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Effie did sleep in the next morning. When he awakened—to an empty bed—and checked his timepiece, it was just after ten. He felt more refreshed than he had in months.

He took the sheet off Leander’s cage, opened the door, and offered his arm. Leander, like Sally, was quite happy to perch on Effie’s hand, but unlike Sally, he wasn’t affectionate. Whereas Sally used to nuzzle Effie’s cheek and take apparent delight in playing games with him, Leander merely regarded him with his blank eyes.

“Is there anything in here?” Effie asked, rubbing Leander’s head feathers. “I fear not.”

“Go!” Leander chirped.

“Oh, so we’ve reverted to ‘Go!’ have we? All right, then.”

It was just as well Leander had forgotten his recent foray into speaking in complete sentences; Effie didn’t need the blasted bird announcing the contents of his heart like some kind of feathered newspaper boy. He arranged the sheets of linen Mrs. Mitchell had furnished and let Leander roam while he performed his morning ablutions.

Later, Effie found the boys lingering in the breakfast room, and as he helped himself to tea, he shot Archie a questioning look. Had he climbed out the window early this morning?

Archie merely winked.

“We were just about to walk to the village,” Simon said. “Stretch our legs a bit. We thought we’d walk there, then visit the beach. We can discuss what to do about your Miss Evans.”

She’s not my Miss Evans , Effie wanted to say, but he also wanted what Simon said to be true, so he remained silent, and after he’d had eaten some kippers and toast, they set off.

The house they were borrowing was newish, its acreage carved out of farmland on the outskirts of the old village and situated on land that sloped down to the sea. It belonged to a friend of Simon’s from Lords whose wife had taken a shine to the area. The family summered here but left the house empty most of the rest of the year.

“Have you been to the beach yet?” Effie asked. “Here by the house, I mean.”

“We went after you stood us up yesterday,” Simon said archly. “It’s very quiet. Rather the opposite of the bustling seaside in Brighton. A shingle beach, with quite large stones. Mrs. Mitchell reports that the water is shallow.”

The walk to the village was short, and as the September sun warmed Effie, that sense of lightness returned, of being able to relax in the steadfast company of his friends.

When he tripped over a loose cobblestone, he realized he had forgotten to put on his boots. He’d come down to breakfast in a pair of court shoes he’d packed and had unthinkingly left the house in them. He’d gone through a phase of wearing the flamboyant footwear last year, and this pair, which he’d had made based on a portrait of Charles II, was perhaps his pièce de résistance. He was mostly over the phase, but he did enjoy antagonizing the boys. And, really, these shoes, with their high red heels and riotous bows of silver lace and ribbon, were so much more pleasant to look at than plain leather boots.

“All right?” Archie said, reaching out a hand to steady Effie.

Simon, for his part, merely let his gaze fall to Effie’s shoes and then lifted it to the sky as if applying for divine patience.

“What if I were to call at the Old Ship?” Effie said, returning to the topic of how he might see Julianna.

They discussed the possibility as they walked.

“What if she doesn’t want to see me, though?” Effie asked. It was hard to imagine, given the tenor of their meeting yesterday, but she had decisively turned down his invitation to dinner.

“I feel certain she will want to see you,” Simon said with a bit of a guffaw.

Effie wasn’t sure what was so amusing. “How? How are you sure?”

“Because there she is.”

Effie nearly tripped again.

“Good heavens, so she is,” Archie said.

Sure enough, about thirty or so yards down Hove Street, dressed in a navy spencer and the same gray-beribboned bonnet as yesterday, was Julianna.

Effie was aware he should not be surprised by anything Julianna did. She was, after all, possessed of uncommon intelligence and wit. But to see her striding down the street here, where they’d purposefully hidden themselves from the bustle of Brighton, positively stopped him in his tracks.

She was wearing a dress of blue gray under the spencer—not the same purely gray dress as yesterday—and carrying an unadorned black reticule. She had a very . . . decided sort of walk, a long, strong gait, and she kept her gaze on her destination. Which, in this case, was apparently him. She looked like a governess intent on reaching a wayward charge.

“How wonderful!” he exclaimed.

