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“You do eat and light candles, don’t you? No one will know I’m here.”

“Fine. But don’t leave until we talk. I want your opinion on some cloth Father bought to use for a new line of trousers.”

“He’s not going to make Cossack trousers, is he?”

Ezra shrugged. “Customers want them, but they offend my father’s sense of what an English gentleman ought to wear.”

“That’s because they are a high crime against fashion.”

Ezra laughed. “An abomination, Father calls them. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Lark set the paper package with Viv’s manuscript on the table. There was enough light for him to begin, but he would wait until he had his supplies and sent his message. He looked about the room again. The plainness suited him. From the window the view north across rooftops reminded him of London as he’d known it with Wenlocke and the others. He recognized St. Botolph’s narrow cone of a steeple rising upward from the irregular pattern of slate and chimney pots stretching out to the horizon.

Ezra returned with a basket of food, three bottles of porter, and one of the firm’s messenger boys. He also gave Lark a box of candles, paper, and pencils, taken from the designer’s workshop. Lark wrote a note to Wenlocke, giving the boy strict instructions for its delivery and a coin. Then Ezra was off for his family’s weekly observances.

*

Lark put aside his gentlemanly trappings, his hat and gloves, his coat and tie, and settled himself at the table. He had dressed himself in the borrowed robes of a fiction for too long. It was time to face the truth. Edward Larkin did not exist. He, Lark, was a thief with a stolen treasure, a thief who could help the woman he loved. He unwrapped the package and found a dark-green cloth-bound book with a sepia drawing of a London street affixed to the cover. He opened the book to the title page and saw at once what had left Viv slumped and bereft on Lady Melforth’s doorstep. Inserted into the blank space between the printed title and Lady Melforth’s name was Viv’s name in pencil. The contrast between the words from the printer in ink and Viv’s neat handwritten pencil correction made everything clear. Her authorship had been denied. Her work, not her purse, had been stolen.

Not by Dodsley. Dodsley would not have omitted Viv’s name from the title page in error, and Lark remembered Viv’s words—Dodsley is not the problem. Only by Lady Melforth’s order could the manuscript have been so altered. Lark turned the pages. The structure and elements of the guide remained what Viv had described, but when he came to the writing, the stories of women woven into the brief walking tours, he saw what Lady Melforth had done. Viv’s penciled notes marked those places where Lady Melforth had removed any sign of Viv’s liveliness and wit and turned Viv’s stories into bland accounts of how to get about London and what to pay for various services. No page remained untouched.

He turned to the story of their meeting. Most of the original story had been omitted and reinstated in Viv’s own hand on a page attached to the proofs with a pin. He traced her pencil marks with his fingertips and began to read aloud, hearing Viv as he did so, seeing her eyes flash, catching her joy at the adventure of it all.

Women are frequently advised to avoid certain streets in our great metropolis. We are told that danger lurks around unsavory corners, which our sex is ill-prepared to meet. These perilous haunts are not the lonely heaths of highwaymen and footpads nor the dark by-ways of lawless and predatory cosh-carriers, but streets of commerce and enterprise, politics and publishing.

To test the truth of such advice, dear reader, this author took it upon herself to risk a solo perambulation down Babylon Street, notorious for its politics and the prints in its shop windows. The danger, it is presumed, is that a woman is likely to fall into a reverie, her gaze caught and bewitched by the spectacle in the windows, so that she becomes the unsuspecting prey of a pickpocket or purse snatcher. I had a great desire to meet just such a type, a master of subtlety.

For the adventure, I took certain precautions. I came by cab and ordered the driver to follow at a distance as I walked the length of the street. I wore a decoy velvet purse on my arm and kept my actual funds secure in a pocket. I carried under my short cape, a serviceable Toby, with the firing of which I am well-acquainted.

For all Babylon Street’s evil reputation, I saw little to alarm me. At one end of the street, a kidney-pie man with his portable oven was doing a brisk business with men splashed in the marks of the plasterer’s trade. A man in the robes and wig of a barrister, his brief under his arm, hurrying past, indifferent to his surroundings, seemed to me a likelier target for a thief, for the fob of a gold watch stretched across his substantial girth. I took heart from a waif carrying flowers, a shawl around her thin shoulders, showing no fear of her surroundings. A barefoot boy teased a dog. These were my fellow Londoners going about their business undisturbed by the reputation of the street.

There was an air of decay about the shops with their overhanging upper stories above the cobbles. The narrowness of the street admitted little light. But these were merely the signs of great age, of the street’s past. I walked on, looking for a likely window to study. One bow window had already attracted a modest crowd while my gaze lighted on a shop advertising schoolbooks. The shop’s wares spilled out into the street on trestles and hanging shelves as if the place were bursting with books.

