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May 1874, Paris

H e was too pretty to die.

Not technically true, but who gave a tinker’s damn about truth when one’s brain matter was jostling about like a poorly sprung carriage?

“I’m too pretty to die, Temple.” William, Viscount Gilford, clutched at his pounding head and fervently wished he’d not drunk that last glass of absinthe the night before. “You’d better mix up one of your foul concoctions.”

“Already done, milord.” The valet pressed a tumbler of his famous overindulgence remedy into Will’s hand. “And ye’d better get it down right quick, begging yer pardon, because there’s a Yankee gent in the salon waiting for yer.”

Pausing the cup halfway to his mouth, Will blinked. “What?”

“Better to get it all down your gullet, Gilford. You’re going to need it.”

Will scowled at the American who appeared in the doorway. “What the hell are you doing here, Woodward? Shouldn’t you be negotiating a treaty or something?”

A former diplomat for the United States, Mr. Benjamin Woodward, while not the last person Will had expected to darken his door this morning, was definitely in the running.

“Go ahead and drink your medicine,” Woodward said with a gravity that was uncharacteristic of their previous interactions, and Will felt a surge of alarm course through him.

Shoving the glass into Temple’s hand, he ignored his headache and stood. “Something’s happened,” he said, taking the trousers the valet had somehow conjured and pulling them on. “Is it Meg? Mother? Grandmama?”

He was the worst sort of scoundrel, Will thought, glancing around the bedroom of the pied-à-terre he’d called home during his sojourn on the Continent. Oh, he’d done his best to ensure that his mother and sister and whatever other relations with a claim on the Gilford estate would be taken care of in his absence. But he’d shirked the main of his responsibilities as Viscount Gilford, and they all knew it.

But his father’s death at the hands of a man the whole family had considered a friend had sent Will into a spiral of grief, and, faced with living in the house he associated with his beloved parent, he’d fled.

Now, with the thought of the loss of his remaining close family, a rush of self-recriminations ran through him as he searched Woodward’s expression for some clue.

The American raised his hands, palms out. “Nothing like that,” Woodward assured him. “Finish dressing, and we’ll talk about it in the breakfast room.”

Before Will could press him for more, Woodward strode from the room.

“Better drink it like ’e said, milord,” urged the valet, giving Will the malodorous drink again. “It sounds as if you’ll need it.”

Not even stopping to taste it, he downed the entire contents of the glass and handed it back to the valet. He was too preoccupied with whatever it was Ben had to tell him to care about such a trivial matter.

A quarter of an hour later, he strode into the little room he used for dining, and saw that Madame Lyon, the woman who did the cooking and cleaning for him, had made Woodward at home. A cup of coffee in his hand, the flaky remains of a pastry on the plate before him, the former diplomat looked up with a grin. “If I had any questions about why you had remained here so long, the coffee and baked goods alone would have put them to rest.”

“I don’t care about baked goods, dammit. Tell me why you’re here.”

Seeming to take pity on Will, Woodward put down his cup and reached into his coat to retrieve a large envelope.

“I don’t actually know what it’s about,” the American said, handing the parcel of papers to him. “We share a man of business, and when I overheard him discussing sending a courier to you, I offered to bring the documents myself. He didn’t seem happy about whatever it was, and I thought you might wish to receive the news from a friend.”

Woodward had been nearby when Will had been given the news of his father’s murder, so he was doubtlessly remembering that occasion.

“But I do know,” Woodward said, interrupting Will’s thoughts, “that it has nothing to do with anything dire happening to your mother or sister. I saw them both in the park yesterday, and they were well.”

That was something, at least, Will thought as he broke the seal on the packet and saw that the top page was indeed a letter from his man of business. A quick scan of the pages below revealed what looked to be account sheets.

Dropping into the nearest chair, he set the financial documents on the table and began reading the letter.

As he took in the words, certain phrases leapt out at him: “profligate,” “crop yields,” “overextended,” “dire need,” “she must be told,” “cannot continue on this path,” “an infusion of funds,” “must marry well.”

When he set the letter atop the other documents—which he now understood to be proof of what the accountant had told him—Will pressed his thumb and forefinger onto either side of his nose and squeezed.

“Bad news, I take it.” Woodward’s tone was sympathetic.

“You could say that.” Placed alongside the news of other calamities—a dead parent, a train derailment, an ill child—the news that he, like so many other peers these days, was in danger of losing his expensive estates was trivial. Will now recognized that no amount of concentration or studied ignorance would save him from the reality that had come to his doorstep in the figure of an old friend.

