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She was about to sink into rising tide of her self-pity when the drawing room door swung open, slamming against the far wall.

Caroline jumped, spilling scalding-hot tea down the front of her gown. She looked up to see William, his hair and cravat tragically askew, stalking toward her.

His face was lit with—wait, was that
joy
?

Quickly she wiped her eyes, ignoring the sting of the hot tea seeping against her skin.

“I’ve found it!” William lifted her from the settee and squeezed her so hard she thought her eyeballs might pop out of her head. “The diamond! Caroline, I’ve found the diamond! And I’ve got a plan to get it back.”

Caroline blinked. For a moment her heart stopped beating altogether; her lungs burned.

“Is that,” she wheezed, “what you were doing, in your study?”

William set her down, shoving a sheaf of papers into her hand. “It’s taken me all morning and afternoon to devise it. You see, Avery uncovered a bit of gossip about old Louis, the one who’s calling himself king now, that he likes to watch women—”

“Wait,” Caroline said, blinking. “King Louis? As in—?”

“Yes,
that
King Louis. He’s the seventeenth’s younger brother, the one who lost his head.” William waved away Caroline’s questions. “Anyway, you know he’s in exile here in England, and I saw him last night, at White’s, and I overheard him talking about the diamond. He knows where it is!”

Caroline peered dubiously at her wild-haired brother. Dark stubble covered his chin and cheeks. “Are you sure that’s what you heard? You’ll have to forgive my assumption, dear brother, but you haven’t been exactly of sound mind these past days. An exiled would-be king, one you found at White’s, willing to spew his secrets in public? Sounds rather . . . interesting.”

“Interesting?”

Caroline coughed. “Farfetched.”

William clapped a hand to his forehead and rolled his eyes, a gesture Caroline was quite familiar with from their days in the schoolroom. William still labored, sadly, under the delusion that he was the cleverer of the Townshend children.

Caroline let it go, just this once.

“An earl in need of neither fortune nor fame, stealing a fifty-carat diamond in front of five hundred members of the beau monde—that, dear sister, is farfetched.”

“Yes,” Caroline said. “But that’s you.”

Even as William grinned, his dark eyes were serious. He took both her hands in his, crumpling the pages in her hand. “I understand I do not deserve your trust, Caroline—”

“You don’t. You still haven’t apologized, you know, for almost killing my—er—Mr. Lake.”

“I know.” The grin devolved into a smirk. “But that apology is going to take hours, days even, and we haven’t the time. Hope’s fortunes fall by the minute, as do Lady Violet’s. I won’t see her fall into penury on my behalf. Not after . . . well, everything that I’ve done. If all goes to plan, I’ll have the gem back in Hope’s pocket by week’s end.”

Caroline’s heart leapt into her throat.
By week’s end.
That meant Henry still had a fighting chance, that their plot to defeat Woodstock might actually work.

For the first time in what seemed an eternity, the warmth of hope peeked around the great mass of her frustration and hurt. All this time she’d ssumed the worst, and had held little faith that either she or Henry would meet with a happy ending.

And now there was a chance that Henry might, if all went well, and Woodstock was bested. He could trade the diamond to the French, and turn the tide of the war.

She ignored the stab of sorrow that pierced this sudden onslaught of relief. Henry’s happy ending meant he would
successfully complete his assignment, and go back to Paris to continue his work there. Henry would leave London, and Caroline.

It was becoming more difficult to deny the deep and lovely and frightening things she felt for him. Like how she would miss him all over again, when he was gone.

But she would deny them as long as she could, for in admitting these feelings, Caroline would expose herself to the eviscerating heartache of losing him once more. She would become a traitor to herself, to everything she had worked for, to every promise she had made.

There was no future to be had with Henry Beaton Lake. They each had chosen their paths. It was too late to change course now. Not after all that had happened.