There I paused to study the shop’s wares, picking a likely volume from the hanging shelf. In no time I became aware of a ruffian who passed me, close enough to brush the hem of my skirts, and easily identified by the noxious smell that trailed in his wake. I kept my arm at an angle, my little velvet bag, while visible, secured by strings deep in the crook of my arm. I confess I did not expect what happened next.

The ruffian returned. He slammed his body against mine. I fell back against the trestles full of books, the purse slid down my arm and disappeared in his grasp. I righted myself in an instant, drew my Toby, and aimed at the fleeing villain. I called out, intent on stopping him, and seizing the opportunity to talk. Instead, to my surprise, a helpful gentleman addressed me, stepping unwittingly into the path of the bullet.

Mr. Witsworth, like most men, appeared to consider me helpless and unable to deal with the situation. His well-meant but thoughtless interference allowed the villain to escape and cost me an opportunity to understand the workings of the criminal mind. It was he, dear reader, who needed assistance.

She’d enjoyed that line, but it caused Lark a pang. She would no longer think of him as Witsworth. The plain room was dark. Lark rose and crossed to stand at the window looking out over London. He rolled his shoulders and shook off the stiffness of sitting so long. In his pocket were the things he and Viv had traded that first day, the spent ball from her Toby and the garnet ring with which he’d proposed. He had to accept that he’d lost her, or he couldn’t get his head clear to help her, to figure out what had happened to bring the manuscript to its present state. He closed the book and looked again at the package. Someone had written the street name and number, and then a second writer had scrawled Viv’s name in place as the person to receive the proofs. So, Viv had received the proofs, discovered the changes, which could only have been made at her ladyship’s orders, and had worked to restore the manuscript. He knew Viv had been to see Dodsley, and that Dodsley had been unwilling to accept her corrections.

He did not know whether Viv had confronted Lady Melforth directly, but Viv’s unhappiness meant that Dodsley was going to publish the version sanctioned by Lady Melforth. Dodsley was willing to participate in the theft. His motive would be profit. Viv was an unknown authoress with no following. Lady Melforth was the Traveling Viscountess, a known best seller. It was Lady Melforth whose motive made little sense to Lark.

Across the way a pair of gulls landed on the peak of a roof and did a bit of bird preening before folding their wings and tucking their heads down for the night. Below the birds, the roof sloped down into a hollow behind a low balustrade. The little nook was bordered by a projecting dormer on one side and on the other by the solid bulk of a brick chimney with its red clay pots feeding thin wisps of smoke into a hazy lavender sky. In such hollows, their gang of lost boys had slept until Wenlocke’s family found him and claimed him. Then the gang had moved, first into Wenlocke’s mother’s house, and later into Daventry Hall in the country. They had had beds with sheets, coverlets, and pillows. They had had clothes and shoes and plenty to eat. They had had lessons. But still they had been a gang until Wenlocke had fallen in love.

Lark remembered again with painful clarity the scene of Wenlocke’s betrayal, of his walking away from Lark without a backward look. Fragments of memory from that long ago scene and the morning’s scene on Henrietta Street tangled together in his mind. He gripped the edge of the window frame. He had walked away from Rook in just such a way. He had saved his old friend from being shot, and he had saved him from being pursued, but Lark could not blame Rook for his anger, or for telling Viv the truth of their partnership. Lark had left their shared life behind. His heart, which had belonged to no one but himself, now belonged to Viv.

Still, he could not see what justified Lady Melforth’s betrayal. The woman did not have Dodsley’s profit motive. Lark went back in his mind over what Viv had told him and what he had seen of her ladyship. Viv had believed them to be partners, friends. She had been protective of her ladyship in the face of the Strydes and eager to share her daily discoveries of London with her ladyship. All that seemed to have changed. An explanation that made sense was Lady Melforth’s illness. Perhaps, her ladyship’s immobility, her shaking hand, her falls, had made her more dependent on Viv than she wished to be. He tried to imagine how her ladyship felt seeing two names on a guide where always before there had only been one. He knew what it meant to be in the grip of strong resentment and what one could do in that state. But now that he had renewed his friendship with Wenlocke, he knew the folly of keeping an old injury alive in one’s heart for far too long.

Lark turned from the window, lit the candles in the darkened room, and opened a bottle of porter. He needed a strategy for seeing Lady Melforth and convincing her to approve of Viv’s corrections.