His Continental fever dream was now at an inglorious end. However much he might have wished to elude responsibility, to pretend that his father was still alive and running the Gilford estates with the same efficiency as always, he must wake up now.

“It seems I am needed at home, Woodward.” Feeling as if he’d aged twenty years in a quarter of an hour, Will leaned back in his chair and ran a hand over his eyes.

When he opened them, the expectant expression on the other man’s face almost made him laugh. But only almost.

“It would seem that my estates are in need of a swift infusion of funds or the house of Gilford will collapse in on itself.”

Woodward’s eyes widened at the words. “I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that.”

Will sighed. “I assumed my father was just as adept at managing the estates as he was at handling the minutiae of foreign policy, but I suppose even he made mistakes. He left everything in the hands of a trusted steward. And foolishly, I kept the man on when I left England to cavort about Europe.”

“He’s mismanaged things, I take it?”

“Oh, he’s done more than mismanage things,” Will said with a growing sense of unreality. “He’s been fleecing the estate for decades and now he’s absconded with his spoils to the devil knows where.”

Woodward bit back a curse. “Surely they have some idea of where he’s gone. A man cannot simply disappear into the aether.”

Will stood abruptly and shouted for Temple. To his friend he said, “The authorities are looking into it, but it seems unlikely they will find him in time to repair matters.”

When the valet entered the room, Will instructed the man to book passage for them on the next packet bound for Dover.

“I am sorry, old fellow,” Woodward said, pushing back his own chair. “Name whatever it is you need from me and it’s yours.”

Will sighed and crossed to the door leading into his bedchamber. Before he went in, he said over his shoulder, “I require only your congratulations.”

“For what?” Woodward called after him.

“My marriage, it would seem.” Will was grateful the American couldn’t see his face because he knew it betrayed just how morose he was at the prospect. “I don’t know who she’ll be. But she’ll be a bloody heiress.”

“Tell me what progress you’ve made on the murder of Mary Crosby.”

As she flipped through a drawer in the massive file cabinets housed outside the office of her cousin, Detective Superintendent Andrew Eversham, Miss Lucy Penhallow listened shamelessly to his conversations.

She’d only recently become acquainted with Cousin Andrew, who had defied familial objections by joining the Metropolitan Police a few years ago. But she had grown quite close to him and his wife, newspaper publisher Lady Katherine, in that time. And it was to Kate that Lucy was certain she owed her minor position as a filing clerk in the offices of the police. Despite his relatively liberal views on the role of women in English society, Eversham was as protective as any man over his family.

“Mary Crosby?” Constable John Boddie asked, not quite keeping the note of contempt out of his voice. “I thought we’d decided to let that one go.”

“Boddie.”

There was a long silence, then Boddie gulped.

If one could hear a man’s life essence depart his body, Lucy had. She wished she could turn and see what expression her cousin had leveled at the man to make him quake so.

“D-detective Super, sir?”

Lucy had come to know most of the men under Eversham’s authority in the murder division, and she knew Boddie to be a conscientious but rather foolish young man. Certainly, he wasn’t clever enough to hide his casual contempt for the people he was meant to serve. But then Lucy often found that those who hailed from the middle classes—Boddie’s father was a well-known barrister—tended to be even more contemptuous of the lower classes than the aristocracy. It had something to do with pulling the ladder leading out of the slums up behind them, she suspected.

“Have we not discussed your attitude toward, er, those women who ply their trade on the streets?”

Lucy bit back a smile at Eversham’s attempt to protect her tender ears from the words that would more properly name the profession of poor murdered Mary Crosby. Then, she mentally chastised herself. A woman was dead.

There was nothing in that to smile about.

“Yes, Detective Super.”

“Then you’d best make a better effort at curbing your tongue,” Eversham snapped. “Every case that is presented to us deserves our best work. And the victims deserve our respect.”

Once Boddie had been dismissed, Eversham called out to Lucy in the filing room. “I suppose you heard that.”

Slotting the last information card into place, Lucy shut the large drawer and turned to enter her cousin’s well-appointed office. Taking in the dark paneling and brass fixtures, Lucy noted not for the first time how much the room looked like her late father’s library in the Mayfair house where she lived with her mother.

Perching on the edge of the chair facing Eversham’s desk, she smiled at him, startled as always to see her own eyes in his masculine face. “Of course I heard it. I must say that I am relieved that you are the man who gives the orders here. If it were up to Boddie and the like, only the murders of those with unblemished reputations would be investigated.”

