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Emily froze. The bits and pieces of observation and gossip rearranged themselves in her brain. Clive Walhouse might be the person they sought, and this girl was the beauty Beatrix hoped her brother Archer would pursue.

The girl turned a questioning gaze up to Emily. Perhaps, Emily could do Beatrix a good turn. “Let’s worry less about your brother, and more about you. Your hair needs attention.”

The girl jumped up, turned to the cheval glass, and gasped in horror. “I look a fright. No one will dance with me. Ever again.”

Emily took her by the shoulders and turned her away from the mirror. “What’s your name?”

“Allegra.”

“Let one of the maids repair your coiffure. I know a gentleman, an excellent dancer, who can whirl you about the floor for everyone to see how lovely you look and how impervious you are to the slights of foolish young men.”

“Really?”

“Truly.”

Chapter Fifteen

Inevitably, the husband hunter will get herself talked about. She may be a person of calm good sense and placid temperament, yet the fashionable world sees her as a volatile commodity, like one of those elements in the laboratory of the medieval alchemist, ready to be transformed by her interaction with the human substance around her. She must never act so as to be censured for impertinence and want of conduct. Above all she must never let herself be singled out for enacting a farce or a drama on the dance floor.

—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

From Lynley’s point of view, Lord Ravenhurst was having a bad night. His Foreign Office friends treated him like a pariah, and now his wife danced a waltz with a much younger man. Ravenhurst drank steadily, lurching from one drink tray to another.

Lynley was not without sympathy. Ravenhurst appeared to be a man caught up in currents he did not understand. No one appeared glad to see him, and as far as Lynley could see, no one approached him. If a spy hovered near, he had not made himself known tonight. All Lynley had gained from watching Ravenhurst’s wanderings was separation from his betrothed.

Something had changed in her with the decision that she and Lynley would be partners in spy catching. He had yet to determine what. She had put up a boundary between them, like a prickly hedgerow enclosing a field. Briefly, the barrier had come down in the wake of their adventure in the prison. But she had put it firmly back in place after her round of morning calls the day before. Lynley’s ribs no longer ached with every step. He thought that if he could manage one waltz with her, he could find a way through the barrier again.

The first waltz of the evening ended in a burst of chatter and movement. Lynley positioned himself to face a pair of doors opposite, so that he could see both ends of the ballroom as well as the entrance. As dancers cleared the floor, he spotted Emily entering the room, arm in arm with a golden-haired girl in white. He started toward her when a hand gripped his arm and spun him around.

He shook off the hand and faced Ravenhurst at the edge of the crowd.

“Lynley, I demand satisfaction.” Ravenhurst waved an empty glass in Lynley’s face.

Lynley noted the drunken slur. The man could not mean what the word usually implied. “Satisfaction? From whom? If your glass is empty, man, apply to a footman.”

“Do you deny your attentions to my wife?”

Lynley stiffened. There it was, a direct if wrong-headed challenge. Around them heads turned, talk died. “Utterly. You’ll have to pardon me, Ravenhurst, I’m about to dance with my betrothed.”

Ravenhurst’s eyes closed and unclosed as if he could blink away some fog. He stared at Lynley. “No, that’s not what you say.”

“You’ll have to advise me of my lines, then, old fellow. Are we rehearsing a play?” If it was a script, Lynley guessed that someone had prompted Ravenhurst to make the challenge.

Ravenhurst straightened and went at it again. “You come to London from nowhere with an insignificant title and you make up to my wife and encourage her in folly at a gaming club. Do you deny that you were there?”

At the mention of the club, Lynley knew who was behind Ravenhurst’s challenge. Barksted. If he glanced around, he would find the man watching. Lynley thought of his pistols at home at Lyndale Abbey. If anyone deserved a bullet, it was Barksted, not the poor lost soul in front of him.

“I was with Woodford.”

“Woodford? The man never gambles.” Ravenhurst took an unsteady step forward. “You were there to expose my wife to the contempt of society.”

“Let it go, Ravenhurst. You’ve been misinformed.”

Ravenhurst shook his head. “No, you’ve confused my wife, made her forget her duty to her husband and her sons. I should call you out.”

Lynley’s throat contracted painfully. Every instinct prompted him to answer the man’s insults in kind. But this was what his father must have looked like, confronting the Russian officer who was his wife’s lover: wounded, confused, and desperate, sure that the man in front of him was the author of all his grievances.

He made himself speak calmly. “But you won’t.”