“He does make a convincing octogenarian,” Richard commented to Geoff as they headed for the dining room in the optimistic anticipation that food would rapidly be forthcoming. “Hell, if I didn’t know better, I would be fooled.”

Geoff darted into the study and emerged shuffling a stack of papers. “You’re not the only one he’s fooled. I gave him last Saturday off, thinking he would wash the gray out of his hair, do the rounds of the taverns, what have you. Instead, he pulled up a chair before the kitchen fire, threw an afghan around his shoulders, and complained about his lumbago.”

The two friends exchanged looks of mingled amusement and distress.

“Well, good butlers are hard to find . . . ,” commented Richard.

“And Stiles will be with you for a great many decades to come,” concluded Geoff.

“That’s the last time we accept an out-of-work actor into the League,” groaned Richard. “I suppose it could have been worse—he could have had delusions of being Julius Caesar and gone about in a toga.”

“He would have fit right in with the members of the Council of Five Hundred,” Geoff commented wryly, referring to the legislative body set up by the revolutionaries in 1795 in an attempt to imitate classical models of government. “About half of them were convinced they were Brutus.”

Richard shook his head sadly. “They read too many classics; such men are dangerous. At any rate, I prefer Stiles’s current delusion. I take it, as matters stand, that he hasn’t lost all track of why he’s really here?”

“If anything, he’s entered into it with even more gusto ever since he decided that he really is an eighty-year-old butler. He plays cards with Fouché’s butler every Wednesday—apparently they exchange remedies for their rheumatism and complain about the poor quality of employers nowadays,” Geoff added with a twinkle in his eye. “And he’s been carrying on a rather bizarre—if informative—flirtation with one of the upstairs maids at the Tuilleries.”

“Bizarre?” Richard sniffed hopefully as he entered the dining room, but comestibles had not preceded them.

Geoff pulled out a chair towards the head of the table and sent the pile of papers he had been holding scooting across the polished wood towards Richard. “He attained her good graces by complimenting her special formula for silver polish. They then proceeded to the intimacies of cleaning crystal.”

“Good God.” Richard began rifling through the stack of correspondence that had accumulated in his absence. “To each his own, I suppose.”

The pile Geoff had brought him contained the usual accumulations—reports from his estate manager, invitations to balls, and perfumed letters from Bonaparte’s promiscuous sister Pauline. Pauline had been trying to entice Richard into her bed since he had returned from Egypt, and the amount of perfume she poured on her letters increased with each failed attempt. Richard could smell the latest all the way from the bottom of the pile.

“How was London?” Geoff asked, signaling to a footman to fetch the claret decanter. “You look like you’re in need of a restorative.”

“You don’t know the half of it.” Richard abandoned his letters and flung himself into a chair across the table from Geoff. “Mother must have dragged me to every major gathering in London. If there was an affair of over three hundred people, I was there. I attended enough musicals to render me tone deaf, if not deaf in actuality. I—”

“No more, please,” Geoff shook his head. “I refuse to believe that it could have all been that bad.”

“Oh, really?” Richard raised one brow. He shot his friend a swift, sideways glance. “Mary Alsworthy asked after you.”

“And?” Geoff’s voice was studiedly unconcerned.

“I told her you had taken up with a Frenchwoman of ill repute and were currently expecting your third illegitimate child. By the way, you’re hoping for a girl this time.”

Geoff choked on his claret. “You didn’t. I’m sure I would have heard from my mother by now if you had.”

Richard tipped his chair back with a sigh of pure regret. “No, I didn’t. But I wanted to. It would have been informative to see if she could count high enough to realize three children in less than two years was an impossibility.”

Geoff looked away, displaying a deep interest in the arrangement of silver on the sideboard behind Richard. “There were a number of interesting developments while you were away.”

Richard let the subject drop. With any luck, by the time Geoff returned to England some other poor blighter would have fallen prey to Mary Alsworthy’s overused lures.

Richard leaned across the table, green eyes glittering. “What sort of developments?”

Geoff regaled him with tales of changes in security at the Ministry of Police (“Rather a case of closing the stable door once the horses have fled, don’t you think?” remarked Richard smugly), the frustrated ambitions of Napoleon’s brother-in-law Murat (“A weak-willed man, if ever I saw one,” commented Geoff. “He may be of use to us yet.”), and strange goings-on along the coast.

Richard’s ears pricked up. “Do you think he could be shipping munitions in for the invasion of England?” There was no need to ask whom Richard meant by “he.”

“That’s still unclear. We haven’t been able to get anyone close enough to see what’s being transported. Our connection in Calais—”

“The innkeeper at the Sign of the Scratching Cat?”

“The very one. He’s noticed an unusual amount of activity over the past few months. The serving wench at the Drowned Rat in Le Havre has similar reports. She says she saw a group of men transferring a series of large packages from a Channel packet to an unmarked carriage, and taking off down the road towards Paris.”

“Could it be just the usual smuggling activity?” Richard nodded his thanks as the footman set a bowl of potato-and-leek soup down before him, trying to quell the anticipation thrilling through him at Geoff’s news. He felt like a hound eager to bounce off after a fox. Of course, he had better make jolly sure first that it was a fox, and not just a rabbit, or a bunch of waving leaves. Or something like that. Richard rapidly abandoned the metaphor. Ever since war had broken out between England and France, the smugglers of both countries had done a brisk trade, hauling French brandies and silks to England, and returning laden with English goods. There had been one or two occasions in the past where Richard had gone haring off into the night, convinced he was on the trail of French agents carrying valuable intelligence to England, only to wind up with a boat full of disgruntled French smugglers and ten-year-old brandy. Not that Richard minded the brandy, but still. . . .