But that didn’t mean she couldn’t help him find the diamond, and in so doing outwit Woodstock, and use the jewel instead to save the lives of Henry’s fellow soldiers, Mr. Moon included. It was what she owed him, for keeping faith in her all these years, for aiming wide when William did anything but.

And so Caroline untangled herself from William’s grasp and looked down at the pages, scattered with diagrams, timetables, maps. “Tell me more about this plan,” she said. “Where is it, the French Blue?”

“Some jeweler or another has it—Eliason, that’s what Louis called him. Must’ve bought the diamond off the acrobats. Anyway. The king and his brother, the Comte d’Artois, are to meet him later this week to purchase it.”

“Right,” she said. “So we follow the king and Artois, and buy it from Eliason ourselves?”

“Buy the French Blue, or steal it.”

Caroline arched a brow. “Stealing it once was enough, don’t you think? Better we come up with a new trick.”

William shrugged. “Perhaps. Either way, old King Louis is going to lead us to the French Blue. After we lure him into a trap and capture him, of course.”

“Of course,” she replied. “Shall we drug him as well? Tie him up, slap him for good measure?”

She meant it as a joke; this plan as it now stood was nothing if not absurd, but William tapped a finger to his lips, thoughtfully. “Excellent idea, Caroline. We shall indeed.”

William pointed to the papers in her hand. “We’ll add it to what I have here. Genius, if I don’t say so myself. Look, we’ll decorate the house in the guise of a—um—house of ill repute, and lure the king there under the pretense of watching some lovely ladies perform, and then we’ll drug him . . .”

Thirty-six

Hanover Square, Brook Street

Five Days Later

T
he Earl of Harclay’s plan was as exceedingly absurd in execution as it was on paper.

It was all Henry could do not to roll his eyes as one disaster after another befell their motley crew of players: Violet, looking worse for the wear, and discreetly casting up her accounts in the water closet every quarter hour; Lady Sophia, her cousin, who managed to drug the earl instead of the king, now sobbing quietly in a corner; Thomas Hope, mooning over Sophia as she sobbed; and then there was the earl himself, dressed as Achilles (for God knows what reason) in a breastplate with egregiously erect nipples.

The idea that the French Blue was found, and within his grasp, was the only thing that kept Henry from going mad. That, and Caroline’s presence.

Though she was vaguely costumed as some Greek goddess or another, she wore her shimmering pink toga well; her
cheeks flushed a matching shade when she met Henry’s eye across the room.

Heavens, but she was lovely. He longed to speak with her, if only to ask how she had been, and if she finished that terrible book already.

But what would it do, to ask her these questions, but deepen the agony of their inevitable parting? These past days, as tonight’s moment of judgment approached, an increasing sense of dread had beleaguered Henry, and kept him awake at night. There were too many moving parts, too many risks. This would not end well; not for Henry, not for Caroline. Probably not for Mr. Moon, either, poor bastard. And he did not want to frighten her with his feelings of helplessness. It was better if he stayed away, as she had asked him to from that first encounter at Thomas Hope’s ball.

Besides, the both of them were kept occupied by the evening’s seemingly endless string of ridiculous tragedies. Even as she flitted capably about the room, he could tell by the set of her mouth that she shared in Henry’s complete and utter lack of enthusiasm for this nonsensical scheme.

Henry watched her, wishing all the while he could grab her, and together they could steal away into the summer night’s velvety warmth.

But he was needed; it was time to move the Bourbon King, Louis XVIII, toward the front door. To say Louis was fat would be like saying the earl’s plan was “somewhat flawed”: so gross an understatement as to be an outright lie.

This man was
enormous
. His arms and legs stuck out from the bulbous mass of his belly like sticks from a pudding. Holding him at gunpoint—“What?” Henry had asked, releasing the safety on his pistol. “He isn’t exactly cooperating, is he?”—made him sweat profusely, his powdered wig sticking to his forehead.

