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Marcus sighed and set down the brightly coloured print that the Honourable Mr Gastrell had just handed him for inspection.

‘I suppose you think it’s amusing?’ he said with a touch of weariness.

It wasn’t really a question – he could see that Jem did from the broad grin that had spread across his pleasantly ugly face.

‘It’s damned amusing, Thorn. They all are, and this is one of the best yet. I’m very sorry to hear that you’re losing your sense of humour under all your current trials, dear old boy.’

Marcus – Thorn to his friends, Major Lord Thornfalcon to the polite world – hoped he wasn’t becoming a dull, dreary sort of fellow as his oldest friend implied, but feared he might be, and really, was it any wonder?

With just a hint of asperity in his deep voice, he said, ‘I wish we might see how long you would retain your famous sense of humour if you were constantly being made the subject of this sort of monstrously annoying thing, dear old boy !’ With a large, well-shaped hand, he gestured at the paper he’d laid down on the table between the two armchairs he and his friend occupied.

He could quite happily have torn it into a dozen pieces and made Jeremy eat them.

It was a satirical print, such as might be bought – or viewed with ease in one of the large new plate-glass windows by those who could not afford to buy – in any of a dozen shops a few minutes’ walk away from White’s club, where the two friends sat this morning.

And there was no mistaking the subject of it.

Thorn was a gift from heaven to the caricaturists, and one they had seized on avidly.

He was far above the average height and magnificently built, with a profile that one lady, swooning at the mere thought, had compared to that of Antinous, and another to that of Michael Angelo’s David.

It was not necessary to choose the ancient personage he most resembled; the effect, in all events, was unmistakeably classical.

His brow was noble, his nose straight, his lips beautifully sculpted and his jawline strong.

His chestnut hair curled crisply in a manner any lady might envy and seek to emulate.

All of this splendour could be seen in garish colour in the print that he so disliked.

Though he was currently dressed with propriety and sober good taste in top-boots, buckskin breeches and blue superfine coat, just like his slighter companion, the print had him arrayed – as they always did – in the new and rather splendid British Hussar’s uniform, skin-tight, flattering to every inch of the athletic manly figure, and liberally trimmed with gold braid.

The scene depicted was not a military one, however.

Far from it. As in all the prints that had bedevilled his existence since his most reluctant appearance in society a few weeks ago, the Hero of Salamanca and Huebra (here described instead in an unscrolling ribbon of text as the Hero of Berkeley Square) was besieged, not by fierce cuirassiers in shining metal breastplates or by Marshal Marmont’s brave dragoons in martial green, but by a great many nubile young ladies in bright, flimsy silks and snowy white muslins.

His expression, drawn in a few swift but powerfully expressive lines, suggested that they were a far more formidable foe than any of Napoleon’s army.

This time, he was pictured in an elegant drawing room, his sabre in his hand but plainly useless as a weapon (there was an obvious implication here, given the lewd nature of many of these prints, and Thorn didn’t care for it at all) because of the tender nature of his pursuers.

These ladies climbed frantically over each other’s bodies in a tangle of near-naked limbs, and fought among themselves, pulling hair and scratching, the better to approach him more closely.

They had rent their garments, or each other’s, which had not been enormously substantial to begin with, the better to expose yet more of their essential nakedness.

He, the sole masculine figure in the scene, stood at bay on a satin sofa, and it seemed as though at any moment he would meet his fate, swallowed up by these modern maenads.

It was, as Jeremy Gastrell had said, excessively well done as these things went, and even among his embarrassment and distaste, he might have admitted as much, had not the chief of his persecutors, the most carefully drawn and also the one who appeared most likely to lay her eager hands upon him first, so greatly and unmistakeably resembled that famous silver-haired beauty, his widowed sister-in-law, Lavinia.

This could hardly be an accident; the artist had known exactly what he was about, and he was grateful that Jem had not seen fit to point it out, as he would not have known what to say in response.

He did not in general lack for humour, despite his friend’s gibe, but he could find no amusement at all in this matter.

