New Amsterdam

Limerent

(October, 1902)

The dead man sat in a wing-backed chair before a cold fireplace. The butler had shut the gas lamps off from the hall. His rooms were dark and still.

Detective Crown Investigator Abigail Irene Garrett paused in the open doorway, and did not yet enter. First, she set her lantern and her blue velvet carpetbag outside the door and drew white kid gloves onto her hands. Then she slipped the pouches drawstringed with ribbons—her housekeeper Mary had cleverly sewn them from linen handkerchiefs—over her shoes, and bound them tight. She shook out her skirts in the hall, and retrieved her silver-tipped ebony wand.

Taking up the lantern, the white beeswax candle flickering only slightly, she went to the corpse's side.

The smell of death was familiar.

As she approached, she became aware of a soft, organic rumble. She cast around for the source, alert to sorcery. But the sound emanated from a large orange cat curled, kneading, on the dead man's lap. It looked well-kept, sleek and worried, and as Garret watched, it bumped the dead man's hand with its smooth skull, rubbing ears and cheek against his fingers, purring loudly enough to shake its whiskers. Coaxing, hoping.

"He's not for eating," Garrett said to the cat. She preferred terriers. Nevertheless, something about the hand that the cat rubbed so determinedly caught her attention.

She reached out gingerly and stroked the cat between the ears with her gloved hand. It turned mad golden eyes on her, affronted, and she chuckled, tucked her wand under her arm, and set the lantern down on the table beside the chair. She slipped her fingers into the dead man's softly cupped hand.

She drew forth something small and dark, neither a cylinder nor a sphere, and rolled it between her fingers. "Las rosas," said a familiar voice, pitched to carry from the hall.

Garrett did not startle, but the cat did, leaping from the dead man's lap to the floor and vanishing behind a plant stand in one sharp, fluid motion. "Sebastien." She permitted herself a smile as she turned to face the detective. "Roses? It's a rosary bead, yes. How did you know?"

He came forward, even more silent than the cat, and picked the bead from her fingers. "It's one of the old ones," he said, and ran it delicately under his nose. "made of rolled flower petals. It's aromatic. Is there any sign of violence?"

She gave him her shoulder and lifted the cover of the inverted book that the dead man had lain over the arm of the chair with the tip of her wand, meticulously, just enough to read the title page. "Do you smell any blood?"

"He could have been poisoned."

"He could," she said. "Do you smell any of that?"

"Not yet. But he was expecting trouble."

"How do you know?"

Sebastien smiled. "Lift the book a little more."

She lifted an eyebrow as well, but obliged him. And sighed. Under the open pages lay a derringer, unfired, balanced on the broad arm of the chair. "I suppose you smelled that as well?"

"Powder and gun oil. Very distinctive, you know," he said, with an apologetic shrug. "But perhaps he died in a locked room, alone, with a

pistol to hand and a cat on his lap—at peace, with just time to lay down

his novel."

"It's a history." Garrett pointed to the title page. Discours sur les révolutions de la surface du monde, et sur les changements qu'elles ont produits. "And stranger things have happened."

"So first," Sebastien said, "we find out how he died. Do you suppose his son will want the cat?"

* * *

The dead man was Emmett Goodwood, and Garrett was slightly surprised to discover that he was the mogul behind the Goodwood patent shoe fortune. He had employed over seven hundred young woman in one cramped and steaming stitchery in the Bronx alone, with other factories in Worchester, Hartford, and Philadelphia.

The Lord Mayor of New Amsterdam, Peter Eliot, would just as soon have kept her out of the case entirely. But the corpse of a millionaire, contained in a locked room, was just the sort of reason that Crown Investigators existed. The Colonial Police—who reported to the Lord Mayor—had a murder squad, but it was not equipped to deal with black sorcery.

Still, Eliot had his own ideas as to the proper authority of the Crown in its Western colonies, and interfering in the quotidian administration of his city lay outside that scope. And so Garrett did not herself question the household staff. The role of Crown Investigators, ideally, was to work in tandem with less arcane branches of law enforcement, and she did not expect this to be a terribly difficult case.

