Geoff's wedding, to be precise.

Or, as it was increasingly looking, Geoff's somewhat delayed wedding. Geoff filed it away as one more grievance to be taken up against Bonaparte, preferably personally, with a small cannon.

With a sigh, Geoff held out his hand.

"'Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,'" he muttered.

"My lord?" The courier gave him a hard look.

"Give me the letter and I'll pen a reply," Geoff translated. Signaling to a waiting footman, Geoff instructed in a low voice, "Go to MacTavish and tell him to go on ahead with the carriage as planned. I'll catch him up at the Oxford Arms. Tell him to give the lady my apologies and let her know that I'll be with her as soon as duty permits."

Mary would understand. And if she didn't, he would make it up to her. She had mentioned that Pinchingdale House needed redecorating—he rather liked his study the way it was, but if Mary wanted to drape it in pink silk printed with purple pansies, he wouldn't say a word. Well, maybe not purple pansies. A man had to draw the line somewhere.

Cracking the seal of the paper in his hands, Geoff quickly scanned the contents. They were, as he had suspected, in code, a series of numbers marching alongside Greek letters that had nothing to do with their Roman counterparts. A month ago, a note delivered within London, carried less than a mile by a trusted—if not too intelligent—subordinate of the War Office would never have elicited such elaborate precautions.

Of course, a month ago, England and France had still been observing a precarious peace. That hadn't stopped Bonaparte from flooding the English capital with French spies, but they had grown decidedly bolder since the formal declaration of war. Even Mayfair, heart of England's aristocracy, no longer provided a haven. A mere three weeks ago, one of the Office's more agile agents had been found, a well-placed hole in his back, sprawled on the paving stones outside of Lord Vaughn's London mansion. Whichever way one looked at it, the new precautions made sense.

They were also a bloody nuisance.

A message in code meant that it would have to be decoded. Even knowing the key, decoding the message and coding an answer in return would take at least half an hour.

As if on cue, the minute hand jerked into the upright position, and a pangent ponging noise rousted out the echoes from their shadowy corners.

Refolding the note, Geoff said in a matter-of-fact voice, "This may take some time. If you'd like to take some refreshment in the kitchen…"

"I'll wait here, my lord."

Geoff nodded in acknowledgment and turned on his heel, setting off through a succession of unused rooms to his study. He knew the route well enough to make the branch of candles in his hand redundant, as his legs, without conscious direction from his mind, skirted small tables and pedestals bearing classical busts.

His boots clattered unevenly on the shiny parquet floor of a ballroom that hadn't seen a ball since Geoff was in the nursery, across the fading Persian carpets of a drawing room whose drapes had been drawn for two decades, through a state dining room glistening with silver and hung with crystal that had seated its last serving back in the days when men affected red heels and women wore skirts that spanned the width of a stair. The Sabine women, painted in mural along the sides of the room, smirked at Geoff as he passed, but he didn't notice them any more than he noticed the lowering portraits of his ancestors or simpering French shepherdesses that graced the walls of the silent music room.

Shutting the door of his study firmly behind him, Geoff crossed to his desk, removing the ormolu ornament on the left-hand leg with one economical movement. From the tiny cavity, he wiggled out a closely written sheet of paper, screwing the fitting back into place with a practiced flick of the wrist. In contrast to the rest of the house, his study showed signs of recent habitation. A half-empty decanter stood on a round table by the long French windows, estate accounts warred for space on the desk with the latest editions of the weekly newssheets, and the broken bindings on the long wall of books provided silent testimony that they served for use rather than ornament.

From the row of broken bindings, Geoff drew an elderly copy of Virgil's Aeneid. That particular work had been chosen on the theory that the French, being a simpleminded sort of people, would never expect a code premised on Greek letters to lead to a Latin poem, and would fritter their time fruitlessly away trolling for hidden meanings in obscure fragments of plays by Sophocles. It had worked brilliantly so far; Geoff's Paris informant assured him that agents of the Ministry of Police had commandeered all the available copies of Plato's dialogues, and that there was scarcely a volume of Aristophanes to be found in all of Paris.

No more or less battered than any of the other books on the shelf, the poem's margins were filled with what appeared, to the casual eye, to be nothing more than schoolboy scribbles, scraps of translation jostled against fragments of amateur poetry and scrawled notes to a classroom companion complaining about the schoolmaster and contemplating mischief. Although the ink had been carefully faded to give the impression of age, none of them dated back further than the previous year. Geoff was nothing if not thorough.

Shifting impatiently from one foot to the other, he spread Wickham's note and the paper bearing the key side by side. The first number in Wickham's cipher brought him to "souls drifting like leaves through the underworld."

"Leave," wrote Geoff with one hand, flipping to the next indicated page with the other.

As codes went, it wasn't perfect. Virgil had failed to anticipate the existence of Prinny or of Bonaparte, and words like "canon" and "artillery" translated oddly from their archaic counterparts. But it did have the benefit of having baffled Bonaparte's agents since the League of the Purple Gentian had first put it into practice. Before that, it had worked just as effectively as a means to bedevil their tutors at Eton, men considerably better versed in the classics than Bonaparte. Or, at least, so they claimed when parents came visiting. Geoff had always had his doubts.

