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contacts in the constabulary. I wouldn’t doubt there’s a criminal dossier on Mr. Doverspike somewhere,” she said as she dipped her pen in the inkwell and signed the first document with a flourish.  
    Josiah H. Beddington
     
     

Chapter 4
     
     
     
     
    Pale dawn sent forth pink attempts to penetrate London’s soot-choked sky. Felix Pelham-Smythe, the Duke of Southwycke, angrily shook off his footman’s attempt to assist him as he stumbled from the gilded barouche. He could spare no time to notice the delights of a new day’s birth. Not after the depressing night he’d just spent. Besides, he was fully occupied with keeping himself upright as he made his way toward the nearest door of the manor house.
    “ My manor house,” he grumbled. “Though you’d never know it. The place is positively infested with Dalrymples.”
    Just because he wasn’t quite of age yet, his stepmother, who was really only a few years older than he, held the purse strings.
    Correction , he told himself. Her guard dog, Mr. Beddington, controls Southwycke’s coffers. Of course, he had the title. No one could keep that from him, but thanks to the terms of his dearly departed father’s will, they kept Felix on a short leash.
    A damned short leash.
    Well, that would change with time. But not soon enough to suit Felix. Hellfire, he couldn’t even get Beddington to agree to discuss the wholly inadequate size of his piddling allowance. Everything came down from on high through the great man’s assistant Mr. Shipwash or Felix’s not-so-great stepmother.
    “As if Beddington was bloody Moses on Mt. Sinai,” Felix slurred. He caught a toe on a paving stone and nearly plunged face down on the path.
    His stomach heaved uncertainly, and he hoped he’d make it to his suite without being sick in public. On second thought, what did he care? The servants needed something to clean up in any case.
    Felix emptied his belly behind the hydrangea and felt slightly better for it. His head was beginning to pound, and his mouth tasted like a band of gypsies had danced over his tongue. Barefoot.
    Drink wasn’t entirely to blame for his malaise. Dame Fortune had been cruel to him at the whist tables of late, and Felix didn’t have the guineas to pay up.
    Didn’t Beddington understand a man had to honor his debts?
    If Felix had been unlucky at cards, at least he’d been fortunate in his creditors. Amazingly, Lubov and Oranskiy, the visiting Russians holding his markers, were willing to forgive his losses if only he’d do them one teeny, tiny favor.
    Put them in touch with Mr. Beddington.
    It was a simple enough request. After all, shouldn’t a mere man of trade hop to when summoned by a peer of the realm?
    However, nothing was simple when it involved Beddington. Felix was sick and tired of having his wishes ignored. He didn’t care that Beddington had taken Southwycke’s dwindling resources and turned the estate into one of the most prosperous in the Empire. His aloof manner was downright insulting. The man was beyond impudent. As soon as Felix took his full inheritance, his first official act would be to sack Beddington.
    But his birthday was months away, and he had the sneaking suspicion that Lubov and Oranskiy might turn out to be much less pleasant if he couldn’t deliver the estate’s trustee to them.
    Felix had no idea why they wanted Beddington. In truth, he didn’t care.
    He only knew he had to flush the reclusive Mr. Beddington into the open.
    And soon.
    * * *
     
    Artemisia nearly tripped over her stepson’s body on her way to the garden. Her nose twitched delicately at the alcoholic fumes rising from his prone form. She could almost hear Cuthbert declaiming that it was “bad form to be found snoring off a debauch in one’s garden instead of one’s bed.”
    Artemisia sighed and stepped over Felix, satisfied he’d come to no more harm than a crooked neck from sleeping on cold stone. Further on the path, she met Naresh, her father’s