She turned from that to the photographs she’d taken of him in his kilt at Kilmorgan. She traced the one of him holding his kilt over himself, hiding little. The next one was of him leaning, bare, against the wall, laughing.

The flash of vision came to her of Hart over her in the dark, his body against hers, whispering, I need you, El. I need you.

Eleanor’s resolution cracked, and she lay across the book and sobbed.

Eleanor loved him. She’d lost Hart, and she loved him so much.

She thought about how she’d found Hart at the tomb of his son, tracing the letters of the lad’s name. Remembered him with head bowed, his hand on the cold stone—proud, proud Hart—anguished that he hadn’t been strong enough to save little Graham.

Eleanor put her hand to her abdomen, where life had begun to stir. Her child. Hart’s son. Tears flowed faster.

She heard someone enter the room, but she couldn’t lift her head. Maigdlin, she thought, but the tread was wrong, as was the scent of cigars and wool.

The chair next to her creaked and then a broad hand touched her arm. Eleanor pried open her eyes to see Ian next to her, his hand unmoving. Ian, who rarely touched anyone but Beth.

Eleanor sat up and snatched up her handkerchief. Ian smelled of the outdoors, of coal smoke and rain. “I’m sorry, Ian. This is not me giving up hope.” She drew a long breath. “It’s me feeling sorry for myself.”

Ian didn’t answer. He was staring at the book, still open to the page with Hart naked, his kilt on the floor.

Face heating, Eleanor closed the book. “Those are…”

“The photographs Mrs. Palmer took of Hart. Good. She gave them to you.”

Eleanor sat back, her lips parting. Joanna had said that an unknown someone had sent the photographs to her with instructions to post them to Eleanor at intervals.

Not Hart. Ian.

“Ian Mackenzie,” she said.

Ian met her gaze for a fleeting moment, then studied the patterns on the cover of the memory book.

“You sent the photographs to the maid Joanna,” Eleanor said. “You did, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Good heavens, Ian. Why?”

Ian traced the gold curlicues that lapped and overlapped and twisted back along themselves across the book’s cover. He said, without glancing up, “Mrs. Palmer had others. I couldn’t find them. I was afraid they’d end up in a newspaper, so when Mrs. Palmer died, I searched the house for them. But someone had gotten there before me, and I only found the eight, stashed behind a brick in a chimney. I kept them a while, then decided to send them to Joanna.”

“And told her to send them on to me?”

“Yes.”

He went back to tracing the pattern. Over and over, staring at it without blinking, his body still except for the tracing finger.

“Why?” Eleanor asked, a little more sharply than she meant to.

Ian shrugged. “So you’d go to Hart.”

“I mean, why now? Why not when you first found the pictures after Mrs. Palmer died? And why use Joanna as the go-between?”

“Joanna likes Hart. She’d want to help him.”

He fell silent, and Eleanor regarded him impatiently. “You didn’t answer my first question.”

Ian sometimes did that. He’d answer what he wanted to and ignore the rest. He used that method to get around his inability to lie.

But this time, he said, “I did not send the pictures when I found them, because Hart was too busy then. He would not have paid enough attention, and he would have lost you again.”

“Well, you cannot tell me he is less busy now. He is about to become prime minister.”

Ian shook his head. “I waited until he finished all his plotting. Now it’s almost over. Hart won’t be prime minister long. He’ll fall.” Ian wrenched his gaze from the pattern and fixed it directly on Eleanor. “And he’ll need you.”

Eleanor, caught by the golden depths of Ian’s eyes, could not look away. “What are you talking about? His coalition is strong, the newspapers are full of it. Even without Hart here, they’ll win the majority. His party will rule.”

“Hart will be a bad leader. He wants everything his way, all the time. All must obey.”

“He’s bad at compromise, you mean.” Eleanor had to agree with Ian, there. The word compromise hadn’t been invented for the likes of Hart Mackenzie.

“I know what you mean, Ian,” she said. “Hart has large ideas and doesn’t notice the smaller problems of ordinary people. Not until it’s too late, anyway. Like he didn’t notice the Fenians until they tried to kill him. And then he had the gall to be surprised.”

Ian continued to gaze at her, unblinking, as though mesmerized by her eyes. Eleanor waved her hand in front of his face.

“Ian.”

Ian jumped and looked away.

Eleanor pushed the memory book aside. “You sound very certain that you will find Hart. Almost as though you already have found him. Do you know where he is?”

Ian went silent again, his gaze moving past her to the window and the darkening fog beyond. He studied it for so long that Eleanor began to believe he did know and was trying to decide whether to tell her.

Then Ian rose. “No,” he said and walked out of the room.

Chapter 21

The pipe-smoking Reeve rented a small boathouse near Blackfriars Bridge on the south side of the Thames, but he and his wife and son spent most of their time either on the river or on the boat wedged up onshore.

Reeve roamed far and wide looking for treasure in the sewers, the river, the water and gas tunnels, under the bridges, and inside the railway tunnels. He claimed that anything along the buried Fleet River was his, though his rivals contested him from time to time. Hence the knife.

Mrs. Reeve provided her family with fresh water every day from a public pump—one of the new wells that tapped fresh water far from the river. She brought enough for all of them, even enough for Hart to wash and clean his teeth. He’d never before realized the simple joy of the tooth powder he had the lad Lewis purchase for him from a chemist.

The Reeves did not tumble to who Hart was, nor did they seem to care. Hart proved willing enough to help—he and Reeve hauled the boat in and out, Hart knew how to cast a net, and he helped Lewis go through the “catch” every night.