“My lords,” she said briskly, dipping into a curtsy as she came to a halt in front of them.

He wanted to tell her to stop that. She needn’t curtsy. She shouldn’t curtsy. Something about it felt terribly, terribly wrong. But before he could object, the boys were sweeping into bows, and what could he do but follow suit?

“Good morning, Miss Evans,” Archie said solicitously. “How lovely to see you.”

Instead of returning his greeting, Julianna said, “My lords, I have secured a tour of the Pavilion’s interior. The public areas, anyway.”

“You have!” Simon exclaimed. “How?”

“I merely called and introduced myself to the servant who answered the door as the editor of Le Monde Joli , a respected and respectable ladies’ magazine, and explained that my readers, possessed of exquisite taste and being interested in decor and the latest fashion, would be delighted to read an account of the place. He invited me in and asked me to wait. Eventually, the butler appeared, and, after some conferencing with the housekeeper, it was decided that a tour could be offered tomorrow morning.”

Effie beamed like a proud papa. She was so resourceful.

“How marvelous, Miss Evans,” Simon said. “I would remark upon how lucky you are, but clearly it is enterprise and not luck at work here.”

Exactly .

“Yes, and I thought you all might like to come. That’s why I’m here, to invite you.”

Simon came as close to having a fit of the vapors as Effie had ever seen—which was admittedly not very close, but still, his delighted gasp was so very un-Simon-like.

“Did you walk here?” Archie peered in the direction of Brighton.

“I did. It is not far.”

“How were you planning to find us, had we not encountered each other here?” Simon asked.

“Lord Featherfinch told me you were staying at the home of one of your friends, Lord Marsden. I deduced that the friend in question must be Lord Haffert. You and he have voted the same on all matters I am aware of in Lords, and you are both engaged in trying to draft legislation related to prison reform for next year’s session.”

Simon’s eyebrows flew skyward.

“And, knowing Lord Haffert has a house in Hove, a place I believe he became acquainted with thanks to his work in Parliament against smuggling, I thought when I got to the village, I would merely ask someone where it was.” She shrugged as if this remarkable bit of sleuthing were an everyday occurrence. Perhaps, for her, it was. Perhaps that was why her magazine was so good.

“And you were merely going to knock at the door and ask for us?” Archie asked.

She looked between the three of them. “Should I not have? Would I have been unwelcome?”

Archie’s hearty laugh peeled out across the sunlit day. “Not at all, Miss Evans. Not at all.”

When she furrowed her brow in confusion—and hurt? Effie hoped not—Effie rushed to say, “He laughs because we have expended a great deal of effort in worrying about if I ought to call on you at the Old Ship. They were concerned my spending time with you would harm your reputation.”

The furrow deepened. It was a decidedly perplexed furrow, though, not a hurt one.

“Or harm your livelihood,” Archie suggested.

“I think,” Julianna began slowly, “that you gentlemen are a trifle confused over what sort of person I am.”

It was Effie’s turn to be perplexed.

“I am not a refined lady whose reputation is a fragile glass bauble in need of protecting. That is your world, not mine.”

Effie opened his mouth to say something, but, realizing he had no idea what that something might be, closed it.

“And, while I am hardly a newspaperwoman—though I was flattered that you thought to call me such yesterday, Lord Harcourt—I have in my time gone rather to extremes in pursuit of a story, so I hardly think being seen in the company of three gentlemen is a concern. In fact, isn’t there safety in numbers? Isn’t your hypothetical lady in need of reputational shielding in more danger from being discovered alone in close quarters with one gentleman than out of doors with three?”

Effie could not argue with that.

Neither, it seemed, could the others, for after a startled pause, they both smiled.

“Miss Evans,” Archie said, “we were about to walk in the direction of home and visit the beach near the house. Would you care to join us? We can make our plans for the tour you’ve arranged.”

She would, she said, and they set off. Effie’s skin tingled from the pure pleasure of strolling with his three favorite people. Had he ever imagined a scene in which he would get to be with Simon and Archie and Julianna? He’d have sooner believed the sky really had turned chartreuse.

