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“That’s only a few—and it’s only one building. We’ve ghosts everywhere, and nobody seems to mind. How odd that Scottish laborers should be afraid. I thought they liked to be haunted.”
    “I made the same point to my parents, but logic is a language they refuse to understand,” he said. “Not that this has anything to do with ghosts or castles, really. It’s all about keeping me at home.”
    “But you’d go mad here,” she said.
    She’d always understood, from the day they’d met and he’d told her of his determination to go to Egypt. She’d called it a Noble Quest.
    “I shouldn’t mind so much,” he said, “if they truly needed me here. My brothers need me—
    they need somebody—but I’m at a loss what to do. I doubt my parents would miss them if I took them to Egypt. But they’re too young. Children from northern climes don’t thrive there.” She put her head back a little to gaze up at him. When those great blue eyes turned upward to his face, things happened inside him, complicated things, involving not merely animal instincts and his reproductive organs. The things jumped about in his chest, and there was a kind of pain, like little stabs, when they did it.
    He looked away, into the fire again.
    “What will you do?” she said.
    “I haven’t decided,” he said. “The so-called crisis broke minutes before we were to set out this evening. I haven’t had time to consider what to do. Not that I mean to do anything about the castle nonsense. It’s my brothers I need to think about. I shall have to spend more time with them, and decide then.”
    “You’re right,” she said. “The castle isn’t worth your troubling about. A great waste of your time. If you—”
    She broke off because the door flew open and Lady Rathbourne entered. Dark haired, her eyes not quite the same blue as her daughter’s, she was a great beauty in her own right.
    Lisle could regard her with equanimity, though, and with affection, and without bewildering feelings.
    “For heaven’s sake, Olivia, Belder’s been looking everywhere for you,” she said. “You were supposed to be dancing. Lisle, you ought to know better than to let Olivia lure you into a tête-à-tête.”
    “Mama, we haven’t seen each other in five years!”
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    “Lisle can call on you tomorrow, if he doesn’t mind fighting his way through the hordes of besotted gentlemen,” said her ladyship. “At present, the other young ladies are clamoring to dance with him. He is not your property, and your prolonged absence is making Belder agitated. Come, Lisle, I’m sure you don’t want to end the party by fighting one of Olivia’s jealous swains, poor fools. It’s too ridiculous for words.” They left the antechamber, and Lisle and Olivia soon parted ways, she to Lord Belder and her other admirers, and he to the scores of young ladies who could not have been less like her had they belonged to another species.
    It wasn’t until later, when he was dancing with one of them, that he remembered what he’d seen, in the instant before Lady Rathbourne interrupted the conversation: the gleam in Olivia
    ’s too-blue eyes before their expression turned inward in the way he’d learned to recognize so many years ago.
    Thinking. She’d been thinking.
    And that, as her mother could have told anybody, was always dangerous.
    Somerset House, London
    Wednesday 5 October
    It was not an official meeting of the Society of Antiquaries. For one thing, they usually met on Thursday. For another, their meetings did not begin until November.
    But the Earl of Lisle did not return to London every day, and he would likely be gone again by November. Any scholar interested in Egyptian antiquities wanted to hear what he had to say, and the event, though arranged on short notice, was well attended.
    The last time he’d returned, though merely eighteen years old, he had presented a