It was not a new conversation between them, and Lucy thought she saw a hint of weariness in the set of her cousin’s shoulders. It couldn’t be easy holding dozens of men to account—especially not in a world where the majority of them reckoned a woman’s mental acumen somewhere just below that of a hunting dog.

“It is troubling to hear such cynicism in one so young, Lucy,” he said with a shake of his head. “I hope your mother won’t be proven right about her opinion of your working here.”

Mrs. Frances Penhallow, the daughter of a viscount’s younger son, and Eversham’s paternal cousin, had argued vociferously against Lucy’s going anywhere near Scotland Yard to assist Eversham. But since she was now above the age of majority and in possession of her sizable inheritance, Lucy was not bound by parental strictures.

“Mark my words, Lucy,” Mrs. Penhallow had wailed, clutching a handkerchief to her bosom like Mrs. Bennet from Miss Austen’s Pride and Prejudice . “Your reputation will suffer. As will your sensibilities.”

“Since my reputation has, alas, not suffered a whit,” Lucy said with a half smile, “then I think you must be referring to my sensibilities. And I can assure you that on that front, I am as unfazed by male conversation as I ever was.”

“And from what Kate tells me of the book club, you are imbibing nothing but lurid details of murder there as well,” Eversham said. Though his words could be construed as chiding, his tone was one of amusement. “I wonder if an interest in solving crime can be passed through bloodlines in the same manner as eye color.”

“It must have passed Mama by entirely,” Lucy said with a rueful smile. Her mother had been appalled when her only daughter, and indeed only child, had come home from finishing school with an appetite for sensationalist newspaper stories about the grisliest of crimes. Lucy had tried to tell her that it wasn’t the details of the crimes themselves but the apprehension of the perpetrator that truly caught her interest.

“I fear that if we didn’t favor one another so much she would wonder if I was a changeling.”

A great beauty in her day, Mrs. Penhallow had hoped to see her daughter repeat her own success in the ballrooms of the ton . But despite enduring multiple seasons, Lucy had not quite taken . This might be the result of her inability to stop herself from speaking her mind. It didn’t matter the topic—Lucy had opinions and seemed unable to keep her thoughts to herself. And if her mouth didn’t betray her, her countenance did.

She regretted that her unruly tongue had caused her mama disappointment in her only child’s marriage prospects, but Lucy couldn’t bring herself to be sorry on her own behalf. As much as she might one day wish to marry and have children, for now, she was pleased to have control of both her person and her fortune.

Since she’d come into her majority at one and twenty, she’d found a great deal of satisfaction in donating some of those funds to certain causes—such as the establishment of Newnham College for women at Cambridge a few years earlier and the continuing fight for women’s suffrage—and she was not ready to cede that control to a husband. Though marriage settlements might be used to protect a lady from an unscrupulous husband’s misuse of her fortune, to a degree, there was little a lady could do to keep out of her husband’s control whatever funds she brought to the marriage. And since the majority of men who’d approached her since her inheritance had become public knowledge had been fortune hunters and grifters, she’d chosen to consign herself to the side of the ballroom at ton entertainments by refusing to dance, and sitting with the wallflowers and chaperones.

The clock on the shelf behind Eversham’s desk tolled and Lucy sprang up from her chair. “I have to go. I’ll be late for book club.”

She retrieved her hat and umbrella from where she stored them and waited for Eversham to escort her to the rear door, where her maid waited for her.

“Please convey my best wishes to your mother,” Eversham said, accepting a quick hug from Lucy before he disappeared back into the building.

“Did you have a pleasant time at the tea shop, Dora?” Lucy asked as she and her maid rounded the corner to search for the Penhallow carriage in the street beyond.

“I did, miss,” Dora said with a sweet smile. Lucy knew that the girl, who was close to her family, met with her mother and sister each week while Lucy was filing. “And I seen—that is, I saw your friends Miss Gilford and Miss Blackwood.”

Lucy turned to judge whether Dora was serious. “At the tea shop?”

“Yes, miss. They said they were waiting for you.”

Lucy hurried in the direction of Applegate’s tea shop. If Meg and Vera were waiting for her, then they would all risk arriving late to the book club meeting.

She and Dora had just turned the corner when Lucy saw her friends, a single maid hovering right behind them. When they caught sight of Lucy they began walking toward her.

“I thought you’d never come,” Meg said with an overdramatic shake of her head. “We’ll be late for the meeting if we don’t hurry.”

