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had been Sebastian’s intention to drive to St. Botolph-Aldgate and take a look at the scene of Mr. Daniel Eisler’s murder. But he was suddenly aware of a profound exhaustion he saw mirrored in his tiger’s face, of his rumpled clothing and day’s growth of beard, and of the need to offer his condolences to the grieving widow of an old friend.
    He ran a hand down the nearest chestnut’s sweat-darkened neck and told Tom, “Go home, see the chestnuts put up, and then take the day off to rest.”
    Tom’s face fell. “Ne’er tell me ye’ll be takin’ a
hackney
?” That peerless arbiter of taste and deportment, Beau Brummell himself, had decreed that no gentleman should ever be seen riding in a hackney carriage, and Tom had taken the Beau’s strictures to heart.
    “I am indeed. To drive this pair back out to Kensington again, after all they’ve been through, would be beyond cruel.”
    “Aye, but . . .
gov’nor
. A hackney?”
    Sebastian laughed and turned away.

    Sebastian had known Annie Wilkinson for as long as he’d known Rhys—except that when he’d first met her, she’d been Annie Beaumont, the plucky, freckle-nosed, seventeen-year-old wife of a dashing cavalry captain named Jake Beaumont. Few officers’ wives chose to “follow the drum” with their husbands, for the life could be both brutal and deadly. But Annie, the daughter of a colonel, had grown up in army camps from India to Canada. She took the hardships and dangers of a campaign in stride, without ever losing her ready laugh or cheerful disposition. He remembered once, in Italy, when a brigand caught her in the hills outside of camp and she coolly shot her would-be assailant in the face. When her first husband died from a saber wound complicated by sepsis, she married again, to a big, rawboned Scotsman who succumbed to yellow fever in the West Indies just months after their wedding.
    Rhys Wilkinson might have been Annie’s third husband, but Sebastian had never doubted the strength of her love for the easygoing Welshman. And of her three husbands, only Wilkinson had succeeded in giving Annie a child. Now, as Sebastian mounted the steps to the couple’s cramped lodgings in a narrow street called Yeoman’s Row, just off Kensington Square, he found himself wondering if that made this husband’s death easier or harder for Annie to bear.
    He had intended only to send up his card along with a note of condolence. But he was met at the door by a breathless, half-grown housemaid who dropped a quick curtsy and said, “Lord Devlin? Mrs. Wilkinson says to tell you she’d be most pleased to see you, if’n you was wantin’ to step upstairs?”
    And so he found himself following the housemaid up the bare, narrow set of stairs that led to the shabby apartment to which Rhys Wilkinson’s continued illness had reduced his young family.
    “Devlin,” said Annie Wilkinson, both hands extended as she came forward to greet him. “I was hoping you’d come. I wanted to thank you again for trying to—for looking—” Her voice cracked.
    “Annie. I’m so sorry.” He took her hands in his, his gaze hard on her face. The freckles were still there, although faded to a sprinkling of cinnamon dust across the pale flesh of her high cheekbones and the thin arch of her nose. As a girl, she’d been awkward and almost funny-looking, all skinny arms and legs and a wide, toothy grin. But she’d grown into a delicate beauty, her form tall and willowy, her features unusual but exquisite, her hair a rich strawberry blond. “Tell me what you need me to do,” he said, “and I’ll do it.”
    He felt her hands tremble in his. “Sit and just talk to me, will you? Most of my acquaintances seem to assume that I’ve either dosed myself senseless with laudanum, or that since this is my third experience with widowhood then I must be taking it comfortably in stride. I can’t decide which is most insulting.”
    She led him to a sagging, aged sofa near where a