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Outside, it was not her father’s coachman, but Lynley waiting for her, next to Phil’s curricle.

Emily glanced down at the steps to cover her surprise. She had been thinking him elsewhere this morning, reporting to his mysterious employer or sleeping in his secret quarters, wherever they were. Even Phil claimed not to know.

“Hello,” Lynley said and offered his hand to help her up into the vehicle. The day was fine, with the plane trees in flower and leaf in the square, and just the hint of a breeze. “Learn anything?”

“In a way, yes,” she said. It was hard to put it into words, but she suspected that Lady Ravenhurst had a lover. Emily had heard no gossip linking the lady to another, but then Emily had been ignoring the fashionable world, absorbed in Chunee’s death and Arthur Broome’s arrest.

Returning to the more conventional activities of the Season made sense after their failed attempt to talk to Malikov. Her mother’s letter, too, had been a reminder that Emily and Lynley needed to keep up the appearance of a courting couple. Only he and she knew that their courtship had stopped its forward progress. No barristers met to arrange settlements. Neither caterers nor clergymen had been notified. No guest lists had been drawn up or bride clothes ordered.

And yet Lynley had said, I want you out of these clothes. The idea haunted her. His words came to mind at the most awkward times, like now as he settled beside her in the curricle. Recalling his words made her clothes feel tight against her skin.

He gave his horses the order to walk on.

She stared ahead while he navigated the traffic around the square. She had understood that with those words he meant to express his concern for some contamination to her garments from the floor of Malikov’s cell, but she had also understood, instantly, in that moment, with a clarity that had flooded her body in heat, that he meant it in a different, more direct way as well.

Her heart had been pounding with the thrill of their escape from the prison. It had been an escape. Someone in that small party of prison officials had permitted murder, and that someone would not want his actions examined. An entry in the register in the governor’s office had tipped Lynley off before Emily, in the deepest recesses of the prison, had realized the danger. He had come for her, and she could only guess at how he had felt in the confined spaces of those passages and cells, where his head and shoulders could barely squeeze through. And so in the carriage, when they were free of the place, he had let a thought escape. He was a most provoking man. She certainly wasn’t taking off her clothes while he wore all of his.

“Well?” he asked.

“Lady Ravenhurst was expecting someone who did not make an appearance. She had dozens of visitors, but no one gave her joy. I think we’re looking for someone who wasn’t there.”

“Like Archer?” he asked.

“Possibly. It’s not too late. I will call on his sister, if you’ll take me there.”

“It was my plan,” he said. He wore the usual accouterments of a gentleman out for a drive—a black hat and tan gloves, a fawn driving coat and polished boots. Little of his person was visible except his face, and yet Emily felt his presence next to her, exerting some pull, stronger than old Newton’s gravity itself.

She sat very straight and fixed her gaze on the horses’ heads. “Did you learn anything more about Zov or Mr. Peach?”

“I did. Isaiah Peach is actually Isaiah Kydd of the Seven Dials. He’s probably known to many of the guards, for he frequents a public house in Giltspur Street. Apparently, he’s available for hire cheap, and his acquaintances say he’s left London.”

“And Zov?”

“Is a man named Zovsky, who operates in Paris, much as Malikov did in London.” He paused. “My...sources doubt that Zovsky would come to London, as his appearance is known, and he would not risk being taken up in an inquiry.”

Emily noticed the care he took to keep those sources confidential. Their partnership had its limits, which she would do well to remember. “So, we don’t know how Malikov’s identity got known, or who hired Peach, or how the poison, if it was poison, got into Malikov’s drink.”

Lynley laughed. “We don’t, but remember what we want is the missing papers, and Malikov couldn’t have taken them.”

“Still, it’s reasonable to think that the work of an informant in the Foreign Office is behind the murder as well as the missing papers.”

“Congratulations, Em,” he said. “You think very much like the man who is on the hunt for that leak. He wants to find any remaining members of Malikov’s network.”

Em! “And he expects us to do so?”

Lynley grinned at her and nodded.

At Beatrix Walsingham’s Castle Street house, Emily handed the butler her card and was invited up at once to a pale green drawing room.

“Hello, Emily, how long has it been? I’m so glad you’ve come. I was in danger of eating all these cakes myself.” Beatrix gestured to a tray of iced yellow cakes. “You must have news to tell, as you’ve become engaged at last, I hear. And your sister is to have a baby.”

Emily smiled and took the seat offered. “My mother is thrilled,” she said, explaining also that her mother was away, and remembering belatedly that Beatrix’s mother had died unexpectedly not three years earlier. Before Beatrix’s marriage to Walsingham, the two friends had compared notes on their mothers’ efforts to get them married.

Beatrix was sympathetic as she poured tea, and Emily found it easy to fall into conversation with her old friend, as if they’d simply been interrupted for a few minutes instead of a few years. She told of Roz’s desire to be an opera dancer and gave Beatrix the version of her engagement that she and Lynley had fashioned together.

Beatrix sighed at the conclusion of Emily’s account. “Now, if only I could see my brother settled. With our parents gone, I feel he’s been added to my care. Though he’s of age, you know what young men are. I feel he needs a woman to steady him.”

Emily reached for one of the little cakes. She had not expected such an opening to the very subject most near to their investigation. Pretending to be Thomas Culley’s wife seemed less false than the charade she now played with her old friend. “Is there no one who’s caught his eye?” she asked.