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sperm bank for conception, or was Peri the child of rape? Either possibility said something very different about her, and about her relationship to her daughter, and I'm not sure which I found more unsettling. There was a time when I would have bulled ahead and insisted on having her spell it out for me. But I'd been in England for too long and had adopted the local manners and mores. Now they were no longer camouflage, but an integral part of me, and so I backed down before her distress and respected her privacy as she expected me to, like a proper English gentleman.
    I told myself it didn't matter, because however it had happened, the man who'd provided half of Peri's genetic makeup wouldn't be aware of her existence and couldn't be involved in her disappearance.
    And yet there was still a niggling little doubt at the back of my mind telling me I was missing something important here.
    “Is there anything else you need to know?” Her tone was cool and impatient, and I felt bad that I'd forfeited her earlier warmth.
    I told myself it was part of the job. “I'm curious about why you've come to me now, two years after another detective let you down.”
    She took a deep breath and held herself very still. “I want you to help me because this could be my last chance. I'm leaving, you see. The London job was for three years. Now my company is sending me back to America. I don't even know where I'll be a year from now—probably New York. If Peri wanted to get in touch with me again, she wouldn't know where to find me.”
    Her words were carefully chosen, but I could hear the anguish vibrating low in her voice, and I felt a sympathetic pain in my own chest.
    “I'll do my best to find her for you, Ms. Lensky.”
    “Thank you.” She rose in one fluid motion. “Call me after you've talked with Hugh.”
    Ancient lessons in now-outdated etiquette pushed me onto my feet, and I hurried around the desk. My mother had done a good job on me: I opened doors for women
and
called them “Ms.”
    She gave me a brief, social sort of smile and slipped out of my office, leaving behind only a faint trace of her summery, green-smelling perfume.
    It was only then, my hand still on the door handle, that I realized I hadn't taken a credit card impress, or a check, hadn't even remembered to get her signature on a standard boilerplate for my services. But none of that mattered. I was back in business, with a new mystery to solve.

3. Benjamin
    Austria, 1809

    The country was full of French spies after Napoleon's recent victory over Austria. Britain was at war with France, and life was not safe for Benjamin Bathurst, the British envoy to Vienna. Before leaving the city, he took the precaution of obtaining false passports for himself and his Swiss manservant. Travel from the Continent to England, especially for someone known to the authorities, a man bearing important papers, was necessarily a slow, dangerous, circuitous progress. Bathurst was determined to reach Hamburg, a still-independent city, where he thought he would be safe.
    On the twenty-sixth of November, Bathurst's coach stopped in the small town of Perleberg for a change of horses. In the coach with Bathurst and his servant were two other travelers. All four dined at the inn while they rested. At nine o'clock, the travelers returned to the courtyard, where the coach was being readied. They waited as their luggage was loaded. Then, for no reason anyone could later explain, Bathurst moved away from the others, walking briskly around the horses as if to check something, or speak to someone on the other side of the coach.
    He was never seen again.
    The two other travelers boarded the coach. Bathurst's servant called for his master, then went to look for him. But he was gone.
    The other travelers were annoyed at the delay, thinking that Bathurst had gone off to relieve himself and perhaps missed his way in the dark. Maybe he'd had too much to drink, or had made an assignation with that pretty