She sealed the scene, remanded the body for autopsy, and left the un-sorcerous detective inspectors of the Colonial Police's Murder Investigations Office to remonstrate with Goodwood's next of kin. Finally, at about the fourth hour after midnight, she turned to find Sebastien standing at her shoulder, the marmalade tom ensconced in his arms.

"Would you do me the honor?" he asked.

"Of accepting an armload of tabby?"

The cat, purring, narrowed its eyes. "I had thought you might agree to share my carriage," Sebastien said. "It will be light soon, and—"

Garrett checked over her shoulder. "Sebastien, are you inviting me to come home with you?" She had never been to his house, though they had been friends and occasional lovers since April of 1901.

About time, perhaps.

A tip of his head, self-deprecating. She studied him; he did look drawn, with the waxen countenance she had come to associate with his need. "I'd love to," she said, and cracked her jaw with a yawn. "But I can't promise to be any good to you tonight. Have you a footman we could send to my Mary for a bag?"

"Jack will see to it," he said.

It was not until much later that it occurred to her that she would have been wise to have asked, who is this Jack?

* * *

Sebastien lived in an end-row townhouse fronting Jardinstraat, which was named not for the park it formed the eastern border of, but—along with the park—for the seacaptain Karel Jardinstraat, Dutch hero of the wars of a hundred years before. Jardinstraat, along with New Amsterdam and the rest of the Dutch colonies, had been ceded to the British for the duration of the French occupation of Holland, which stretched until 1815. At the end of the war, the Iron Queen's grandmother Eleanor had been regent for a George who did not live to take the throne; she returned Captain Jardinstraat to the Dutch, but not so the park named for him or the colony it belonged to.

Her grand-daughter, born in 1822, had been named for the end of the last great war with the French: Alexandria Victoria. The Iron Queen.

It was her death that had brought Abigail Irene to the city Queen Alexandria's grandmother claimed as a spoil of war, because it was one thing to be the lover of a dashing, martial younger prince. It was quite another to be the lover of the heir to the throne. Especially when one was scraping by in society on a courtesy title as the elder sister of a wastrel lordling.

Sebastien, however, seemed as if he could not care less for any of that. He'd never asked, and when he'd learned, he'd greeted the news without so much as a shrug. Duke Richard, by contrast, had been tempests of sighs and unconcealed jealousy.

And now, Sebastien let her doze against his shoulder in the rocking carriage, as the orange cat dozed on his lap, only rousing her when they came up to the house. If Garrett fell in love anymore, she'd be tempted. Whatever peculiar dietary habits he professed.

He gave the cat to the footman and handed Garrett down from the carriage. He was a lean man of slightly more than medium height, with strength in his arm that did not admit of her weight. She felt sticky and disarrayed, stumbling on cobbles, but he caught her and she straightened automatically, posture drilled and corseted into reflex. She fumbled her carpet bag from the carriage before the footman shut the door.

Sebastien said, "When was the last time you ate?"

"This afternoon." She had to pause to remember. The sky was paling behind the roofs, though the sun had an hour or so 'til rising. Sebastien had left himself plenty of time.

"Yesterday afternoon," he corrected, and led her to the side-entry.

The mudroom was dim and still, the only light filtering through a narrow window beside the door. The small room smelled pleasantly of lemon wax and hothouse flowers. The footman set the orange cat down and stepped back outside the door, no doubt to assist the coachman in getting the horses unharnessed. It shut behind him with a click, and Sebastien, one-handed, shot the bolt. He cracked the inside door so the cat could enter the house—it did with all speed—and then he shut it again, sealing himself and Garrett in the narrow entry.

And then he was against her, his hands in her hair, tipping her head back to kiss her hard, his tongue at first cool and dry, drawing warmth and moisture from her mouth. She gasped and pressed against him, supporting herself on his shoulders until she got herself against the wall between the coats and scratching coathooks and leaned back. Then she fisted her kid-gloved hands in her skirts and hoisted them to her waist. Sebastien leaned against her, slipped between her thighs, made a small, inarticulate sound to find her as bare under her petticoats as any dance-hall can-can girl. "You should eat first," he said, and for answer she put her forearms over his shoulders and pushed down, trailing ruffles and flounces.

