever with a simple economic transaction. As an heiress with her money in the funds, Lucy could slip into their world as if there’d never been a Papa, a Tom Holbrook, who’d once been Iron Tom in a bout against the champion. It was a tidy plan.

“Lucy, dear,” Cordelia urged, “do open our gift. We found it in our pew, just where you usually sit, and knew at once that it was a sign.” Cordelia gave the package a shove across the table toward Lucy.

“Not yet, Cordelia,” Cassandra admonished. “Everyone should eat. I recommend this pudding. You may compliment your cook, Lucy.”

* * * *

Captain Harry Clare, late of the First Royal Dragoons, opened the door of the Tooth and Nail, a west London inn from which coaches and travelers set out for Dover and the continent. He let in a gust of cold March air that caused the men on two long benches to glance his way and holler greetings. He had not encouraged the familiarity, but they greeted him as if he were one of their own.

He slipped out of his wet coat and hat and tossed them on a hook by the door. He had been lodging at the inn since the debacle that closed the Pantheon Club. The club, a front for a group of handpicked spies in England’s great game against her former ally, Russia, had been Harry’s home for nearly a year as he and his fellow spies had tracked down enemy agents operating in London.

The club’s unexpected closing had come just as Harry was about to complete his final assignment and receive the promised reward for his year and a day of service. Instead, he’d been cast out to shift for himself. He was an old hand at such shifts, having joined the army at seventeen and seen action from Spain to Waterloo. He could make a billet anywhere, from a muddy mountainside to the ruins of a shelled castle. And he was a man who never failed to complete an assignment, even one as puzzling as the one he’d been assigned—to find a blind man who was the only witness to a murder.

He’d found his unlikely murder witness at the Tooth and Nail, where the old man sat on a bench near the kitchen door, doing odd bits of handwork. The man, Adam Pickersgill, was simple-minded and easily agitated. A stray bit of conversation from the bench sitters could rouse Adam to a frenzy of waving fists and shouted words until his voice failed. Harry had seen similar cases of sudden starts in men who’d been subjected to the shock of war. Getting information out of Adam to solve a crime would not be easy.

The old man’s daily pattern revolved around Lucy Holbrook, the innkeeper’s daughter. She was a distracting female. The eye wanted to follow her, all golden hair and fair skin, but Harry was generally good at ignoring distractions when he had a job to do.

When he’d first come to the inn, he’d made an arrangement with the innkeeper, Tom Holbrook, about his lodging. In exchange for letting Tom set up a display cabinet at the front of the inn with the few mementos he’d acquired in the long campaign against Napoleon, he had a fine room. Tom Holbrook had fitted up a glass case in the entry to hold Harry’s Waterloo relics: his straight sword, a bronze replica of the eagle he’d helped Alex Clark take from the French Guard, the Morning Chronicle’s report of his exploits, and a fine collection of Evershot plates depicting the heroes of June 18, 1815—Blücher, Wellington, and the Prince of Orange. If Harry thought the true heroes of the day lay in the fields of Belgium, he kept that thought to himself. He could tell a good war story with the best of them.

Then Tom Holbrook had been so inhospitable as to die. “Iron Tom,” as he’d been known in his youthful days in the ring, had been buried the previous Sunday, and his golden-haired daughter had become a woman of property. The Tooth and Nail looked just as it had the week before, but its usual customers had taken to combing their hair and replacing stained waistcoats and worn jackets with Sunday finery. It was plain that, as the inn’s new owner, Lucy Holbrook had become a sought-after prize. Harry was not a betting man, but he’d wager that the girl had other plans than marrying one of her neighbors.

From the entry, Harry stepped down the three wide steps that led to the common room. The inn’s oak wainscoting was as brown as beef and ale. Its walls were gold as mustard or onions. Its hearths were black with a century’s worth of soot.

Under the old mullioned windows facing the yard were the long tables where coach passengers could get a quick meal. A slate menu read: Lamb. Pork. Beef. A great stone inglenook fireplace divided the room between the front tables for travelers and the lowly benches in the tap where the inn’s usual customers had their pints and smoked their pipes, dipping the stems in their ale.

The place was a bit of England for which the long war with France had been fought, but the men who sat on its benches knew war only as plunging or rising prices, changing governments, and distant battles that faded into history faster than the local champion’s fame in the ring. They were civilians, and even after ten years of peace Harry didn’t think he knew how to be one of them.

A thin layer of bluish smoke hung in the taproom air. The long-case clock ticked, the fire crackled, and outside, rain clattered in the drainpipes. The regular bench sitters slumped over their pint pots. Harry guessed the reason for their dejection—the innkeeper’s golden-haired daughter was nowhere to be seen.

Will Wittering, a blacksmith with the forge that served the inn stables, called out, “Captain, come wet yer throat w’ us this sad day.”

Harry strolled their way, and the group shifted to make room for him on the bench.

“A bit of news for you, Captain,” Will offered.

“What’s that?” asked Harry. He nodded at Frank Blodget, the tapman, to draw him a pint. With the spy club closed, Harry no longer had to stick by its rule of no spirits.

“One of Sir Geoffrey Radcliffe’s Rockets was stopped by a gang of highwaymen last night.”

Harry took his first swallow of ale and listened as the tale poured out from several tellers. He took a moment to glance at the blind man, alone on his bench without his usual work. Queenie, the inn’s orange-and-white cat, lay curled in Adam’s lap between the big man’s slack hands.

“Did the robbers get much?” he asked the bench sitters. He wondered whether he could get some sense out of the old fellow while Lucy Holbrook was away.

“That’s the puzzle,” said Will, shaking his head. “They only took the horses.”

“Not Radcliffe’s gold?” Harry knew the animals on one of Radcliffe’s Rockets would hardly be prize horseflesh. Radcliffe ran the kind of coaching enterprise where profits were lean, and his drivers were the kind who drove their beasts until they died in the traces somewhere between London and Dover.

The bench sitters chuckled. Geoffrey Radcliffe had been knighted for loaning staggering sums to King George when the latter was a mere prince.