Lavinia – who was by cruel irony Lady Thornfalcon though most definitely not his wife, but rather his brother’s widow – was, of course, currently residing with her parents in Berkeley Square, as all the world knew, including the printmaker.

Ten years ago, Lavinia Hall, as she had been then, would not have needed to pursue him.

He had been hers, body and soul. And she had been his.

He still believed that she had, when they had both been sixteen and seventeen.

But fate, in the shape of the late Lord Thornfalcon and his neighbour and crony Sir Lionel Hall, had intervened.

Lavinia, the loveliest girl in Somerset, had been destined for Lord Thornfalcon’s heir Ambrose, a most suitable bride, so that their substantial estates might one day be joined.

Her ambitious father had not the least notion of allowing her to marry the Viscount’s far less eligible second son, who was to go for a soldier.

Marcus might have defied his father and hers, and suggested an elopement to Gretna Green to his love, had he not realised, without ever puzzling out the full significance of the thought, that his delicate, fragile, heartbreakingly beautiful Lavinia was not particularly well-suited to the life of a very junior officer without a fortune to his name, even one in a fashionable cavalry regiment.

He’d hoped with the optimism of extreme youth to make a great career and rise to a high position in the army, but he could not flatter himself it would happen quickly.

And so he had told her that he could not ask such a sacrifice of her, and she had cried prettily, and agreed.

‘I must obey my father; it is my clear duty,’ she had said, looking up at him with those mesmerising, drenched-violet eyes, as if challenging him to contradict her, or to take her in his arms again this one last time and kiss away her tears.

He had kissed her – had done much more than that – but he hadn’t told her she was wrong.

So she’d married his brother Ambrose in the family chapel at Thornfalcon, but luckily – his father, though proud and rigid in his outlook, hadn’t been entirely devoid of sense, and his long-suffering mother must have had a part to play too – Marcus hadn’t been there to witness it.

He’d gained his lieutenant’s commission with extraordinary swiftness and been packed off post-haste to his regiment.

He had resigned himself, he’d believed then, to seeing Lavinia only as a sister as the years passed; it would hurt at first, he knew, but he hoped the pain would lessen.

He knew too that Ambrose loved her, in his quiet fashion.

Everyone did; she was so perfect. That was some sort of mercy; he need not think of her being anything less than adored. She deserved that.

And as far as he knew – from what his mother had told him, carefully, in her letters – the pair had been happy enough together.

Certainly, nobody had ever hinted to him that they weren’t.

In time, she’d borne Ambrose a daughter, Priscilla, and Marcus had sent sincere congratulations and a generous gift, for this child, no doubt as lovely as her mother, who might so easily have been his.

Marcus had fought through Spain and Portugal and Spain again with little more than a few scratches and a concussion, until recently.

But while he had been fighting and growing to manhood, the third Lord Thornfalcon had died, which was to be expected, given his age and state of health, and then a few months later, the fourth, which was not.

Ambrose had broken his neck one winter afternoon in a stupid, pointless riding accident.

He had no son, which mean that Marcus was still his heir. And now Lavinia was a widow.

He hadn’t rushed back for his father’s funeral, nor for his brother’s, though it was doubtful if he could have made it in time on either occasion.

He could have come after, of course, and probably should have done, but last year had been a crucial one in the fight for the Peninsula, and he’d chosen to believe that he could not be spared, though of course he was far from being indispensable and knew it.

But a Frenchman’s bayonet-thrust deep into his shoulder had broken his run of luck at last, in the desperately bloody hand-to-hand fighting among the trees along the River Huebra, and so he’d been sent back to England at last, much against his will, to face Lavinia.

Jeremy said now, clearly realising from the storm clouds gathering in his friend’s normally amiable face, that it was past time for a change of subject. ‘Do you go to Mrs Singleton’s ball tonight, old man?’

Marcus would have been glad of a diversion, but this was scarcely that. ‘Need you ask? I shall be there, naturally, escorting my sister and my mother, if she is well enough.’

‘I expect Miss Helena’s Season is a great strain on Her Ladyship,’ Jeremy said sympathetically.