He was cold in her arms, his face cold as he pressed it to the heat of her thighs, his hands cold as he stroked her sweating skin. She drew a deep breath, bracing for the expected agony that would lead to pleasure beyond speech, and instead felt his shivery kiss, the insinuation of his tongue.

"Sebastien—"

He caught her wrists, dropped her skirts over his head and shoulders and held her until she tugged free and pressed a double fistful of gabardine to her mouth, muffling the sounds she couldn't help. And only then, while she was panting, slack, his steadying hands on her hips keeping her upright against the pounding surf of her pulse, did he kiss her mons softly and slide sideways, tongue the hollow of her thigh, part the flesh over the artery with an adroit nudge.

Garrett made another noise against the crumpled wool, this one of sharp duress, but Sebastien's hands gentled her, an abject apology, and then a moment later she lost herself in the narcotic rush of his kiss, a sweet asphyxiating pleasure that bore as much resemblance to their foreplay as champagne did to soda water. She arched like a figurehead, face turned, temple pressed to the wallpaper, and sobbed against her skirts.

When she recollected herself, Sebastien still knelt under her lifted dress like a pilgrim at a shrine, his handkerchief pressed to the scratch on her thigh. "Thank you," he said, peeling the cloth aside to see if the wound had sealed. He dabbed his lips with the same linen as he stood; she saw it by the faint movement of white cloth in the near-dark. She dropped her skirts and gave them a shake, but leaned on his arm harder than she liked until she found her balance.

He continued, "I am much restored. And now for you—"

He opened the door into the side parlor, where there was light. Someone stood by the far wall, holding a candle. Garrett shaded her eyes, caught the glint of flame on fair curls. "Sebastien?" A young man's voice, light and flexible, with an upper-class snap. "Is all well?"

"Very well," Sebastien said. "Jack, I should like you to meet Detective Crown Investigator Abigail Irene Garrett. Abby Irene, Jack Priest, my very dear friend."

More than that, Garrett thought, if Sebastien was giving him precedence in the introductions. Mr. Priest came forward, the candle in his left hand, and took Garrett's glove in his right. "Charmed," he said, and did not sound it. He was shockingly young—seventeen? Perhaps? No, he looked like a lad, but he carried himself with a man's confidence.

He glanced at Sebastien, as if to record the wampyr's dewy complexion and restored glow. "Lady Abigail Irene, do you require refreshment?"

She was about to demur, the undercurrent of tension in the room too much in her current state of exhaustion, afterglow, and blood loss, but Sebastien intervened. "Don't wake Consuela," he said. "But if we could find her cider and an egg on toast, perhaps a bit of black sausage?"

Mr. Priest nodded, turning silently with his candle, and led them down a long hallway to the kitchen, where he shaded the windows for Sebastien's safety before he lit the gas lights and the burners. "By the way, Jack,"

Sebastien said, as the young man was cooking, "have you just seen an orange cat?"

Mr. Priest, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, hooked a thumb in the pocket of a borrowed apron, and did not look away from the egg and sausage sizzling on the stove. "Bringing home strays again, are we?"

* * *

Garrett woke in a darkened room, and did not know the time. The shades were closed and the drapes were drawn, the door cracked open. There was no warm weight across Garrett's feet, where her terrier Mike should be, and she heard voices, thready and thin. An argument, if she could only pick out the words, but one carried out in low and level tones.

Her wand was on the nightstand, where Sebastien, who knew her, had left it. She reached gingerly; Sebastien's hearing was as good as his sense of smell. Warm ebony slipped into her fingers. A generic focus, not as powerful as a dedicated one might be, but it would halfway serve.

She sketched a quick sigil in the air, and mouthed the words. And faint, but distinct, the voices came to her.

—It's my house too, Sebastien.

—Do you think I brought her here idly?

—That woman? I don't know what to think. I know you've been dancing attendance on her since last year, and now I see she'd never even heard my name—

—Jack.

