Leaning an elbow against the windowsill, Geoff demanded abruptly, "What were you discussing with Vaughn?"

"Certainly nothing of the nature you were discussing with Miss Fairley," Letty shot back.

"That," replied Geoff sharply, "is none of your affair."

"No, it's your affair, isn't it?"

"Coming over the jealous wife, my dear?" enquired Geoff, in a tone that could have corroded the iron railings around the door. "Don't you think that's a bit unconvincing under the circumstances? You're playing it a bit too brown."

"I'm not playing it, as you so eloquently put it, any way at all. Which is more than I can say for you! 'We're some little bit acquainted,'" Letty mimicked in a passable imitation of her husband's urbane drawl.

"While you were being entirely aboveboard, Mrs. Alsdale?"

Letty flushed, and Geoff felt a childish pleasure at having scored a hit.

Taking a corner of her black-dyed sleeve between his fingers, he rubbed the fabric. "What are you in mourning for, Mrs. Alsdale? Your lost freedom? Or were you planning to kill me off, and merely donned the black as an anticipatory measure?"

"For that sort of joyous occasion, I would have worn crimson." Letty jerked her sleeve out of his grasp, inexplicably angered by the intimate gesture. She glared mutinously up at him. "You should be thanking me for traveling under another name. Or you might have some explaining to do to your Miss Fairley. A wife would certainly get in the way of your courtship, now, wouldn't she?"

That wasn't all that a wife was likely to get in the way of. Any residual pleasure he might have derived from baiting Letty abruptly dissipated as the true consequences of her appearance struck him. All it would take was one injudicious word from Letty—to Lord Vaughn, perhaps—and the entire underpinning of the mission would come unmoored. Oh, there were undoubtedly ways around it; Geoff frowned as he tried to think of one. After their display of amorous intentions, it was too late to pass Jane off as a relative. Having her play his mistress would deny her and her chaperone entrйe into the drawing rooms of Dublin, effectively cutting off one of their most reliable sources of information. Miss Gilly Fairley and her aunt could conveniently disappear, to be replaced by some other combination of persons, but it was too late in the game for such a transformation. Her abrupt disappearance would raise questions, and a new persona would take time to develop, time they didn't have.

All of Geoff's frustration crackled through his voice as he rounded on his inconvenient little wife and demanded, "What in the devil possessed you to come out here?"

"I had something to tell you." She looked up at him, lips pressed together into a mask of self-mockery that made her look much older than her nineteen years. "It doesn't matter anymore. None of it does."

Geoff crossed his arms across his chest. "You're with child, aren't you?"

"What!"

Geoff's eyes lingered insultingly on Letty's lush bosom, which needed no help from ruffles to fill out the bodice of her dress. "Why else would you be so eager to seek the protection of my name? You needed a husband in a hurry, and I was there."

The words came out with much less conviction than Geoff had originally intended. It might have had something to do with the way Letty was staring at him, as though he were newly escaped from Bedlam.

"You think I'm with child?"

"That was the theory, yes," said Geoff, beginning to wonder how he had lost control of the conversation. This wasn't at all how he had envisioned her reacting. Tearful denials had been more the thing.

Letty shook her head disjointedly, looking anywhere but at Geoff. "This can't be happening," she muttered. "This just can't be happening. This isn't real life. It's…it's a Drury Lane melodrama!"

"So was your maneuvering me into marriage at the expense of your sister. Which play did you steal that from?"

"I most certainly did not…. May I point out that your coachman was the one who kidnapped me?"

"He couldn't have kidnapped you if you hadn't been there."

"An irrefutable piece of logic if ever there was," scoffed Letty.

"Fine," clipped Geoff. "Then you tell me what you were doing next to my carriage in the middle of the night."

"I was trying to protect my family's good name, which some people were doing their best to sully!"

"Oh, that makes sense. Save your family's good name by loitering about half-clothed in the wee hours of the morning."

It didn't help Letty's temper that the same objection had occurred to her. Several times. But what else was she supposed to have done under the circumstances? Roll over, go back to bed, and let Mary ruin herself? Blast it all, if he hadn't had the hare-brained notion of eloping with her sister, she wouldn't have been in that predicament in the first place.

"I—oh, why am I even bothering? What do I care for the good opinion of a philandering reprobate?"

Geoff itched to refute the charge, but when it came to a choice between the moral high ground and England, self-justification would have to wait. It galled him to be tarred with her brush, philanderer to her schemer, but there was nothing he could bloody well do about it.

That realization did nothing to improve his temper.

"An excellent point," he drawled, experiencing an entirely unjust satisfaction as Letty bristled at the insouciant response.

"Tell me," Letty demanded, "did you ever intend to marry my sister? Or were you going to carry her off and discard her when you tired of her?"

England was all very well and good, but some things were too much to be borne.

Geoff's hands closed into fists at his sides. He took a step closer, so close that the frill that edged her bodice brushed the folds of his cravat, and said, in the sort of implacable tone that preceded thrown gauntlets and swords at dawn, "I loved your sister."

"It didn't take you long to forget her."

"I—" Geoff broke off, hating the look of triumph on Letty's face at the telltale pause.