“No one pressed you into waiting for me,” Lucy said, embracing first Meg and then Vera. “You might already be settled into Mrs. Clevedon’s drawing room enjoying the warmth of the fire.”

The Ems, as the ladies called the Mischief and Mayhem Book Club, after the letters in the name, met at the home of one of the members once a month. And since the original founders, Lucy’s cousin-in-law Lady Katherine and Lady Wrackham, had been forced to step away because of their increased familial and business responsibilities, Lucy and her friend Meg had offered to take up the mantle.

They’d met Vera Blackwood, whose family had traveled to London from their home in Boston earlier in the year, at a rout party given before the season officially began, and had become fast friends. Vera’s forthright manner, paired with her infectious humor, had endeared her to some and given a distaste for her to others. As a result, despite her willingness to entertain offers from even those potential suitors Lucy would avoid, Vera too spent many dances sitting with the other wallflowers at the side of the ballroom.

Now, they were scurrying to find Lucy’s carriage so that they would arrive at Mrs. Clevedon’s in time.

“Did you learn anything new today, Lucy?” Not long into their friendship, Lucy had come to recognize that Vera found her relationship to a high-ranking member of the Metropolitan Police to be the most fascinating thing about her. It didn’t bother Lucy. If their positions were reversed, Lucy was quite sure she’d have felt the same way. There were so few opportunities for ladies of their station to mix with anyone having to do with crime or, for that matter, newspapers. And thanks to her cousin, Lucy was in close proximity to well-born members of both the police and the press.

“Only that there is yet another constable who cares not whether they ever catch whoever killed a lady of the night.” She related the exchange between Eversham and Boddie she’d overheard.

“What a terrible person,” Meg said, her lips twisting into an expression of distaste. “The more I learn of men, the fonder I am of my dog.”

“That’s because Ralph is a darling,” Vera said with an indulgent smile. Meg’s Pomeranian was a favorite among the Ems, and whenever the club met at Gilford House, he invariably was sick from all the treats bestowed upon him.

“He is, isn’t he?” Meg asked with a grin. Then, her expression sobering, she asked, “They still have no idea who killed Mary Crosby?”

All three women had been following the story of the young prostitute, barely fifteen years old, who had been found with her throat slit near the waterfront earlier in the month.

“No,” Lucy confirmed with a shake of her head. “And with the sort of attitude Boddie showed toward her, it’s no surprise.”

“But your cousin is leading the investigation, isn’t he?” Vera asked. “He’ll find the culprit.”

There was a time when Eversham might have been able to devote his time to searching for the man who had murdered Mary, but now that he was in a more senior position, he spent most of his time delegating tasks to the men he managed. So if the case was resolved, it would most likely be done by one of his detectives. To Vera, however, she made a noncommittal sound. Eversham had never expressly forbidden her from speaking about the inner workings of the Met, but she didn’t feel right about divulging such things even so.

“He’ll try his best,” she said with a smile in the other lady’s direction. “He always does.”

Seeming to accept Lucy’s words at face value, Vera changed the subject. “You haven’t told her your news, Meg.”

Meg pulled a face and rolled her eyes. “It’s not anything to be pleased about.” To Lucy she said, “My brother is expected home any day now.”

Frowning, Lucy asked, “But I should think that’s happy news. You’re fond of one another, are you not?”

From what she knew of Meg and her brother, Viscount Gilford, they were quite close. Indeed, Meg always spoke of him and his prolonged sojourn in Europe wistfully.

“It isn’t that I am not fond of him,” Meg said with a sigh. “It’s just that Mama views his arrival as an opportunity to unburden herself with all of her complaints about me and my many sins.”

Lucy snorted. “Your mother and mine must do nothing but despair over their disobedient daughters when they encounter one another.” Though she spoke the words more as a balm for her friend than anything else. Her own mama was sweetness itself compared to the unpleasant Lady Gilford.

“I suppose I must be grateful my mother is dead,” Vera said with a laugh.

At Lucy and Meg’s twin expressions of alarm, Vera sighed. “My sense of humor is sometimes too much even for my closest friends. I apologize, ladies.”

Though she had been startled by Vera’s words, Lucy chided herself for being so sensitive. “Oh, do not apologize, my dear. Meg and I are likely being oversensitive.”

But as the carriage rumbled along toward Elise’s townhouse, she couldn’t stop the sadness that washed over her. How unhappy Vera’s childhood must have been. Her mother had died of a fever when the girl was barely more than a baby.

Mindful of that, she gave a bright smile to her companions. “What did you both think of the book?”