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It was near teatime when Nate entered Kirby’s. The bell jingled, and the old man looked up from where he sat behind the counter in the gloom of the shop. It was a sign of how low his spirits were that he had yet to fix the broken window at the front of the shop that Nate had boarded up before the club closed.

“Where’s Miranda?” he asked.

“In the back. She’s very down.” Kirby shook his head.

“Let me have a crack at her, sir. I’ll bring her out of it.”

The old man shrugged, and Nate pushed through the crimson velvet curtains into the passage that led to Kirby’s tailoring room, where he had measured the spies—Blackstone, Hazelwood, and Clare—and created for them the clothes each needed to play his role. Kirby had made coats for Nate, too, coats to rival those of the loftiest toffs in London.

He found Miranda sitting on the kilim-padded bench, red-eyed and hunched over a blue silk waistcoat, most likely one of Lord Hazelwood’s. She didn’t move though she had a sewing case at her side and a needle in hand, a silver thimble on one finger. The glow from a lamp on the table hardly reached her.

Nate steadied himself. For a year he’d made a study of Miranda Kirby, her looks and her moods. He knew just what made her blue eyes flash and her perfect round chin jut proudly. He had memorized the shape of her left ear and the way her white lace tucker moved with her breathing. Once, he had kissed her, an experience that left his head spinning and his heart aching.

Today her nose was red, and her bright hair looked dull and flat against her skull. She looked up at him and quickly down again. “You,” she said. “Go away. I’m busy.”

“Don’t you want to know why I’ve come?”

“I won’t be mocked.”

“I haven’t come to mock you.” He took a seat opposite her bench, near enough to touch her, but not so close as to crowd her. “I’ve come to enlist your help.”

“My help? Hah, nobody wants my help.”

“Turns out I do.”

“Why?”

“Because a...” He almost said man. That was the word he’d used with Captain Clare, but he thought the better of it with Miranda. “...a spy needs a partner.”

“What spy?”

“Me.”

“Oh, you’re a spy now?” Her eyes came alive a bit as she challenged him.

“I’ve got a job to do for Captain Clare. You could come along.” He waited while she fretted at the buttons of the waistcoat.

“Where?”

“To a place called Hartwood. It’s off the Aylesbury road near High Wycombe. A lord’s estate.” Miranda’s interest always picked up if a toff was involved.

“High Wycombe’s near thirty miles away. How do we get there?” She knew he didn’t drive, a lack of gentlemanly accomplishment in her view.

“Thirty miles of good road. We’ll travel stage.”

“And then? We walk up the drive in all our dirt and knock on the door and ask the butler, who is as high and mighty as a lord himself, if we can spy on his lordship?”

Nate wanted to laugh. “We won’t be going to the front door. No butler is going to look down on us. We go to the housekeeper.”

She appeared to consider the strategy. “What do we say?”

“I’ve got it figured. Do you want to come?”

She plucked at the silk in her lap with her thimble-covered finger. “You go.”

“You want the club to open again, don’t you?”

She looked up, and if Nate read her rightly, she looked stricken with guilt. There was something his Miranda was not telling him.