His brother, the Comte d’Artois, was no better. After shoving King Louis into the first of two hired hackneys brought round to the earl’s residence—Henry had recruited the drivers from among the most discreet of Mr. Moon’s men—the lot of them made for the city. There, using information begrudgingly provided by Louis, they met with Artois at a darkened corner;
the comte held in his pocket the twenty-thousand-pound note he planned to exchange for the French Blue.

Henry coaxed him into the hack beside King Louis, again at gunpoint; despite lacking a kingdom and a country, the royals proved overly familiar with giving orders, rather than taking them. The two of them, Louis and Artois, were like bewigged, blubbering hippopotamuses.

Hippopotamuses in whose meaty hands the fate of all those gathered here rested.

Henry tugged a hand through the hair at the nape of his neck and let out a short, hot breath. Why they didn’t entrust the diamond’s retrieval to him and Mr. Moon in the first place, he hadn’t a clue. It would have been easier, and far more discreet. They would have a chance—a small chance, but a chance nonetheless—of success.

As things stood now, Henry had a better chance of being eaten by Artois than anyone, including the earl, had of retrieving the diamond.

The knot in Henry’s belly tightened. He reached up and pounded the roof, signaling the driver.

King Louis swore this jeweler of his—the mysterious Mr. Eliason, the one who apparently had the diamond—was holed up on a ship in the Docklands.

Henry hated the idea of traveling to London Docks, and at darkest night. Never mind the pickpockets and cutthroats that populated the nearby wharves; he feared the Marquess of Woodstock might materialize from the darkness and snatch Caroline so quickly, so silently, that Henry could do naught to stop him.

But Caroline’s brother the earl would not be thwarted, even as he was ill with the aftereffects of his accidental poisoning, and so to the docks they went.

The stench rose up like a fog from the Thames as the hackneys approached. By now Henry’s heart was clambering up and down his rib cage. If Louis was telling the truth, they were close, very close, to the French Blue. Henry’s every worry, every fear, could be erased in a single stroke, but he was not so foolish, nor so hopeful, as to believe that luck was on their side.

Still, even if the jewel was beyond his grasp, that didn’t mean he couldn’t protect Caroline. She rode in the hackney
behind his; the moment they reached their destination, Henry leapt through the door and waited for Caroline to alight, following her closely as they made their way onto the wharf.

“Is everything all right?” she whispered.

“Hardly,” he replied. “Stay close.”

The blackness was complete here, blurred by the lantern Thomas Hope held at his shoulder. The only sounds were the limp rush of the Thames, the snap and grate of ships in their docks; no one dared make a noise, their footfalls muted. It was humid, the air, and Henry’s palm felt clammy against the warm metal of his pistol as he held it in the waistband of his breeches.

King Louis led them to the end of the wharf, before he turned to the small crowd gathered behind him.

“We cannot take all of you,” he said in heavily accented English. “Eliason is a greedy man but he is not stupid. If he sees so many coming, he will turn up his tail and run.”

Artois nodded, chins quivering in agreement. “Yes, he will run. We will only take two.”

Henry’s throat seized with rage. He was so close, so
very close
, to the French Blue, and now he was being turned away, told to entrust its retrieval to these idiots.

He had half a mind to leap past the royals and find Eliason’s ship himself. He knew the jeweler would use a sloop, something fast and low in the water, probably something old, inconspicuous. It would not be difficult to find. Doubtless Henry could outwit and outsize Eliason, and any goons he employed as security. Lake could bully the jeweler into handing over the diamond; he could have the French Blue in his pocket in a quarter of an hour, maybe less. Free Moon and be done with the whole thing.

But that would mean leaving Caroline.

And Henry wasn’t about to do that, not here, not in this godforsaken swampland. Who would defend her, should Woodstock appear out of the ether? Certainly not her brother, as lovesick and half-dead as he was; and Thomas Hope was, well, hopeless—thoroughly occupied with Lady Sophia’s ample bosom.