A pleading note, nothing Garrett had ever heard in Don Sebastien's voice. She stilled an icy spike of jealousy, and almost pulled the warm silver tip of her wand from her ear. But no, it was better to know.

Sebastien had never pretended to be faithful, as she had never pretended with him.

A long silence, and then:

—I'm being unreasonable.

—It is an unreasonable situation, mi cariño. But you will understand I hold the lady in some affection, yes?

—Yes, Mr. Priest said, unwillingly. —I suppose you would like it if I tried to make friends.

—I do not expect miracles outside church, Sebastien answered dryly, and Mr. Priest, still reluctant, laughed.

—Were you unwell last night? Or injured? he asked, in a different tone all together. —You had your due of me not so long ago, to find yourself in such straits.

—It is no matter.

—It does matter.

Despite herself, Garrett smiled to hear Sebastien bullied. Someone needed to undertake it.

—I grew tired at the murder house, Sebastien admitted. —But Abby Irene was well enough, and we were together the whole time. I think I am only overwrought.

And Garrett had not the faintest inkling why that might be. She frowned, and resolved to ferret it out—between murders. It wasn't, she assured herself, that it was intolerable that young Jack Priest knew something about Sebastien that she did not. Surely there were many such somethings. Sebastien was. . .

. . .she didn't know how old he was. Decades? Centuries? More?

—Here, he said to Mr. Priest. —Look at this. Can you find out from your Irish friends what it might be doing in a dead man's hand?

—What makes you think my Irish friends will know anything

about it?

—It's a rosary bead, said Sebastien. —A paddereen.

—That's also their word for bullet.

—I know, Sebastien said. —I know.

* * *

Garrett padded downstairs uncorseted, wrapped in Sebastien's dressing-gown, which he or Mr. Priest had left on the bedpost. The interior of the house was bright enough for comfort unless one meant to read, shades and drapes in the front room and parlor thrown wide, the den behind them lit by reflection through the open door. Sebastien was in that den, working the ciphers in the Sunday paper. She envied him his freedom from sleep, a need that often affronted her. Her envy wasn't quite strong enough to tempt her with the cure, however.

"So," she said, when he glanced up and smiled, "Have I slept the day away?"

"Just the morning. Are you well?"

She settled in the chair beside his. "Nothing a little beefsteak and brandy won't cure. What do we know about the murder?"

A game they played; sometimes listing the facts made a pattern come plain, like the transposed digits in the broadsheet puzzlers. He rang for a servant, and began. "I am the fabulously wealthy Emmett Goodwood. Who wants me dead?"

"My heirs and assigns," Garrett said promptly. "My mistress. Do I have a mistress?"

Sebastien licked his pencil and made a note in the margin of the newspaper while Garrett restrained the urge to warn him against antimony poisoning. You couldn't get French graphite in the colonies any more. But wampyr, as far as she knew, were no more subject to long-term harm from toxins than from bullets.

And—witness Sebastien's cavalier handling of the rosary bead—tales of allergies to holy relics were myth as well.

"If I don't have a mistress, why not?"

"I love my wife?" Garrett suggested, and Sebastien noted wife below mistress on the yellow newsprint. He also wrote down brother, sister, son.

"Goodwood seems like it should be an English name, doesn't it?"

"Nothing Englisher," Sebastien answered. The orange tom appeared beside his chair and made an imperative noise, and Sebastien reached down to scratch it behind the ears. "So why did he die with a Fenian death-wish clutched in his hand?"

"Does he have any family in the old country?"

"Mary is no doubt in receipt of a small mountain of documents wired from London by now," Garrett said. "Do you think Finn's Boys might have done away with him as a message to a relative in the heart of the Empire?"

"English colonial politics are not my forte. But it supports investigation, I should think." He held the pencil in his left hand now, and the right still dangled toward the floor, scratching the cat under its chin. Garrett could hear it purring again, and the sound brought with it smell of the dead man's room. She waited to see if Sebastien would give her anything more—a hint of Mr. Priest's investigations, of his illicit contacts. But he petted the cat one last time and sat upright, saying, "If he thought the Fenians sought his death, he'd have no little reason for the locked door and the derringer."