He hadn't forgotten Mary. He just hadn't thought about her much over the past week. The two were not the same thing. And whose fault was it that Mary had been driven from his mind? Not Miss Gilly Fairley's, certainly. Not even Napoleon Bonaparte's. It was all the fault of a stubborn woman with reddish hair, who persisted in turning up at the most inconvenient times and places and driving him utterly, bloody mad. Fine for her to twit him for forgetting Mary, when she was the one who had torn them apart. Geoff could feel his self-control beginning to fray, like a rope in the hands of a malicious child with a knife.

"At least I didn't steal my sister's betrothed," he snapped.

"You don't have a sister," flung back Letty.

"That," replied Geoff, a muscle beginning to tic dangerously in his cheek, "is not the point. The point is—" Geoff froze, arrested by a sound from outside the window.

"Ha!" retorted Letty triumphantly. "You don't even have a point, do you?"

"Shh!" Geoff flung up one hand to quiet her.

There it was again, a regular rhythmic tapping. With a muffled curse, Geoff whirled toward the window. Sure enough, there, just outside the glow cast onto the street by Mrs. Lanergan's brightly lit windows, a man with close-cropped dark hair was tapping his cane against the cobbles, deep in thought. And he was walking away.

"Don't you dare shush me!" Letty planted her hands on her hips. "I haven't even begun to tell you what I think of you."

"You'll have to begin again tomorrow," said Geoff, moving her rapidly aside. "We can finish our discussion then. Your servant, madam."

And with a bow so brief it was barely a nod, he was gone.

"What do you think you're—"

Letty bit off the angry words, partly because Lord Pinchingdale was already halfway across the room, but mostly because it was clear to the most intellectually challenged village idiot exactly what he was doing. He was leaving. Again.

How dared he run away just when she was winning the argument!

This time, she had had enough. She wasn't going to allow it. They were going to have it out here and now, or her name wasn't Letty Alsworthy…Alsdale…well, Letty.

Without pausing to grapple with the difficulties of identity, Letty wiggled and shoved her way through the crowd with a great deal less finesse than her perfidious husband. Mumbling, "Pardon me," and "I'm sorry," in a continuous monotone, she fought free of the crush, grabbing on to the handles of the drawing room doors with a huge gasp of relief.

Ha! She would show Geoffrey bloody Pinchingdale that he couldn't run away from her!

With a deep breath, she flung the portal wide and plunged into the hall—straight into a blue-and-scarlet mountain that grabbed her by the arms and wouldn't let her go.

Chapter Eleven

Why was it that whenever Letty Alsworthy turned up, everything went wrong?

Geoff swung himself down the front steps of Mrs. Lanergan's town house, landing lightly on the balls of his feet. Pausing, he peered down either side of the street. There was no sign of Emmet.

Geoff wished he could conclude that Emmet had just slipped around the back of the house, the better to conduct a clandestine meeting. Unfortunately, that theory was marred by the fact that when he had spotted him, Emmet had been heading away from the house. Unless it was merely a clever ploy to mislead pursuers, that could mean only one thing. The rendezvous was over. They'd come, they'd plotted, they'd left. And Geoff had missed it all. Every last syllable.

When he should have been scanning the room, he had been staring at his wife with Vaughn; when he should have been circulating through the crowd, he had been dragging his wife across the room; and when he should have been following Emmet to his rendezvous, he had been so busy slinging insults that Emmet and his contact could have had a revolutionary sing-along in the front hall and Geoff wouldn't have noticed. If it hadn't been for that rapping noise knocking him to his senses…

Over the throbbing of his thoughts, Geoff could still hear it, marking a measured rhythm against the cobblestone. Geoff stilled, willing it to be more than the pounding of his pulse or an aural illusion produced by his imagination. Holding his breath, he strained to listen. There it was again, a faint clicking in the distance. Emmet was still nearby.

Without wasting any more time, Geoff slipped off after the phantom thread of sound. It was coming not from the east, where Clanwilliam House and the Whaley mansion lorded it smugly over St. Stephen's Green, but from the west, the streets that led to the workers' districts just outside the bounds of the city proper. As he increased his pace, Geoff could just make out the dark form of Emmet ahead of him, taking the bend that led from Lower to Upper Kevin Street. Geoff didn't have high hopes that his pursuit of Emmet would lead to anything interesting—at least, anything more interesting than several new verses to "Lord Edward's Lament" and other fine examples of rebel song.

Geoff had followed Emmet along a similar route two nights before, down Thomas Street, through the White Bull Inn, and out a back door at that establishment, into a tiny yard that gave onto a nondescript house on Marshal Lane. Between dusk and dawn, Geoff had quietly searched the premises, taking note of the sacks of saltpeter in the cellar, ready to be mixed into gunpowder, the shrouded piles of muskets shoved beneath tables, the baskets of grenades hidden behind a false wall in the attic. And then there had been the pikes, thousands and thousands of pikes, stacked one on top of another in the loft, ready to be placed in the eager hands of volunteers.

There had been more pikes than guns. Geoff couldn't tell whether the profusion of pikes was a sign of lack of funds, since pikes could be manufactured easily and cheaply on the premises, with lumber provided by Miles Byrne from his brother's timber yard, or merely an indication that the more sophisticated weaponry was being hidden at another depot. Geoff knew there were others—he had searched two more the night before, one on South King Street, the other in the Double Inn on Winetavern Street, just opposite the majestic bulk of Christ Church. Both had been empty, only a trail of saltpeter and a lone grenade giving any indication of their prior purpose.