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“Not the whole story,” he said.

Again, Miranda sucked in a telltale breath, and Nate steeled himself, running through possible answers in his head. He’d obviously lost some quickness of wit while he’d lain in bed with a fever.

“Captain Clare came looking for us, didn’t he?” Miranda blurted. She bounced a little on her toes.

Their highwayman host grinned. He probably appreciated Miranda’s bounce, just as Nate always did.

“I knew he would,” she said.

“I wonder then,” said their host, “that you tried to leave Lyndale in the middle of the night, on foot, while your...husband still suffered from a bullet wound.” The highwayman rose, fixing his gaze on Nate.

He really was a tall fellow. “Apparently, you were to meet Captain Clare at the Tooth and Nail. Is that right?”

Nate nodded. He was glad the highwayman had met Harry Clare. That meant the man knew they were not entirely defenseless.

“If you’ve recovered sufficiently to endure the jostling of a carriage ride, let’s return you to the Tooth and Nail. This investigation of yours intrigues me.”

Again Nate nodded. They’d got their wish to return to the inn, but they’d be bringing a curious and not altogether predictable gentleman with them. He’d like to be sure Captain Clare would be there to meet them at the other end.

“Sir, may we send an express to my...wife’s father? I have the blunt to pay for it.” Nate reached for the leather pouch he’d hung around his neck.

The highwayman waved away the offered money. “Send directly. We leave within the hour.” He strode off.

* * * *

Lucy sat next to Adam on his bench with a basket of worn linens beside her and her needle in hand. Lamb and rosemary from the kitchen mingled with pipe smoke and ale from the tap and quite erased from Lucy’s memory the delicate scents of Brook Street. Loud talk and laughter from the bench sitters filled her ears. Everything and nothing was the same. She herself was different. More different than she ever imagined.

She had a letter in her pocket from her father’s solicitor. It had been waiting for her at the inn with a bundle of things her father had wanted her to have. Her father had never married. There was no Mrs. Holbrook, no mother who had died giving birth to Lucy.

A long, thin envelope had slipped from the solicitor’s bundle. Inside was a receipt. At first she could make little sense of the names on the paper. Then she understood. It was a receipt for the portrait of her lady. Her papa had paid the artist the shocking amount of four hundred pounds for a painting of a stranger, and apparently not even an English stranger. The lady’s name was Madame La Comtesse de la Neuvillette.

One didn’t question love. Papa loved her, and Adam loved her. She had never doubted either of them. She had never longed for a mother while she was so loved. But Papa’s desire that she become a lady went far beyond what she’d imagined. That her frugal papa, who economized on candles and coal and made sure not to be cheated with a hollow cheese or sprouted malt, could spend so staggering a sum on a painting was a wonder. The day he’d hung the painting in her room, he’d urged her to think of her lady as a friend and model. “Whatever they say at your school,” he’d told her, “about your papa, know that your lady is on your side.”

Papa’s extravagant faith in the portrait of a foreign countess and his utter silence about her real mother now struck her as ominous. All those years ago Amelia had suggested that Lucy was better off knowing nothing about her mother, and perhaps it was true.

The thread that had connected her to the Tooth and Nail had been snipped, as easily and finally as she herself snipped the thread at the end of her needle. Adam sat calmly beside her, polishing candlesticks. Earlier he had repeated his question about the missing Queenie until Lucy thought she must lose all patience with him. His fortnight in London had not harmed him, but it had made her forget the old habit of talking with him. It required the patience of needlework, the steady repetition of even stitches, the careful piecing together of parted seams, and a willingness to break off threads going nowhere.

This morning she had set herself the task of mending table linens. Later she must face the account books. She drew another cloth from her basket, held it up to the light, and discovered a gravy stain the size of a butter dish. She turned the cloth several ways, but the stain could not be concealed. She put aside her thimble and needle and began to tear the ruined linen into strips.

Her people had welcomed her home. Mrs. Vell made a treacle tart, the bench sitters toasted her with their ale, Will Wittering grinned at her, and Hannah babbled for an hour about all that happened in her absence. It was Hannah’s account of the inn that now troubled Lucy. In spite of Queenie’s mysterious absence, the inn remained as it had always been, comfortable and warm, and noisy. In the midst of the daily comings and goings of neighbors and guests, she could not credit Mountjoy’s warning of danger from spies and murderers. What did spies have to do with the Tooth and Nail? But all morning Adam had repeated his question about Queenie, and a thing that Hannah said stuck in Lucy’s mind. A fine gentleman had come to the inn every afternoon while Lucy was away. He was the one who had come once, before Lucy had left for London, the gentleman who had ordered a fish dinner and disappeared without eating it. When Lucy had asked Hannah what sort of gentleman he was, Hannah told her he was a gentleman doctor, with a fine coat and hat and a black bag. Hannah was sure he would come again and glad for the coin he gave her each time he came. She promised to be on the lookout for him.

Mountjoy had told Lucy the inn was watched. She had not asked him how he knew or what that meant. A fish-ordering gentleman who skipped without paying did not seem like a potential enemy, but a doctor who came every day and went out of his way to befriend Hannah bothered her.

She wanted to rail at Mountjoy for cutting up her peace, for disconnecting her from the familiar world in which she belonged. She, who had been content to dream of being a lady, had had a taste of it now. She had opened the box of London pleasures, beside which the pleasures of the Tooth and Nail looked small and shabby, everything plain, worn, and loud. Doors banged and men shouted. She, Iron Tom’s daughter, was someone else, someone she didn’t know. She had only Adam left to connect her to the inn. She had believed his past to be past, and yet apparently it was present, and what little she had, what she was left with after the London dream crumbled, could be taken away from her.

She would not let that happen. She would fight it. On one point she and Mountjoy had agreed. He thought, as she had thought years earlier, that Adam’s sayings made sense, told a story, and that unraveling the story might help Adam overcome the past. She looked at her childhood companion now. He was not as calm as he first appeared. In Queenie’s absence, his hands paused in their work every few minutes, and he tilted his head to listen to the sounds of the inn as if there might be something amiss. He was not in distress, just slightly unsettled. If there ever were a moment to try to help him, it was now before Hannah’s gentleman doctor returned.

“Adam.” She put a hand on his sleeve. “Will you come with me to Papa’s room?”

He put aside his polish and his rags and took her hand. They made their way to the back of the inn, and Lucy let them into the familiar room. Adam turned as if to go to his bed under the stairs, but Lucy steered him to her papa’s chair. She lit the lamps that Adam never needed.

Once she had him seated, she was not sure how to proceed. “We’re going to have a talk, Adam,” she told him. “Here in this safe place, about what happened to you long ago when you came to the inn.”

“Adam stayed,” he said.

Lucy took a steadying breath. “I know you did, Adam, and Geoffrey ran away.”

Adam began to tremble, shaking his head from side to side. “No, no, no, no, no,” he murmured.