Mick Boden of the Bow Street Runners was standing in the Earl of Durbury’s private sitting room at the Pulteney Hotel again, one week after his first appearance there. He had no real news to impart except that he had discovered no recent trace of Lady Sara Illingsworth.

His failure did not please him. He hated assignments like this one. Had he been summoned to Cornwall to investi gate the murder attempt on Sidney Jardine, he could have used all his skills of detection to discover the identity of the would-be murderer and to apprehend the villain. But there was no mystery about this crime. The lady had been in the process of robbing the absent earl when Jardine had come upon her. She had hit him over the head with some hard object, doubtless taking him by surprise because he knew her and did not fully realize what she was up to, and then she had made off with the spoils of the robbery. Jardine’s valet had witnessed the whole scene – a singularly cowardly individual in Mick’s estimation since the thief had been a mere girl with nothing more lethal than a hard object to swing at him.

‘If she is in London, we will find her, sir,’ he said now.

‘If she is in London? If?’ The earl fumed. ‘Of course she is in London, man. Where else would she be?’

Mick could have listed a score of places without even taxing his brain, but he merely pulled on his earlobe. ‘Probably nowhere,’ he admitted. ‘And if she did not leave here a week or more ago, she will find it harder now, sir. We have questioned every coaching innkeeper and coachman in town. None remember a woman of her description except the one who brought her here. And now we are keeping a careful watch.’

‘All of which is laudable,’ his lordship said with heavy irony. ‘But what are you doing to find her within London? A week should have been time enough and to spare even if you put your feet up and slept for the first five or six days.’

‘She has not returned to Lady Webb’s, sir,’ Mick told the earl. ‘We have checked. We have found the hotel where she stayed for two nights after her arrival, but no one knows where she went from there. According to your account, sir, she knows no one else in town. If she has a fortune on her, though, I would have expected her to take another hotel room or lodgings in a respectable district. We have found no trace of either yet.’

‘It has not occurred to you, I suppose,’ the earl said, going to stand in front of the window and drumming his fingernails on the sill, ‘that she may not wish to draw attention to herself by spending lavishly?’

It would strike Mick Boden as decidedly odd to steal a fortune and then neglect to spend any of it. Why would the young lady even have stolen it, if she was living at Candleford in the lap of luxury as the daughter of the former earl and relative to this present one? And if she was twenty years old and as lovely as the earl had described her, would she not be looking forward to making an advantageous match with a wealthy young nob?

There was more to this whole business than met the eye, Mick thought, not for the first time.

‘Do you mean she might have taken employment?’ he asked.

‘It has crossed my mind.’ His lordship continued the finger-drumming while he frowned out through the window.

How much money had been taken? Mick wondered. Surely it must have been a great deal if the girl had been willing to kill for it. But of course there had been jewels too, and it was time he explored that possible means of tracing the girl.

‘I and my assistants will start asking at the employment agencies, then,’ he said. ‘That will be a start. And at all the pawnbrokers and jewelers who might have bought the jewelry from her. I will need a description of each piece, sir.’

‘Do not waste your time,’ the earl said coldly. ‘She would not pawn any of it. Try the agencies. Try all likely employers. Find her.’

‘We certainly would not want a dangerous criminal let loose on any unsuspecting employer, sir,’ Mick agreed. ‘What name might she be using?’

The earl turned to face the Bow Street Runner. ‘What name?’

‘She used her real name at Lady Webb’s,’ Mick explained, ‘and at the hotel those first two nights. After that she disappeared. It has struck me, sir, that she has realized the wisdom of concealing her identity. What name might she use apart from her own? Does she have any middle names? Do you know her mother’s maiden name? Her maid’s name? Her old nurse’s? Any that I might try at the agencies, sir, if there is no record of a Sara Illingsworth.’

‘Her parents always called her Jane.’ The earl scratched his head and frowned. ‘Let me think. Her mother was a Donningsford. Her maid …’

Mick jotted down the names he was given.

‘We will find her, sir,’ he assured the Earl of Durbury again as he took his leave a few minutes later.

Though it was a strange business. A man’s only son was in a coma, one foot in the grave, the other on an icy patch. He might even be dead at this very moment. And yet his father had left him in order to search for the woman who had tried to kill him. But the man never left his hotel suite, as far as Mick knew. The would-be murderess had stolen a fortune, yet the earl suspected she might be seeking employment. She had stolen jewels, but his lordship was unwilling to describe them or to have them hunted for in the pawnshops.