“You can’t come as yourselves tomorrow,” Julianna said after they’d walked a way. When she was met with blank stares, she added, “I thought you were trying to avoid detection while on holiday.”

“We are,” Archie said. “We are.”

“While I do not fear any reputational harm from being in your company, neither do I want to call unnecessary attention to myself. If you attend as yourselves tomorrow, surely the news of your visit will get back to the king. The servants wouldn’t fail to mention the three peers who came calling, asking for a tour, would they?”

“You are suggesting subterfuge,” Simon said.

“I am.”

“How exciting,” Effie said, barely refraining from clapping.

“I am thinking that one of you is my assistant at the magazine,” Julianna said. “One of you is an artist I have commissioned to take some sketches. The other is . . . Well, I haven’t figured that out yet.”

“A student of architecture,” Effie said. “The person you have hired to write the story.”

“Yes! Perfect!” She turned and beamed at him. Effie had thought yesterday that the rosy, slanted rays of the sunset had illuminated Julianna, but he could see now that hadn’t been exactly correct. Julianna glowed from within. No amount of gray wool could contain that glow. It was stoked by the fires of her inner self. Her wit and ambition and goodness.

“Your student should be Simon,” Effie said, beaming back at her, “for he can credibly opine about architecture.”

“Yes,” she said, turning to Simon. “I so enjoyed our discussion yesterday about architecture.”

Julianna and Simon had had a discussion about architecture yesterday? Effie could recall no such discussion. But to be fair, he could recall little about their tea other than his singular focus on the idea that Julianna had been wearing a wedding ring. When he’d first degloved her, in the Pavilion garden, the shock of it had been visceral. As if that little bit of metal was a dagger and she’d shoved it straight into his heart. And then he’d spiraled: what right had he to feel betrayed over her being married when he had lied to her for years?

It was just that she’d spoken so forcefully against marriage, in her letters. The idea that she might have actually been married, even as she’d taken such a fierce stance against the institution, had made him feel rather ill.

The ring-dagger had then become a snake charmer, playing a tune that had him single-mindedly fixated—Effie was the snake in this unfortunate metaphor. He hadn’t been able to focus on anything else. To hear anything else. So it was entirely probable that Julianna and his friends had had any number of conversations he had missed.

“You should be the artist,” Archie said to Effie, “for you are an artist.”

“No, I am the assistant,” Effie said firmly. “I am Miss Evans’s assistant.” It felt like a true statement. He did aid her, did he not, by contributing to Le Monde Joli ? “I know a fair bit about the magazine’s production,” he said, in case he needed support for his assertion.

“But that leaves me to be the artist,” Archie said, “and I could not sketch to save my life.”

“It matters not,” Julianna said. “I have been told that I may not commission any plates of the interiors, only describe them in words. I shall tell them you are making rough sketches merely in order to aid the memory of my writer.” She gestured to Simon, thereby anointing him the student of architecture.

“Well, then, it’s settled,” Effie said. “I am the assistant.” What fun. What an adventure. Was it tomorrow yet?

They spent the next while skipping stones into the sea and making up names and histories for the characters they were to inhabit—histories almost certainly more elaborate than would be required. But the laughter flowed, and the stones skipped and they kept going.

“Perhaps I ought to write a poem about the Pavilion,” Effie said, attempting to balance on a large stone. He had to admit that boring leather boots were more practical for beach frolicking than were court shoes.

“Or about three peers and a magazine editor who break into the palace in Brighton,” Archie said.

“We’re not breaking in,” Julianna said. “We’re gaining entry under false pretenses.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon, that’s quite different, then,” Archie retorted.

He adored the way Julianna and the boys were getting on, teasing one another as if they were long-standing friends.

After an hour had passed, Julianna said she needed to be getting back. As yesterday, they offered to walk her; as yesterday, she declined. “You all have spent part of each of the last two days with me, and you’re to join me tomorrow morning. I believe that’s quite enough gate-crashing on my part. I will see you tomorrow at ten o’clock.”

She started to turn away but swiveled her head back toward them. “Please endeavor to look less like the aristocrats you are.” She frowned at Effie. “That goes doubly for you. For heaven’s sake, find some reasonable footwear.”