The Meecham mansion was one of London’s older, grander houses, and one of the few that still sat apart from the street, surrounded by its own paling and small parkland. It was a grand 17th century beauty, filled with beautiful paintings and portraiture that Toby would have loved to see, but he no longer allowed himself the dark pleasure of sliding unseen along people’s galleries on his way to and from their boudoirs.

This evening he stayed off the roof, preferring to find a good vantage point in the shrubbery, where he made himself only a little conspicuous—conspicuous enough for the thief to know where he was, but not so conspicuous that the authorities might find him before he could find the thief.

It was a delicate balance he attempted while trying to keep his neck out of a noose.

He sat quietly, resting comfortably against the wall of the house with his back in the crook of the chimney, and closed his eyes to better sort out the sounds of the night. Sounds of harness brass jangling in the street beyond the high stone wall. The clap of closing doors and footsteps on stairs within the house. The low moan of the wind across the chimney tops. The quiet, shuffling movement of the animals stabled in the nearby mews.

He opened his eyes, now adjusted to the biting dark of the cold, moonless night, and mentally went through his plan, sorting out where he would have entered the grounds, where he would have chosen to make his ascent of the drainpipes, or balconies, or whatever means the house presented.

He heard them before he saw them—muted crunches as they came across the gravel drive. Too many footfalls to be only one person.

And there they were—two large hulking shapes making low toward him. Two men too large to be successful rooftop thieves. Two men with knives already drawn.

It was going to be a brutal business.

Toby drew his own knife in readiness.

They came at him fast, with purpose—no hesitation, no shifting preliminaries. Their faces were blackened with burnt cork, but he could tell they knew him just as well as he knew them—his old shipmates, Bolter and Mott, come to give vent to their jealousies.

The more agile one—Mott—struck first, going for Toby’s hair, fisting it up to stretch his neck back—the better to silently slice his throat open.

Toby slashed upward with his own blade, slicing into the soft underside of the fellow’s arm—the hand in his hair immediately gave up the grip. He then used the only other weapon he had—his skull—smashing it hard into the bastard’s forehead, momentarily stunning him.

Bolter was the bigger, heavier one. But he was also slower, though he had strong, strangling hands that felt as if they could choke a bullock, let alone a man. Hands that wrapped hard around Toby’s neck.

Toby had to drop his knife to try to pry Bolter’s fingers off, to pull some air down his throat and into his lungs, but the fellow was relentless, holding on with the strength of a butcher, steadily throttling the life from him.

Out of the corner of his eye Toby saw Mott stagger to his feet and raise up his cosh or pipe, or whatever the persistent bastard had armed himself with.

Toby did the only thing he could—he pushed himself into the hands around his neck with just enough force that Bolter reversed his effort to hold Toby at bay, and pulled him closer. Just in time for Mott’s strike to land with deadly force.

Toby heard the sick crack of bone, but miraculously it wasn’t his bone—the pain he expected never came. Instead, the beefy hands around his neck went slack. Bolter sagged down on top of Toby with dead, crushing weight.

Toby managed to slide out from under him, letting the body down in a scattering of gravel, and turned to meet the stunned Mott still holding the pipe.

In his horror, Mott turned and fled at the first shrill screech of a constable’s whistle. A barrage of footfalls sounded on the gravel from every direction, while lights flared from the house, as if they had been in waiting to spill out into the yard, cutting off potential paths, blocking Toby from following his would-be attacker.

But he knew a better escape. Always three ways in and five ways out.

Toby retreated into the dark of the shrubbery at the base of the chimney, and immediately made use of the irregular stonework as footholds. He was up and flattened into the crook of the chimney top in a trice, well out of sight of the constabulary below who clustered like flies around the body of the dead man. As if that poor fellow were the answer to their search.

As if there weren’t another still loose in the night.

* * *

Cally did not miss him in the least. She had not spent most of her waking hours thinking about him, worrying about him, heartsick over her mistake.

And what a dreadful mistake it was.

Because the headline blaring across the frontispiece of the Tattler being hawked by a lad on the street corner proclaimed that the Mayfair jewel thief was dead.

Cally felt an awful moment of stunned numbness before the pain set in, as if something within her chest had torn in two, and was spreading hot poison inside her.

She had to grasp her mama’s arm to steady herself.

“Cally?”

It could not be. She wouldn’t allow it.

“Cally? Where are you going?”

She forced herself to walk the three paces to the corner and dig the necessary coins out of her purse to buy the broadsheet, but she could barely steady her hands enough to read the lines that proclaimed the plague of jewelry thefts that had beset society was not the work of the renowned Scottish thief, but another, who had met his just end, his skull crushed after falling from a Mayfair rooftop.

Now it was mama who clutched Cally’s arm. “Who is it? Is he dead?”

No need to ask who ‘he’ was.

“No.” Cally was too sick with relief to say more for a long moment. She could feel the awful emotion wash out of her, as if someone had pulled the plug on all her fears. She had to take a deep, fortifying breath before she could continue. “It says his name was Bolter, and that he worked at the wine merchant’s warehouse on the Strand. It says that he was a career criminal of long repute.”

Mama clasped a hand to her chest. “Thank goodness.”

Yes, Cally agreed. She would thank goodness, or badness, or wrongness—however it was that Tobias McTavish had not been involved, she was glad of it.

Glad she had been wrong about him.

“You’re going to have to apologize to him.”

“I know.” Although knowing it only made Cally dread it more. She was particularly bad at apologies—she had too much experience of being right.

“You were wrong about him.”

“I know,” Cally repeated with a little more heat. She was also very bad at taking criticism—especially of the I-told-you-so variety.

“Hugh had the measure of him—he said McTavish was an honest man.”

“I know,” Cally repeated for what she hoped was the last time. “He was right, and I was wrong, and I will make my apology, just as I ought. You needn’t tease any further. I’ll make it the handsomest apology ever.”

“You do that, lamb. And while you’re at it—do figure out how you managed to fall in love with such an inappropriate man.”