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Absently, he took another pinch of snuff—it must have been too much for he sneezed violently.

He pushed the box away from him in annoyance.

Petteril’s questions annoyed him too. Or perhaps worried him was more accurate.

It wasn’t that he had begun to forget things—though he was aware that too much blue ruin and brandy could do that to a man.

He sat down, rubbing his forehead. Truth be told, he had given himself a fright and had been on the wagon last night, for he really had not cared for the odd flashes of memory from the night before last.

And he was very afraid those memories involved a baby.

He had certainly dreamed of a baby, for in a hazy kind of way, he recalled giggling over one in a box, and it might just have been on Lord Petteril’s area steps, though he couldn’t think what the devil he could have been doing there.

Must have been a dream , he told himself. I certainly didn’t put an infant there!

Or did he? The girl who shared Lucious Lila’s rooms had a baby.

Please, God, tell me I didn’t filch that baby and leave it on Petteril’s doorstep...

“Of course I didn’t,” he said aloud. “Even drunk as an emperor I’d never have touched a damned child.”

It was just a fragment of a dream. It didn’t seem to have any connection to the flash of horses and hackney cab which had caused him to fall down in the square. The hackney seemed to be real, so the unrelated baby image must be a dream. That was logical, wasn’t it?

He scratched his armpit, and thought he could probably do with a bath before he went out this evening. In fact, he could do worse than go out early and just drop in on Lila to be sure the brat was still there. If it wasn’t...well, he would have to do something to make things right for himself.

***

A S SHE WENT IN SEARCH of a hackney rather than go home and order the carriage, April found herself wistful for the days when she could just leap onto the backs of vehicles going in the direction she wanted and jump off again when they veered from her chosen course.

She amused herself with the vision of young Lady Petteril hurling herself onto the footman’s plate at the back of a town conveyance and carriage-hopping her way to the agency, skirts billowing in the breeze. ..

In the end, of course, she travelled inside the hackney, like the lady she now was, and caused quite a flurry as she stepped into the agency favoured by Mr. and Mrs. Park.

Though she always assumed such places would know her for a fraud and was prepared to fight with all the weapons she had to get the information she needed, she need not have worried.

The agency staff fell over themselves to please her, until the manager himself invited her into the privacy of his office. If he was disappointed that she refused tea, or that she had not come in search of more staff, he did not show it but kept smiling.

“My errand concerns Mrs. Robb,” she said, “whom you sent to us yesterday as a wet nurse.”

“I trust she is giving satisfaction?” the man said, a first hint of anxiety in his fading smile.

“The baby does not complain,” April assured him.

“But as you know she was engaged on a purely temporary capacity. If we were to employ her in the longer term, we would like to know more about her. Of course, I am aware from Mrs. Park, my housekeeper, that the woman had character references. But how well do you know her?”

“I have to say it was a pleasure to encounter a female of such class looking for such a menial position, and of course, any new mama would be bound to want the best for her child—”

“Indeed,” interrupted April, who could spot someone avoiding the question within three words. “So, Mrs. Robb has been registered with your agency for some time?”

He shifted in his seat, taking off his spectacles and polishing them with a mercifully clean handkerchief from his pocket.

“In fact,” he said hastily when April raised her brows threateningly, “she registered with us only yesterday, a mere few hours before your Mrs. Park called on us. Of course, we thought at once of Mrs. Robb—such a rare discovery—for the position.”

“Indeed...” Were her suspicions justified?

Had Mrs. Robb, for financial or other reasons, abandoned her baby on the Petteril’s doorstep with the intention of then looking after her own child at their expense?

If so, then she had lied to April’s face about her child’s death and, presumably, to Mrs. Park and the agency. “Do you know when her own baby died?”

“She did not say, only that it was recent...”

“Might I see what information you have?” Such as Mrs. Robb’s address, if she had one.

Half an hour later, she came to a halt outside a respectable house—one of a row of similar houses, built in the last ten years or so.

What on earth was she going to find here?

Why would a woman who lived in this relative prosperity abandon her child and then seek him out again?

Even if her story was true, why would she be seeking such menial work?

There was only one way to find out. April walked up the path and rapped the knocker. A maid opened the door and bobbed a curtsey.

April presented her card. “Mrs. Robb, if you please,” she said, in imitation of Aunt Hortensia in one of her pleasanter moods.

“Who?” the maid said blankly, blinking at the card before her eyes widened and she curtseyed again. “Ma’am,” she added hastily, “that is, my lady!”

“Mrs. Robb does live here?”

“Oh! No, ma—my lady. Mrs. Robb’s the previous tenant who just moved out. Poor widow, she was, couldn’t stay here once her husband died.”

“Then where did she go?”

“I don’t know ma’am. She left everything but a few clothes in a bag. And the baby, of course.”

So there was a baby!

“Then you saw her leave? What did she carry the baby in?”

At this point, April was sure the maid would have closed the door in her face, had the card inscribed Lady Petteril not been clutched in her hand. There were definite advantages to being the viscountess.

“What was it carried in?” the girl repeated uncertainly.

“In a cradle? A box?”

