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“Right then, get on with it. You’ll know in an hour or two whether your commander will ever walk again. I do hope that there’ll be no further reason for me to feel concern about my safety, or the safety of my wife, my mother, or my possessions.”

Wiglet backed away quickly. “Never, Yer Grace,” he gobbled. “Not in the least. I mean, never.” He and the other man stepped through the door into the water closet, presumably throwing themselves down the hole in their fervor to get away from Simeon.

The dowager pulled herself to a standing position. “My jewels!” she said. “On the floor with those filthy, ravening beasts. I shall never feel the same about them, never!”

Simeon bent down to pick up the stones.

“Get up!” she shrieked, her voice suddenly strong. “That’s a job for a servant, as I shouldn’t have to tell you!”

“Your Grace!” Isidore said, “Let’s—”

Simeon dropped the ruby into the cracked box on the floor and straightened. “Would you prefer that we leave the rest for Honeydew to collect, Mother?”

“I would prefer never to have been born,” his mother said on a gasping breath. “You—you have humiliated me one too many times. One too many times!”

Isidore’s mouth fell open.

“Your father would have taken those ruffians out with a blow to the jaw, like any respectable Englishman,” the dowager said. But her voice cracked on a sob. “You—my son—with his feet—”

Isidore met Simeon’s eyes over his mother’s head.

“We’ll go outside now, Your Grace,” she said, lifting the remaining jewelry box from the dowager’s arms. “Follow me, if you please.”

They left Simeon there, the marble around his feet littered with tarnished jewels, in settings popular a half century ago. Isidore turned around once, but he was staring at the ground.

Chapter Twenty-nine

Gore House, Kensington

London seat of the Duke of Beaumont

March 3, 1784

The Duke of Villiers handed his cloak to Fowle, the Beaumonts’ butler, pausing at the news that Jemma was out, but that the duke was in.

He and Elijah had to talk.

It had been years since they had spoken properly, although his valet Finchley babbled of how Elijah saved Villiers’s life when he was in a fever. Since Villiers had no memory of that, he could hardly savor the reunion.

The truth was that Villiers was currently doing his best to seduce Elijah’s wife, and yet apparently he owed him gratitude for the said life-saving.

What was all that between old friends?

“I’ll announce myself,” he told Fowle. As he entered the library, he saw Elijah’s profile around the side of a high-backed chair. He seemed to have closed his eyes. Villiers loathed naps. But then Elijah spent his adult life saving the world, or at least the English parts of it, while he himself concentrated on frivolities like chess.

As always when he observed differences between his life and another man’s, he paused to consider whether he would prefer to order his world on Elijah’s model.

No. He had no wish to take up his seat in the House of Lords. In fact, he had a positive revulsion to the idea.

Villiers walked noiselessly across the wine-colored, flowered carpet. It was as glorious as one of his own coats. He rounded the chair.

Elijah was indeed asleep.

Or not asleep.

There was something odd about the immobility of his face, about the way his body was slumped in the corner of the chair.

“Duke,” Villiers said sharply, bending over. Could Elijah have fainted? His face was rather white. “Elijah!”