Within ten minutes, the tattered volume was back on the shelf, and Geoff held a heavily marked-up page that had reduced itself to the message "Leave for Eire soonest. Situation urgent. See early tomorrow for instructions." It would have been only eight minutes if he hadn't wasted two precious minutes puzzling over the word "air," alternately translating it as "ere" and "e'er" before hitting on Eire. Both "early" and "soonest" were unmistakable. Both had been heavily underscored.

Ireland wasn't the place Geoff would have chosen for his honeymoon—he had cherished romantic images of bearing his bride off for a tour of the Lake District, where they could dally among Norman ruins and read poetry by the waterside—but years of managing the affairs of the League of the Purple Gentian had taught Geoff the importance of flexibility. Plans were all very well and good, but homicidal maniacs brandishing swords generally didn't take it kindly when you informed them that they were supposed to be rushing at you from the other side of the room.

Besides, reflected Geoff with a rakish grin, all one really needed for a honeymoon was a bed and a bride. And he was willing to compromise on the former.

Confining himself to essentials, Geoff jabbed his quill into the inkpot and wrote quickly, "Some difficulties. Explain tomorrow."

Wickham, Geoff thought, neatly transcribing his words into a meaningless mess of numbers and symbols that took up far more space than their content deserved, was not going to be overjoyed with the sudden addition of an extra party. But that was something to be hashed out in person, not crunched into code. Rapidly reducing Wickham's note to ash, Geoff dribbled sealing wax on the folded page, stamped it shut with his ring, and looked triumphantly at the clock. Ha! Only a quarter past the hour.

Geoff pushed away from the desk and made purposefully for the door, threading his way back through the empty rooms that wouldn't be empty once he brought Mary home as his bride. If he rode quickly, he might be able to catch the more cumbersome coach before it even reached the Oxford Arms. His blood—and other parts of his anatomy—quickened at the thought of Mary already tucked away into his coach, speeding through the night to be by his side. He still couldn't believe, even with the preparations made, the coach dispatched, the precious special license crackling in his pocket, and the parson summoned, that she had really chosen him.

Geoff remembered her as he had first seen her two years ago at the start of her first Season. Two years, one month, and three days to be precise, since time as Geoff reckoned it had never been quite the same again. There might have been the proverbial clap of thunder, but Geoff couldn't tell for sure; he couldn't hear anything over the sudden roaring in his ears. She had favored him with a dance. It had been a country dance, of the sprightlier sort, but to Geoff, every skip and hop seemed suspended in the air, every turn about the room a journey of a thousand miles. The music, the feet pounding the floorboards, the voices and laughter, had all receded somewhere behind the garden gate created by Mary's smile, and the periodic press of her hand in his.

And that had been all. The dance had ended and Mary's other admirers had closed back around her with all the finality of brambles around a sleeping princess. The following day, Geoff had returned to France to resume his duties in the League of the Purple Gentian. He had tucked the image of Mary away with his volumes of poetry and his collection of Renaissance etchings as something to be taken out and marveled over, something beautiful and pure in a world gone mad. Something worth fighting for. The hazy memory of Mary's face, lit like a Madonna with a hundred dripping candles, buoyed Geoff through his forays into the grim underworlds of Paris.

It seemed nothing short of a miracle that she should, after two years, still be unwed, and even more of a miracle that out of all the men in London she would look favorably upon him.

It wasn't that Geoff didn't know he was accounted a good catch. As society reckoned such things, he was right up there with the heirs to earldoms and considerably above ambitious second sons. He had a title, a respectable fortune, and all his own hair—although the latter fact was immaterial to most of the matchmaking mamas who thronged London's busy ballrooms. He could have been a knock-kneed dwarf with a hook for an arm and still made it to the upper end of the matrimonial lists. Viscounts, after all, weren't exactly thick on the ground, not even in Mayfair.

But he also knew that his wasn't the sort of face and form to set fans fluttering and females swooning when he swaggered into a ballroom. Geoff didn't swagger; he walked. He had never perfected the pose in the ballroom door, never cultivated the slow stare that stripped a lady down to her chemise in one easy arc of the eyes.

On the contrary, much of Geoff's life had been spent in learning how to deflect attention rather than command it. He had learned stillness in the quiet corridors of Pinchingdale House, and his lean form and aquiline features possessed the benefit of being unobjectionable, unremarkable, and entirely unmemorable. Miles, whose attempts to disguise himself generally resembled those of an elephant sticking a lamp shade on its head, had observed disgruntledly that Geoff didn't even need a disguise to slip about unseen.

"My dear boy," replied Sir Percy Blakeney, with a debonair twirl of the quizzing glass, "sink me if our Geoffrey isn't a very prince of shadows."

And so Geoff had gone on his shadowy way, gathering information, thwarting French plots, and building up an impressive repertoire of contacts in cities across the Continent. Richard might live for the dashing escapade, and Miles might garner genuine glee from bashing French operatives over the head, but Geoff was more than content to mastermind from the shadows. He had his friends, his books, his work—and he believed himself happy.

Until he met Mary Alsworthy.

Handing off his message to the courier, Geoff drew on his riding gloves and bounded down the steps at the front of the house. His groom held his horse for him, saddled and ready, not all that happy to have been dragged from the warm stables, and completely unaware that he was about to carry his master to the most momentous event of his life.