“Oh no, ma’am. She just carried it in her arms.”

“Was this yesterday?” April asked. “The day before?”

“Oh, no, my lady,” the girl said in some relief. “Must have been a fortnight and more ago.”

Then where did she go? “Would you mind inquiring of your mistress if she has a forwarding address for Mrs. Robb?”

The mistress of the house, however, almost more flustered than the maid, could not help on this score. Mrs. Robb had been evicted by the landlord for not paying her rent and had, presumably, vanished with her child, into the faceless sea of London’s poor.

***

O N HIS WAY TO THE HACKNEY stand in Oxford Street, Piers detoured to two men’s hostels and an inn.

None of them claimed to have heard of Simon Park, although of course he might have been using a different name.

In each case he suggested Mr. Park might have had a small baby with him.

One hostel told him they didn’t allow children.

The caretaker of the other just stared at him.

At the Golden Cross Inn at Charing Cross, he was told he’d never see a man with a small baby because they were women’s business.

Hoping for more help from hackney drivers, Piers moved on to the nearest stand at Westminster. Right next to the seat of parliamentary power and privilege lurked the swamp of poverty, crime, and vice known as the Devil’s Acre, to which he had been introduced at Christmas.

It crossed his mind to wonder if one of April’s family had sent a struggling mother and child to their doorstep. But he would talk to April before venturing there.

At the hackney stands, he received several glances of disbelief. “How am I supposed to remember every passenger I have in a day?” one driver demanded. He had a particularly large wart on the side of his weathered red nose.

“Well, you might, because this was very early yesterday morning and there was a baby in a wooden box, possibly carried by a desperate young woman, but definitely going to Hyde Square in Mayfair.”

“Well, that’s where you’re wrong,” the Westminster driver said triumphantly, “because I didn’t start until midday yesterday. Never do.”

Piers touched his hat and tried the next driver in line. This fellow scratched his head beneath his somewhat disreputable hat. “Not much call for hackneys here so early in the morning. More likely to pick up in Mayfair.”

“Did you?” Piers asked, hopefully. “Yesterday?”

“Nah.”

It was slow and spirit-sapping work, so by the time he got to Oxford Street, he was prepared for further disappointment. At least the stand was bustling, though brisk business meant he had little time to ask his questions, before the jarveys brushed him off in favour of actual passengers.

So he wandered up to a group of drivers whose vehicles were a few yards away from the actual stance while their horses rested.

“Excuse me for interrupting, gentlemen,” Piers said amiably. “I’m trying to trace a small child who was abandoned and I have reason to believe a hackney driver may have witnessed—or even carried—the passenger who left him.”

“Bless my soul,” said one, clearly shocked. He even took off his hat to reveal an entirely bald pate, as though in respect for the dead.

“Oh, the babe still lives,” Piers hastened to assure them. “But obviously we need to know to whom it belongs. I don’t suppose any of you were working at dawn yesterday?”

A couple of them, including the bald man, nodded.

The other wore a bright red muffler against the cold. When his head moved, the muffler shifted down from his nose to his chin. “Didn’t have no baby in me cab, though,” he said nervously.

“The baby,” Piers said, “might not have been visible. It was probably in a wooden box and resembled a pile of rags more than a living being. Your passenger might have been a poor, desperate young woman...”

“How’d she afford the fare, then?” asked the bald man.

“That is what has me stumped.” One of the many things that stumped Piers right now. “At any rate, there seems to have been a hackney in Hyde Square around seven or eight o’clock yesterday morning.”

“Not me,” said the muffled man with clear relief. “No one goes to the park that time of the morning.”

“True,” said the bald man. “Certainly wasn’t me. Didn’t even see any babes in arms—or boxes—that morning. Or any other. Tucker here’s the one who’s always lucky with families.”

“Fill the whole cab up, and dirty it too with sticky fingers and snot,” the third man said, speaking for the first time.

He was younger than the other two, and wore a white Christmas rose in his threadbare buttonhole.

“Not yesterday, though. Don’t normally start so early.

Day before, I had two whole families. Nowhere near Hyde Square.

’Scuse me.” He moved away to his horse who was restlessly pawing the ground and showing signs of taking himself for a walk.

It was certainly too cold for the horses to be still for too long, so Piers didn’t blame him. What troubled him was his sense that the man was lying.

“What’s his name again?” Piers asked the others as the third jarvey walked his horse into the traffic and along the road past the stand. “Just so I can cross you all off the list of drivers I’ve spoken to.”

“He’s Amos Tucker. I’m Brearly and that’s Smith,” said the bald man, flexing his arms and nodding. “Good luck to you, and the poor little mite.”

Piers thanked them and walked away in the same direction as Tucker.

It had struck him that the younger man looked just a little more refined than the others.

And that he was around the right age to be Simon Park.

Although he had been trained as a gardener, not a coachman, Simon was apparently good with horses.

But when Piers reached the first corner, the traffic had swallowed up man, horse and cab. Still, he knew now where to find him.

Only how the devil was he to recognize the man, let alone describe the man to Park? In Piers’s head, Tucker’s features were already the same as everyone else’s.