A very strange business indeed.

After one week of moving between his bed upstairs, the sofa in the drawing room, and the chaise longue in the library, Jocelyn was colossally bored. Which was probably the understatement of the decade. His friends called frequently – every day, in fact – and brought him all the latest news and gossip. His brother called and talked about little else except the curricle race that Jocelyn would have given a fortune to be running himself. His sister called and talked incessantly on such scintillating topics as bonnets and her nerves. His brother-in-law made a few courtesy calls and discussed politics.

The days were long, the evenings longer, the nights endless.

Jane Ingleby became his almost constant companion. The realization could both amuse and irritate him. He began to feel like an old lady with a paid companion to run and fetch and hold the emptiness at bay.

She changed his bandage once a day. He had her massage his thigh once, an experiment he did not repeat despite the fact that her touch was magically soothing. It was also alarmingly arousing, and so he rebuked her for being so prudish as to blush and told her to sit down. She ran errands for him. She sorted his mail as he read it and returned it to Quincy with his instructions. She read to him and played cards with him.

He had Quincy in to play chess with him one evening and instructed her to sit and watch. Playing chess with Michael was about as exciting as playing cricket with a three-year-old. Though his secretary was a competent player, it never took great ingenuity to defeat him. Winning, of course, was always gratifying, but it was not particularly exhilarating when one could see the victory coming at least ten moves in advance.

After that Jocelyn played chess with Jane. She was so abysmally awful the first time that it was a measure of his boredom that he made her try it again the next day. She was almost ready that time to have given Michael a marginally competitive game, though certainly not him. The fifth time they played, she won.

She laughed and clapped her hands. ‘That is what comes, you see,’ she told him, ‘of being bored and toplofty and looking down your nose at me as if I were a speck on your boot and yawning behind your hand. You were not concentrating.’

All of which was true. ‘You will concede, then,’ he asked, ‘that I would have won if I had been concentrating, Jane?’

‘Oh, assuredly,’ she admitted. ‘But you were not and so you lost. Quite ignominiously, I might add.’

He concentrated after that.

Sometimes they merely talked. It was strange to him to talk to a woman. He was adept at chitchatting socially with ladies. He was skilled at wordplay with courtesans. But he could not recall simply talking with any woman.

One evening she was reading to him and he was amusing himself with the observation that with her hair ruthlessly scraped back from her face, her eyes were slanted upward at the corners. It was her little rebellion, of course, to make her head as unattractive as possible even without the aid of the cap, and he hoped uncharitably that it gave her a headache.

‘Miss Ingleby,’ he said with a sigh, interrupting her in the middle of a sentence, ‘I can listen no longer.’ Not that he had been doing much listening anyway. ‘In my opinion, with which you may feel free to disagree, Gulliver is an ass.’

As he had expected, her lips tightened into a thin line. One of his few amusements during the past week had been provoking her. She closed the book.

‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘you believe he should have trodden those little people into the ground because he was bigger and stronger than they.’

‘You are such a restful companion, Miss Ingleby,’ he said. ‘You put words into my mouth and thereby release me from the necessity of having to think and speak for myself.’

‘Shall I choose another book?’ she asked.

‘You would probably select a collection of sermons,’ he retorted. ‘No, we will talk instead.’

‘What about?’ she asked after a short silence.

‘Tell me about the orphanage,’ he said. ‘What sort of life did you have there?’

She shrugged. ‘There is not a great deal to tell.’

It must certainly have been a superior sort of orphanage. But even so, an orphanage was an orphanage.

‘Were you lonely there?’ he asked. ‘Are you lonely?’

‘No.’ She was not going to be very forthcoming with her personal history, he could see. She was not like many women – and men too, to be fair – who needed only the smallest encouragement to talk with great enthusiasm and at greater length about themselves.

‘Why not?’ he asked, narrowing his gaze on her. ‘You grew up without mother or father, brother or sister. You have come to London at the age of twenty or so, if my guess is correct, doubtless with the dream of making your fortune, but knowing no one. How can you not be lonely?’

She set the book down on the small table beside her and clasped her hands in her lap. ‘Aloneness is not always the same thing as loneliness,’ she said. ‘Not if one learns to like oneself and one’s own company. It is possible, I suppose, to feel lonely even with mother and father and brothers and sisters if one basically does not like oneself. If one has been given the impression that one is not worthy of love.’

‘How right you are!’ he snapped, instantly irritated.

He was being regarded from very steady, very blue eyes, he noticed suddenly.