The only thing Reeve refused to let Hart do was go with him into the tunnels—it took a special knack, Reeve said, and he didn’t want to be hunting for Hart in them again. Hart agreed, never wanting to see the bloody sewers again. Hart knew too that Reeve didn’t want to take the chance that Hart would disappear and not give Reeve his reward money.

As for Hart, he was not yet ready to leave. He wanted more than anything to get back to Eleanor—he dreamed of her every night. But once he’d discovered, through the discarded newspapers Reeve brought to the boat, that Eleanor was alive and well, and so was Ian, he made himself resist the frantic urge to rush to her. Scotland Yard and others were still hunting those trying to kill Hart, and Hart could protect Eleanor and his family better by lying low. He needed to get a message to Eleanor, however, to reassure her he was all right.

For that, he’d have to recruit help. Hart watched the Reeves, assessing them, working on winning their trust as he decided whether to trust them in return.

Hart never tried to take command of Reeve’s boat or tell him what to do. He made requests instead, reasonable ones, offhand. For boots that fit so he could better help carry the boat over the shingle. A fisherman’s sweater to wear over his thin shirt so he didn’t have to borrow Reeve’s extra coat. He’d had Mrs. Reeve find him some trousers before he’d been there a day, converting his plaid into a cover for his pallet. He also let his beard grow in, rough and red, prickly stubble. From a distance, and perhaps even up close too, he now looked like just another fisherman.

Hart started suggesting where they might take the boat and cast the nets for a better haul. He began standing guard at night so the boy and Reeve could get more sleep. Gradually Reeve began asking for Hart’s opinions, and then, when Hart’s ideas found them more valuable flotsam and jetsam, Reeve started waiting to be told what to do. Hart was a natural leader, and Reeve, though not a mindless follower, began to acknowledge Hart’s casual command.

He decided that he should not use Reeve as his messenger to Eleanor, however. Reeve would do anything for money, and he might decide that selling information about a rich stranger leaving a message in an odd place would fetch more than what Hart could give him. Mrs. Reeve was stoutly loyal to her husband, though she let her opinion be known when she disagreed with him. Loudly.

The lad, now. Hart had won Lewis’s respect by helping with the nets and letting Lewis instruct him what to look for. Hart learned much about which bits of trash could be turned into money and which bits were worthless. Lewis was loyal to his father but also his own man, young as he was. Lads grew up fast on the river.

“Lewis,” Hart said to him when he felt the time ripe. “I need you to run an errand for me.”

Lewis looked up at him, neither interested nor uninterested. Hart rubbed his face, feeling that his beard had softened from stiff bristles to wiry hair.

“I need you to go to Mayfair for me,” Hart said. “And not tell your father. It’s a simple task, nothing dangerous to you, and I promise I am not trying to cheat your father out of what I owe him.”

“How much?” Lewis asked.

He was his father’s son. “How much do you want?”

Lewis contemplated. “Twenty shillings. Ten for doing it, ten for not telling my father.”

The boy was a shark. “Done.” Hart held out his hand, and Lewis shook it in a firm grip. “Now, then, lad, how good are you at climbing fences?”


Eleanor opened the gate of Grosvenor Square and walked into the little park. It was early by Mayfair standards, about eleven o’clock in the morning. Nannies in gray with white starched aprons pushed prams or held the hands of small children, or sat on benches while their charges played on the grass. They watched Eleanor, used by now to seeing the famous duke’s wife take her morning amble. Such a brave woman, trying to bear up.

Eleanor walked past them as usual, keeping her pace unhurried. No sense rushing to the middle of the gardens, no sense drawing attention to herself. She strolled along, a parasol raised against the sunshine. Yesterday, it had been an umbrella against the rain. She came here every day, rain or bloody shine.

Eleanor counted her steps, the mantra keeping her pace even. Perhaps today. Perhaps today… forty-two, forty-three, forty-four…

When she reached the center of the garden, she kept walking, off the path and onto the green. Seventeen more steps. Around the base of the wide-trunked tree…

Eleanor stopped. A little violet, the kind men purchased from flower girls to wear on their lapels, rested at the base of the tree. Not a hothouse rose, no, but the sort of thing a man who was hiding for his life might be able to obtain and leave for her.

She closed her eyes. Someone must have dropped the flower. She wanted so much for Hart to have left it that she was inventing things.

Eleanor opened her eyes again. The flower remained, sitting in the exact place Hart had left the others for her years before.

The flower will mean that I cannot come to you as promised, but I will when I can, he’d told her when he’d come up with the idea. And that you are in my thoughts. He’d missed a walk with her, she’d been angry, and Hart had invented the scheme to charm her out of her bad temper. It had worked.

Eleanor picked up the violet and pressed it to her nose. Hart was alive. This had to mean that Hart was alive. She lowered the flower to her chest, to her heart, and drew in a shuddering breath, forcing back tears.

Maigdlin came around the tree. “You all right, Your Grace?”

Eleanor wiped her eyes and thrust the violet into her pocket. “Yes, yes. I’m fine. Go on. I want to sit by myself a moment.”

Maigdlin peered suspiciously at Eleanor’s eyes, but she nodded. “Yes, Your Grace,” she said, and faded discreetly away.

You are in my thoughts.

“But where are you, Hart Mackenzie?” Eleanor whispered. No one knew the signal but the two of them. Why had Hart chosen to leave it but not come to the house or write a note? Did he believe himself still in danger? Or was this some new machination of his?