Esme placed the final items in her traveling trunk, closed the latch, then stood back and surveyed her empty side of the room. Only one object remained on her bed: the letter from her sisters that she had read so many times it had gotten worn out from reading.

When she had received it, she had not been surprised. Of course Charlie had found them wonderful lodgings, and of course he had paid for their journey home, and of course he had been the perfect gentleman, seeing to their comforts and making them happy.

How exactly he had come to encounter and then recognize them was not entirely clear: Mary’s letter referred vaguely to nasty Mrs. McDade and a scene on the street. But it hardly mattered. He had helped them because that was simply what he did. He was wonderful.

Picking up the letter for the last time, she pressed it to her lips, then cast it upon the grate. The simmering coals swallowed it in a quick burst of flame.

She sniffed.

“Are you so despondent to leave that you are weeping?” Adela said behind her.

Esme’s flatmate stood in the doorway to their bedchamber.

“Not at all.” Only to leave him behind, once and for all. Where she was going now, she would begin anew. No more useless infatuations. No more unrequited love. No more heartbreak. Only learning and creating and grand adventure.

Adela threw her arms around her and hugged her tightly.

“Well, I will miss you,” Adela declared. “And so will Minnie. And I’ll wager nasty Josiah Junior will miss you too, even if he does not realize it. That lecher has been eyeing you since the moment you returned from Scot—Oh!” She released Esme and darted around her to the window. “Good Lord,” she exclaimed. “It’s Charlie Brittle!”

Esme’s heart did a thick, hard turnabout. She went to the window and over Adela’s shoulder looked down into the street.

There he was, standing before the door of his family’s print shop, beneath the sign that read Brittle and Sons, Printers and looking up at her window as she had always dreamed, wished, and hoped he would yet never had.

“He’s seen me!” Adela grabbed the broken latch and flung open the window. “Charlie!” she shouted into the street.

“Good day, Adela,” he said.

“Where have you been?” Adela called down. People walking and riding by glanced at her, then at him.

“I will be glad to tell you. But first, would you be so kind as to ask Miss Astell if she will allow me a moment of her time?”

Adela swung her head around and pinned Esme with a wide-eyed stare. Esme swallowed over her careening heartbeats, nodded at him, and went out of the room and down the stairs. Opening the door onto the street she came face-to-face with him.

The dye had gone from his hair and it was rakishly long now and a bit tousled, the sandy blond striated with gold. His beautiful eyes looked fierce.

“Why aren’t you in Paris?”

“Good day to you too, sir.”

“Why aren’t you in Paris?”

“I am not going to Paris.”

“But it is your dream.”

“It was. But I realized it was the wrong dream. I am going to Provence, where I will study with Monsieur Cadence, who has taken me on as his apprentice.”

“Are you happy with this?”

“Yes. Very, very happy.”

His shoulders seemed to settle. “Then I am happy as well.”

“Why are you here? Shouldn’t you be in Edinburgh? Or already on your way to America?”

“No. Esme, I am sorry I am so late.”

“Late? Late for what?”

“I would have been here sooner, but I spent the past several weeks searching for Pate.”

“Pate! But why?”

“I had to free the others he held captive.”

It felt as though someone were squeezing her heart. Of course he had risked his freedom for that. “Did you succeed?”

“Yes, although not as I expected. Esme, he was dying. He had known he was dying for months, long before we made port in Scotland. When I found him, he barely had enough breath to tell me he was leaving everything to me—his ship, his gold, his property. Everything.”

She gaped.

“That was my reaction too,” he said. “He said the dog, the money, it had all been a test.”

“A test of what?”

“Of my mettle. My resourcefulness. My desperation to be free of him, perhaps. I don’t know. He died without explaining.”

“I—I don’t know what to say. I will not wish you my sympathy. But, Charlie, what will you do with this ill-gotten wealth?”

“I have given it to charitable foundations, all but a parcel of land on the coast of Devonshire that his solicitor insists was kept scrupulously free of any taint of criminal gains. Apparently,” he said with a slight smile, “it was his grandmother’s property and Pate had a fondness for her good opinion of him.”

She laughed. “How remarkable.”

“But when I said I was sorry for being late,” he said, “I meant five years late. I am sorry, Esme, that in all those years when you were only four doors away, I never told you—showed you—how I felt about you.”

“About . . . me?” she whispered.

“I never looked at you,” he said. “I never let myself look at you, not after the first few months after you arrived in London when each time I looked at you I got confused.”

“What do you mean, confused?”

“If you knew how many times my heart said, ‘carry those heavy packages for her’ or ‘throw your coat over that puddle before she wets her feet’ or ‘offer to repair the broken window in her flat’ while my hands said, ‘grab her and pin her against the wall and kiss her’—but my head said ‘she couldn’t want you.’ So quiet and self-possessed, you didn’t need helping or protecting—or me. You didn’t need anyone.”

“Everyone needs someone,” she said.

“I know one thing: that I need you. I am in love with you, Esme. Perhaps you will think me too hasty in expressing my—”

Grabbing his lapel, she pressed her body to his and with her other hand pulled him down to kiss her. Then his arms were wrapped around her and her arms were twined about his neck and their mouths were deliriously declaring their love in hungry kisses and tender kisses and yet more rapturous kisses.

“Will you go to live in Devonshire now?” she eventually said with the little breath she had remaining.

He looked into her eyes. “I will go wherever you go. If you will have me.”

With a burst of joyful laughter and further enthusiastic kisses she showed him how thoroughly she would have him at the first possible opportunity.

“But what of Mrs. Wallis and her collection?” she said. “Will you abandon her?”

“She and her collection are in good hands. After agreeing to sell the most valuable pieces, she has decided to keep the remainder and hire a quartet of lads to index it for the use of scholars.”

“A quartet. Rory and the boys! But do they even read?”

He smiled.

“Oh, that is her actual project,” she said. “She intends to school them.”

“Under cover of honest work.”

She ran a fingertip along his jaw.

“And you, pirate, what honest work will you do now that you are a free man?”

“I believe I will look for work in France. Southern France, in particular. I suspect someone there has need of a man who can set type, curate books, and swab decks.”

She lifted her face to be kissed and then whispered into his ear the words she had whispered against the window pane in her bedchamber and the pillow and the sweet summer wind hundreds of times: “I love you, Charles Westley Brittle.”