‘Is that what happened to you?’ she asked.

When he realized just what it was she was asking, the intimately personal nature of the question, he felt such fury that it was on the tip of his tongue to dismiss her for the night. Her impertinence knew no bounds. But a conversation, of course, was a two-way thing, and he was the one who had tried to get a conversation going.

He never had conversations, even with his male friends. Not on personal matters. He never talked about himself.

Was that what had happened to him?

‘I was always rather fond of Angeline and Ferdinand,’ he said with a shrug. ‘We fought constantly, as I suppose most brothers and sisters do, though the fact that we were Dudleys doubtless made us a little more boisterous and quarrelsome than most. We also played and got into mischief together. Ferdinand and I were even gallant enough on occasion to take the thrashing for what Angeline had done, though I suppose we punished her for it in our own way.’

‘Why does being a Dudley mean that you must be more unruly, more vicious, more dangerous than anyone else?’ she asked.

He thought about it, about his family, about the vision of themselves and their place in the scheme of things that had been bred into them from birth onward, and even perhaps before then.

‘If you had known my father and my grandfather,’ he replied, ‘you would not even ask the question.’

‘And you feel you must live up to their reputations?’ she asked. ‘Is it from personal choice that you do so? Or did you become trapped in your role as eldest son and heir and eventually the Duke of Tresham yourself?’

He chuckled softly. ‘If you knew my full reputation, Miss Ingleby,’ he said, ‘you would not need to ask that question either. I have not rested on the laurels of my forebears, I assure you. I have sufficient of my own.’

‘I know,’ she said, ‘that you are considered more proficient than any other gentleman with a wide range of weapons. I know that you have fought more than one duel. I suppose they were all over women?’

He inclined his head.

‘I know,’ she said, ‘that you consort with married ladies without any regard to the sanctity of marriage or the feelings of the spouse you wrong.’

‘You presume to know a great deal about me,’ he said mockingly.

‘I would have to be both blind and deaf not to,’ she said. ‘I know that you look upon everyone who is beneath you socially – and that is almost everyone – as scions to run and fetch for you and to obey your every command without question.’

‘And without even a please or thank you,’ he added.

‘You engage in the most foolhardy wagers, I daresay,’ she said. ‘You have shown no concern this week over Lord Ferdinand’s impending curricle race to Brighton. He could break his neck.’

‘Not Ferdinand,’ he said. ‘Like me, he has a neck made of steel.’

‘All that matters to you,’ she said, ‘is that he win the race. Indeed, I do believe that you wish you could take his place so that you could break yours instead.’

‘There is little point in entering a race,’ he explained, ‘unless one means to win it, Miss Ingleby, though one also must know how to behave like a gentleman when one loses, of course. Are you scolding me, by any chance? Is this a gentle tirade against my manners and morals?’

‘They are not my concern, your grace,’ she said. ‘I am merely commenting upon what I have observed.’

‘You have a low opinion of me,’ he said.

‘But I daresay,’ she retorted, ‘my opinion means no more to you than the snap of your fingers.’

He chuckled softly. ‘I was different once upon a time, you know,’ he said. ‘My father rescued me. He made sure I took the final step in my education to become a gentleman after his own heart. Perhaps you are fortunate, Miss Ingleby, never to have known your father or mother.’

‘They must have loved you,’ she said.

‘Love.’ He laughed. ‘I suppose you have an idealized conception of the emotion because you have never known a great deal of it yourself, or of what sometimes passes for it. If love is a disinterested devotion to the beloved, Jane, then indeed there is no such thing. There is only selfishness, a dedication to one’s own comfort, which the beloved is used to enhance. Dependency is not love. Domination is not love. Lust is certainly not it, though it can be a happy enough substitute on occasion.’

‘You poor man,’ she said.

He found the handle of his quizzing glass and lifted it to his eye. She sat looking back at him, seemingly quite composed. Most women in his experience either preened or squirmed under the scrutiny of his glass. On this occasion its use was an affectation anyway. His eyesight was not so poor that he could not see her perfectly well without it. He let the glass fall to his chest.

‘My mother and father were a perfectly happy couple,’ he said. ‘I never heard them exchange a cross word or saw them frown at each other. They produced three children, a sure sign of their devotion to each other.’

‘Well, then,’ Jane said, ‘you have just disproved your own theory.’

‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘it was because they saw each other for only a few minutes three or four times a year. As my father came home to Acton Park, my mother would be leaving for London. As she came home, he would be leaving. A civil and amicable arrangement, you see.’ One he had thought quite normal at the time. It was strange how children who had known no different could adapt to almost any situation.

Jane said nothing. She sat very still.

‘They were wonderfully discreet too,’ he said, ‘as any perfect couple must be if the harmony of the marriage is to be maintained. No word of my mother’s legion of lovers ever came to Acton. I knew nothing of them until I came to London myself at the age of sixteen. Fortunately I resemble my father in physical features. So do Angeline and Ferdinand. It would be lowering to suspect that one might be a bastard, would it not?’

He had not spoken those words to hurt. He remembered too late that Jane Ingleby did not know her own parents. He wondered who had given her her last name. Why not Smith or Jones? Perhaps it was a policy of a superior orphanage to distinguish its orphans from the common run by giving them more idiosyncratic surnames.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am sorry. No child should have to feel so betrayed even when he is old enough, according to the world’s beliefs, to cope with the knowledge. It must have been a heavy blow to you. But I daresay she loved you.’

‘If the number and splendor of the gifts she brought with her from London are any indication,’ he said, ‘she doted on us. My father did not depend upon his months in London for pleasure. There is a picturesque cottage in a remote corner of Acton Park, Jane. A river flows at the foot of its back garden, wooded hills grow up around it. It is an idyllic setting indeed. It was home during several of my growing years to an indigent relative, a woman of considerable charm and beauty. I was sixteen years old before I understood just who she was.’

He had always intended to give the order to have that cottage pulled down. He still had not done so. But it was uninhabited now, and he had given his steward specific orders to spend not a single farthing on its upkeep. In time it would fall down from sheer neglect.

‘I am sorry,’ she said again as if she were personally responsible for his father’s lack of taste in housing his mistress – or one of them anyway – on his own estate with his children in residence there. But Jane did not know the half of it, and he was not about to enlighten her.

‘I have much to live up to, you see,’ he said. ‘But I believe I am doing my part in perpetuating the family reputation.’

‘You are not bound by the past,’ she told him. ‘No one is. Influenced by it, yes, perhaps almost overwhelmingly drawn to live up to it. But not compelled. Everyone has free will, you more than most. You have the rank, the wealth, the influence to live your own life your own way.’

‘Which, my little moralist,’ he said softly, narrowing his eyes on her, ‘is exactly what I am doing. Except now, of course. Such inaction as this is anathema to me. But perhaps it is a fitting punishment, would you not agree, for having taken my pleasure in the bed of a married woman?’

She flushed and looked down.

‘Does it reach your waist?’ he asked her. ‘Or even below?’

‘My hair?’ She looked back up at him, startled. ‘It is only hair. Below my waist.’

‘Only hair,’ he murmured. ‘Only spun gold. Only the sort of magic web in which any man would gladly become hopelessly caught and enmeshed, Jane.’

‘I have not given you permission for such familiarity, your grace,’ she said primly.

He chuckled. ‘Why do I put up with your impudence?’ he asked her. ‘You are my servant.’

‘But not your indentured slave,’ she said. ‘I can get up and walk out through that door any time I please and not come back. The few pounds you are paying me for three weeks of service do not give you ownership of me. Or excuse your impertinence in speaking with lascivious intent about my hair. And you may not deny that there was suggestiveness in what you said about it and the way you looked at it.’

‘Certainly I will not deny it,’ he agreed. ‘I try always to speak the truth, Miss Ingleby. Go and fetch the chess board from the library. We will see if you can give me a decent game tonight. And have Hawkins fetch the brandy while you are about it. I am as dry as a damned desert. And as prickly as a cactus plant.’

‘Yes, your grace.’ She got to her feet readily enough.

‘And I would advise you,’ he said, ‘not to call me impertinent again, Miss Ingleby. I can be pushed only so far without retaliating.’

‘But you are confined to the sofa,’ she said, ‘and I can walk out through the door at any time. I believe that gives me a certain advantage.’

One of these times, he thought as she vanished through the door – at least one time during the remaining two weeks of her employment – he was going to have the last word with Miss Jane Ingleby. He could not remember not having the last word with anyone, male or female, any time during the past ten years.

But he was relieved that their conversation had returned to its normal level before she left. He did not know quite how she had turned the tables on him before that. He had tried to worm out of her something about herself and had ended up telling her things about his childhood and boyhood that he did not care even to think about, let alone share with another person.

He had come very close to baring his heart.

He preferred to believe that he had none.