“There is that,” Geoff conceded. “But Stiles heard from Fouché’s butler that the Ministry of Police has been very quietly detailing men to guard shipments of something coming in from Switzerland. He wasn’t sure what, and he didn’t know when—at least not yet—but he did say that it was top priority, whatever it was.”

“That does sound promising, if somewhat vague. I take it you’ve had someone watching the major roads and waterways?”

“I will ignore the implicit insult,” Geoff said calmly. “Yes, I have. In addition to another three cases of brandy in the cellar, we also have a few leads. Whatever these shipments are, Georges Marston is up to his neck in it.”

Richard’s lip curled in distaste. “Why does that come as no surprise?” he inquired of the portrait on the wall behind Geoff’s head.

The portrait, presumably an ancestor of the former owner of the house, which Richard had purchased furnished, sneered silently. One might assume that the gentleman in the portrait would have turned up his nose at the likes of Marston, even had he been able to speak. While Marston claimed a relation with a distinguished English family through his father, it was an open secret that he had been raised by his French mother in circumstances that could hardly be called respectable. Having wrangled his father’s family into buying him a commission in the English army, he had promptly deserted in the midst of battle and decamped to the French.

“Marston has been frequenting the docks,” Geoff continued. “I’ve had our boys watching him. We’ve noticed a pattern—every few days, someone will come to his lodgings with a note, and then he hares off in a carriage to the waterfront.”

“Then what? Oh, devil take it!” Richard mopped at his lap, where a little puddle of soup was collecting from the spoon that he had suspended halfway to his lips.

“Not the devil, Marston,” Geoff corrected with a twitch of his lips. “I hope those weren’t new trousers?”

Richard scowled.

“At any rate,” Geoff went on, “he always takes an unmarked black coach and four—”

“I thought he only had that flashy curricle of his.” Richard made sure to put his soup spoon down before speaking. “That hideous bright red thing.”

“It wouldn’t be at all bad if it weren’t for the color,” commented Geoff wistfully.

“Marston?” Richard prompted.

“Right.” Geoff shook himself out of his reverie of curricles and phaetons. “The use of the carriage heightened our suspicions. We traced it to a livery stable not far from Marston’s lodgings.”

“The curricle would be too noticeable,” mused Richard. Seeing the gleam of the carriage lover rekindle in Geoff’s eye, Richard hastily asked, “What does he do once at the docks?”

“Cleverly disguised as a sailor, I followed Marston to a rather disreputable tavern called the Staves and Cutlass. They named it that for good reason, I might add,” Geoff commented thoughtfully. “It was quite a good thing that I was wearing a hook.”

“And there I was with the debutantes while you were having all the fun,” mourned Richard.

“Calling it fun might be stretching matters a bit. When I wasn’t otherwise occupied in retaining my skin in one piece, I did notice Marston first engage in conversation with a bunch of ruffians, and then slip into a back room. When he didn’t return, I left the establishment just in time to see Marston and his cronies finish loading the carriage with a number of brown paper packages.”

“What were they?”

Geoff cast Richard a mildly exasperated look. “If we knew that, why would we still be following him? However, I can tell you that at least some of the shipments have made their way to the Hotel de Balcourt.”

“Balcourt?”

“You know, little toady of a man, always hanging about the Tuilleries,” Geoff clarified.

“I know who you mean,” Richard said through a mouthful of soup. Swallowing, he explained, “It’s just a devilish odd coincidence. I shared a boat—and a carriage—with Balcourt’s sister and cousin.”

“I didn’t realize he had a sister.”

“Well, he does.” Richard abruptly pushed away his empty bowl.

“What a great stroke of luck! Could you use the acquaintance with the sister to discover more about Balcourt’s activities?”

“That,” Richard said grimly, “is not an option.”

Geoff eyed him quizzically. “I realize that any sister of Balcourt’s is most likely repugnant at best, but you don’t need to propose to the girl. Just flirt with her a bit. Take her for a drive, call on her at home, use her as an entrée into the house. You’ve done it before.”

“Miss Balcourt is not repugnant.” Richard twisted in his chair, and stared at the door. “What the devil is keeping supper?”

Geoff leaned across the table. “Well, if she’s not repugnant, then what’s the—ah.”

“Ah? Ah? What the deuce do you mean by ‘ah’? Of all the nonsensical . . .”

“You”—Geoff pointed at him with fiendish glee—“are unsettled not because you find her repugnant, but because you find her not repugnant.”

Richard was about to deliver a baleful look in lieu of a response, when he was saved by the arrival of the footman bearing a large platter of something covered with sauce. Richard leaned forward and speared what looked like it might once have been part of a chicken, as the footman whisked off with his soup dish.

“Have some,” Richard suggested to Geoff, ever so subtly diverting the conversation to culinary appreciation.

“Thank you.” Undiverted, Geoff continued, “Tell me about your Miss Balcourt.”

“Leaving aside the fact that she is by no means my Miss Balcourt”—Richard ignored the sardonic stare coming from across the table—“the girl is as complete an opposite to her brother as you can imagine. She was raised in England, somewhere out in the countryside. She’s read Homer in the original Greek—”