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“Thank you for telling me, Octavia.” Her throat ached, but she kept her voice as level as she could. “We will say no more about it, if you wish, but I think you may be right about your brother.”

“About my brother?”

“Yes,” Harriet said. “He was just Jasper’s age when it all happened, wasn’t he?”

“Jasper’s age? Oh.” Octavia paused. A look of rueful comprehension came into her eyes. “I never think of him as young, but he must have been.”

“He was,” Harriet said. She had utterly misjudged him, never imagining that the memory of such horror lurked under the smooth air and manner of a London gentleman. “He can’t forget holding you under those fishing nets can he?”

“I suppose he can’t.” Octavia acknowledged. She sighed. “But how can I get him to see that I’m no longer a babe?”

* * * *

Goldsworthy liked Charles’s new line of inquiry. They sat in the gloom of his office on the dark afternoon as the snow began to descend. Wilde had left coffee and some sweet, honey-coated pastries on the big desk.

“That’s the ticket, lad,” Goldsworthy said. “Spies are never disinterested parties. They are men—”

Charles raised a brow.

“—or women, who have known...betrayal.” Goldsworthy’s eyes darted back and forth as his mind worked. “They’ve learned to distrust appearances.”

Charles drank his coffee and waited. Though it was rare for Goldsworthy to share his thinking, there was more coming. Lynley had told him that Goldsworthy had been in the spy business for over twenty years. The man was ancient and ageless at once like a mighty oak with a gnarled trunk and a green head.

“She avoids being in company with Wellington, does she?” Goldsworthy prompted.

“She does, though he’s the man more than any other who could help a royalist widow establish her claim to property in France.” Charles had now seen her turn away from the duke three times.

Goldsworthy chuckled. “And our duke has always had an eye for the ladies. Her avoiding him rather confirms your suspicion that she was in Paris during the occupation. So who else might have noticed her? How old would she have been?”

“Twenty-three, perhaps. No more than twenty-five,” Charles said.

Goldsworthy’s lively eyes did their thinking dance. “If the marchioness was in Paris during the occupation, she could have caught some Englishman’s eye, and if his intentions were less than honorable, if she suffered at his hands, she might be susceptible to Zovsky’s recruiting methods.”

Charles had considered the possibility and its limits. He and Perry now had intelligence reports of various parties and balls at which the English officers and their Russian counterparts had mingled in that time of reveling in the allies’ victory and the delights of the great city suddenly reopened to them. If they were right, somewhere in the mass of gossip and detail would be the story of a scandal, of a dashing officer who pursued a young Russian woman and broke her heart or, worse, ruined her.

“The theory is not without its limits,” Charles admitted. “Even if such an event is part of the marchioness’s history, the man who wronged her would have to be dead now for her to move so openly about London.”

Goldsworthy shook his great head. “She’s a bold one. You’ve seen yourself that she goes everywhere even though she must avoid Wellington.”

Charles nodded and shifted the conversation back to the most important point. “Betrayal may be her motive, sir, but what we don’t know is her mission.” Charles could make no sense of it so far. “She takes little interest in men with obvious government ties, except for Edenhorn. She is remarkably open in her movements. She takes pains to let me know where she is going and with whom. One sees her daily in public places. One could almost suppose her innocent except that she tries so hard.”

“Raises your suspicions, doesn’t it?” The big man chuckled.

It did. From the beginning he’d doubted the marchioness’s authenticity. Her willingness to provide a family tree, her open references to the vineyards of Saumur and the members of his family, her persistent presence wherever Charles went... Perry had discovered with Faraday’s help that some of the ink on the family tree was quite recent, no more than a few months old. Great Uncle Victor was a fabrication.

* * * *

Harriet spent hours pondering Octavia’s revelations, unable to stop thinking about Wynford, the man who wanted to dance with her. Her contrary impressions of him had undergone two complete reversals in an hour. As the spy who read Octavia’s post, he appeared nearly as overbearing and blind to his sister’s happiness as Harriet’s own brother had once been. As the boy under the fishing nets, she thought he might be forgiven almost anything in his desire to protect his sister from harm.

Harriet wandered the house, absently collecting items from Lady Luxborough’s list that were meant to go into the country the following week with the remaining servants. Unaccountably, among them was the sheet music for the old carol, “The Holly and the Ivy,” which Pris had been practicing for weeks. Harriet discovered the music under an embroidery frame left on a chair in the second-best drawing room.

When she picked it up, she read the words of the old song to push Wynford from her mind. “The holly bears a berry as red as any blood. The holly bears a prickle as sharp as any thorn. The holly bears a bark as bitter as any gall.” Then she laughed at her quick descent into melancholy, knowing that Pris laboring at her instrument was not the least bit likely to inspire melancholy in anyone but her music master.

Instantly her thoughts returned to Wynford. Octavia’s revelation of the family history was at odds with Wynford’s usual composure and his untroubled manner as a single gentleman with a flirtatious smile.

Harriet did not quite understand how the boy on the beach and the man who teased her for a dance could be the same person. Snatches of conversation between them would come to mind to make her stop in the middle of a room. Then she would pick up Lady Luxborough’s list again and return to work.

There was more to the story than the horror Wynford had faced as a boy. By Octavia’s own admission, she had related a secondhand account. The girl had not questioned elements of the tale that struck Harriet as pointing to quite another explanation for Lady Wynford’s death on that beach.