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“No one must see me.”

“It’s only me.” Emily peeked around the screen. A golden-haired young woman in the white of a girl’s first Season had curled up in a chair between a side table and a standing glass. Her eyes and nose were red, and her over-elaborate coiffure tilted disastrously to one side.

She straightened, glanced at Emily, and gave a hiccup. “Do I know you?”

“Not at all, so you won’t mind my help. Here, drink this.”

The girl accepted the lemonade and drank. She was the sort of ripe, delicate beauty, all rosy-cheeked and dewy-eyed, usually besieged by suitors.

“Whatever has happened to overset you?” Emily asked.

The girl sniffed and fumbled for her reticule. A pair of men’s tan York gloves slid from her lap to the floor. Immediately, she began to sob again, her bosom heaving, and the lemonade sloshed dangerously in the glass.

Emily retrieved the glass and scooped up the gloves, setting both on a small round table. She stepped up to the girl and put an arm around her shoulder and held her until the storm subsided.

“What terrible thing has happened?” Emily asked.

“He gave...me…gloves.”

“And?”

“He glanced and smiled at me all evening. Then he strolled over and handed me gloves.” She shuddered.

“Who is he?”

“Archer.”

Emily glanced again at the gloves, a man’s good quality tan York gloves. If Archer had brought the gloves to the Vange ball, did that mean he expected to meet the gloves’ owner? “Whose gloves are they?” she asked.

“My brother’s. Archer just wanted to know how to get a pair of stupid gloves to my brother. I thought...” A sob intervened. “I thought he was going to ask me to dance. I was never so humiliated.”

The girl paused to listen to the music, and Emily braced herself for more sobs. “Nothing is going right. He’s dancing with her, and nobody knows where my stupid brother is, and my Season is ruined.”

Emily drew up a stool to sit by the girl. She said nothing to diminish the girl’s pain. She knew a thing or two about a ruined Season, though she was at a loss to understand how a pair of gloves had caused such despair.

“How did the gloves end up with Archer?”

“Oh, they are from Lady Ravenhurst. My brother is forever leaving things in her house or carriage.”

Emily held herself very still. To the girl the gloves were a sign of a beau’s indifference, but if the gloves had come from Lady Ravenhurst, there could be no doubt that they were the very gloves the spy had used at the Ravenhurst party in the foiled attempt to get government papers out of the house.

“You remember the Radical Race,” the girl prompted. “That’s when everything started to go wrong.”

Emily did remember. She had not seen the race, but she had certainly heard about the successful attempt weeks earlier to drive a huge van pulled by four horses across the frozen lake in Hyde Park. Most of fashionable London had turned out to see the thing done. It was exactly the sort of event that the serious-minded of Emily’s friends had condemned, risking horses’ lives for a wager.

While one part of her mind followed the girl’s association with the gloves, with another she tried to puzzle out what had happened to the gloves since. Archer must not be a spy, or he would not dispose of the gloves to this girl so casually.

“Well,” said Emily, “forget the gloves and the race. What you must do is go back into that ballroom with your head held high and dance the soles of your slippers off. You must make this Archer see that you don’t care a fig for his folly in pursuing an older married woman.”

“Do you think so?”

Emily nodded emphatically.

“What do I do about the stupid gloves?”

“I’ll take them. Who is your brother, by the way?”

“Clive Walhouse.”