Page 33 of Who Cries for the Lost

Isabella flushed and looked away. “I never told Monty about Miles’s visit. We’re just friends, of course—were just friends. Miles and I, I mean. But Monty... He doesn’t understand. He gets... jealous. He can’t know. He can’t.”

Hero kept her gaze on the other woman’s face, her voice low and even. “Sedgewick didn’t come to see Sir Montgomery, did he? He came to see you.”

Isabella brought up one hand to shade her eyes, then let it fall. “All right, yes! I told you: We were good friends. But there was nothing more to it, I swear!”

“Did Sedgewick tell you how this list happened to come into his possession?”

“He said it was compiled by someone named Fouché. But I didn’t ask how he got it, no.”

Hero felt her breath catch. Once, Joseph Fouché had been the Minister of Police under Napoléon. A powerful, corrupt, brutal, and duplicitous man, Fouché had controlled an infamous network of agents and spies. He’d lost power even before the fall of the Emperor, but at one point before Napoléon’s return from Elba, Fouché had been attempting to ingratiate himself with the Bourbons. Hero could see him having once compiled such a list in an attempt to work his way back to power with the newly restored regime.

“Do you know why Miles was in Vienna?” Hero asked.

“Yes, of course. He told everyone he was going to Salzburg to see the site of some famous witch burnings, but that was just a cover story. The government needed someone whom neither Napoléon’s agents nor the Allies would suspect was actually there for a different reason entirely. He did that sort of thing, you see. He missed the excitement of what he used to do in the Army.”

“He told you that?”

“Yes.”

It occurred to Hero that Miles Sedgewick sounded like a man dangerously incapable of keeping a secret. But all she said was, “Precisely who sent him to Vienna?”

“I always assumed it was either the Foreign Office or the War Office, but I’m not sure he ever actually said.” She sucked in a quick, shaky breath. “You will tell Lord Devlin about the list, won’t you? But he can’t tell anyone the information came from me. It’s vitally important that my name be kept out of this.” Her features hardened. “If it does come out, I’ll say it’s all a hum, that he simply made it up.”

“I’ll tell him. But you must realize that it may come out eventually, whether you wish it to or not.”

“It can’t! It simply can’t!” she said, her eyes flashing and her jaw clenching with determination, as if she could somehow direct the course of events simply by the strength of her will.

Some ten minutes later, Hero was standing beside the drawing room window, her gaze on the gray, rain-washed street below, when Devlin came in, his face and boots still glistening with wet.

“I’ve just had a rather troubling conversation with a scholar named Dudley Tiptoff,” he said, going to hold his hands out to the fire.

“Oh?” said Hero. “Well, wait until you hear about my visit from Isabella McPherson.”

Chapter 19

Sebastian’s relationship with the man he’d long called Father had always been complicated.

Of the four children born to the Earl of Hendon and his lovely, wayward Countess, Sophia, only two now survived: Amanda, their eldest child and only daughter, and Sebastian, the youngest son, who’d always been the least like the Earl. The son who’d grown tall and lean rather than big and stocky like his father and elder brothers; the son whose eyes were a strange yellow rather than the famous St. Cyr blue; the son whose very existence sometimes seemed to cause Hendon pain.

Sebastian was nearly thirty before he understood the reason behind any of it. But the truth behind Sebastian’s paternity had never stopped the Earl from accepting him as his son and—after the death of Sebastian’s last brother when Sebastian was eleven—as his heir. And it hadn’t stopped Hendon from forming a deep and powerful affection for the brilliant, quicksilver changeling to whom he’d given his name.

But the bond between the two men had come close to rupturing more than once over the past several years. And much of the turmoil between them revolved around the beautiful Irish-born actress Kat Boleyn, whom Sebastian had once planned to marry and whom they now knew to be Hendon’s natural daughter.

Profoundly troubled by the threat to Hendon implied by what Hero had learned from Isabella McPherson, Sebastian took his carriage to Hendon’s town house in Grosvenor Square, only to be told that the Earl was out. He then tried to see Kat, but she was in rehearsals and he couldn’t begin to have a private conversation with her. Frustrated, he considered trying to chase Hendon down, then gave up the idea and directed his coachman instead to Carlton House, the Prince Regent’s overdecorated palace in Pall Mall, where private chambers were reserved specifically for the use of the Regent’s powerful cousin, Lord Jarvis.

Ushered into his lordship’s presence by an underfed, pale-faced, nervous clerk, Sebastian found his father-in-law seated at a delicate French desk, his quill scratching furiously across a sheet of paper. “One moment,” he said without looking up.

Sebastian went to stand beside the window, his gaze on the rain-lashed forecourt below. He turned when he heard Jarvis set aside his pen and sit back in his chair.

“I presume you’re here for some reason you consider extraordinarily pressing?” said Jarvis.

Sebastian leaned his hips back against the windowsill and crossed his arms at his chest. “I know why Sedgewick was in Vienna.”

“You do, do you? And how do you come to know that?”

“Does it matter?”

“It might.”

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