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“Better. What brings you here? Your…special order isn’t due until tomorrow. Everything is in order—I’ve already checked.”

“I know,” Clara said. Her latest chapbook was being released that very week. “But I won’t be here, so I just wanted to make sure everything was set.”

“You won’t?” Kitty was surprised. “You’re always here on publication day.”

It would be a wrench. Clara loved to see readers asking in hushed tones for the new book and spiriting it away in reticules—and once, memorably, down the front of a dress when the reader’s mother came in. For the same purpose. Watching them circle each other was thoroughly entertaining.

“I’ll be away for a few weeks. I’ll leave the direction with my solicitor, should it be required.”

“I’m sure it will all be fine. We’ve done this a dozen times already.”

Half an hour later, Clara had made a little pile of books to be purchased for her trip.

“Notable Families of Hampshire?” Kitty read from the spine. “Card Games and Their Rules? Not exactly your usual fare.”

“I’m branching out.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“What?”

“Fine, keep your secrets.”

By the time Kitty had wrapped the books and placed them carefully into a box with a ribbon handle, the quiet had given way to the murmurs of shoppers in the narrow aisles. And a thump at the window.

Kitty marched to the door and yanked it open. “Oi!”

A shocked gasp from behind her, three from the sidewalk.

“You peddle sin!” The thrower of the egg now splattered over her window shouted.

“And you peddle misery, you rotten old cabbage!”

The older man turned purple with affront.

“Get home before I tell Grandmother,” Kitty added, slamming the door. “My grandfather,” she shrugged at the questioning gaze of a customer.

“Never mind,” she added to Clara. “I’ve just had a delivery of gold paint. I’m going to paint the next griffin right on the outside wall, where he will see it every time he walks by. I’m going to give him my grandfather’s walrus mustache as well, just see if I don’t.”

Clara admired her fire. And her willingness to wield it, consequences be damned. “If I return from the country in time, I shall lend a hand.”

“Oh, good. You’re the only one who can get the angle of the wings right.” Kitty’s gaze tracked a woman hovering by the counter, pretending to admire a set of music sheets. She winked at Clara and turned away. “Good afternoon—how may I help you today?”

Clara could only make out the whispered “Nightingale” because she was very accustomed to straining to hear it. She lifted a hand in farewell and stepped back out into the bustle of the city.

Carriages rolled past, the steady rhythm of the horses’ hooves nearly lost amid the general cacophony. Her father’s carriage had had the family coat of arms on the door. It was painted teal and lavender with ornate gold trim and was nearly as flamboyant as her father. There were peacocks who were less flamboyant. And common house sparrows who were more decorative than her mother. Clara hadn’t been inside that carriage in years, even before the new earl took possession of it. It was now a very tasteful gray with sage-green accents.

She now lived in a perfectly respectable townhouse that her mother would have found akin to a brothel and her father drab to the extreme. She loved every inch of it, paid for with the earnings of her “torrid chapbooks,” as one gossip columnist referred to them. But a carriage was an exorbitant indulgence when most of her other expeditions were within walking distance or done by hired hackney. There was no arguing that the family carriage was far more comfortable and had smelled far better. The walls were painted silk, the cushions laundered weekly. There was always a warming brick to keep her toes from turning into icicles.

No longer. Just a hired hackney with smoke-stained curtains.

Today, she felt too uncharacteristically energetic to be cooped up. She would walk home. There was the usual chatter and cries of flower sellers and street sweepers. The smell was purely London: coal smoke, horses, damp, flowers struggling to find the sun. Clara wove between pedestrians and shoppers and footmen lugging piles of boxes behind their mistresses. A dog barked somewhere.

A young boy, no more than eleven, popped into her path. “Lady Clara?”

She stopped. “Do I know you?” She could not think how. A woman wearing a silk dress the color of tangerines clicked her tongue at him when he did not dart out of her way quickly enough. He just grinned, a gap in his side teeth.

“Here you go.” He shoved a letter at Clara and promptly vanished into the crowd, weaving between carriages with a laugh at every curse thrown his way.