The cat blatted at him, and Garrett laughed as he blocked his lap and newspaper with the hand holding the pencil. "I had no idea you were so fond of cats."

"They aren't often so fond of me as el Capitán here, are they, gato?" Sebastien said the last as if in direct address to the cat, which smoothed its whiskers at him. Even Garrett's fearless terrier had not been so fearless, at first, of the well-dressed predator.

Cat eyed wampyr, and after a brief battle of wills the wampyr stood, surrendering the chair. "Mary sent over fresh clothing. You'll want to get back on the case, of course."

There were a thousand things she could have said. She laid a hand on his forearm, stroking the fabric of his coat. "I've never been in your house before," she reminded. "May I have the tour?"

"Of course. That is the parlor. You'll pardon me if I introduce the front rooms from the doorway."

He made her laugh. It was the deadpan as much as the conspiratorial tone. She moved forward, into the well-lit parlor, letting her toes seek out the direct rays of the sun where they warmed the carpet. She turned to see him, framed through the door. "Why are all your windows open? That seems

incautious—"

"It presents a grim façade from the street if everything is sealed, don't you think?" He wasn't quite looking at her, but rather into the shadows by the cold fireplace. "The light doesn't dazzle me if I don't stare at it directly, and I'm no more likely to stray into a sunbeam than you are to lay your arm across a hot stove-lid. Also, the servants prefer a little light." Then, delicately, like a testing cat himself. "And Jack."

"Ah yes. Jack." He let her have the silence while she selected her words. "Sebastien, who is Mr. Priest?"

"An emancipated and quite capable young man," he said. "Anything else, he should tell you himself."

"Your pet?"

He still wasn't looking at her; now he stared down at the cat, quite cozy in his abandoned armchair. "One would think they were seeking the warmth, no?"

"One would think," she said. "Do you love him?"

His dark eyes shone when he glanced up at her, though she did not think wampyr could weep. "Don't be foolish." He made a gesture as if blowing the fluff from a dandelion clock. "One cannot love dust. One might as well put the hook in one's heart oneself. You'd better go along, Abby Irene. I shall join you tonight, and tell you what Jack has uncovered in his travels. He's out among the lower element, seeking the provenance of the 'paddereen.'"

He must have observed her shock as she came back to him; he arched his brows and tilted his head in silent query. "I thought you were keeping secrets," she said. Anything more would be a confession of eavesdropping—as if he didn't already know. But he'd just more or less told her that Mr. Priest associated with the Fenians, without telling her anything in a way she could not deny.

But then, she was already a wampyr's lover—and that was illegal, too.

He smiled, and kissed her mouth without touching her elsewhere. "I am."

He cares for me, she thought, with a kind of amazement. And the next instant, brutally pitied him.

* * *

The raisin-sized nugget rested in the middle of a white linen handkerchief, surrounded by candles, a goblet of water, a goblet of wine, a dish of salt, and the magnetized blade of Garrett's arthany. With her silver-tipped ebony wand—just the length from elbow to fingertip—she made passes in the air above it, and pronounced the requisite words.

The table was of a size for eight, without the leaves in place, though she'd pulled the chairs away for unfettered access and gotten Sebastien and his manservant Humbert to roll up the rugs so she could cast a circle in salt.

The paddereen looked ridiculously tiny on Garrett's improvised altar in Sebastien's dining room. Inaptly named, perhaps, except obviously someone ate there. Mr. Priest?

In any case, the little lump of preserved flower petals showed no signs of having been magicked, not even with a trigger or a focus spell. No sorcery had been cast on it or through it, in other words, though there were lingering traces of an ancient Catholic blessing, layered and relayered so many times that it clung to the bead like lacquer.

It also revealed no traces of poison. Not that she'd expect it to—she'd only handled it with gloves, but Mr. Priest had touched it bare-handed and come to no harm.

If she had suspects, she could write their names on slips of parchment, array them around the edges of the altar-cloth (or Sebastien's handkerchief, as the case might be) and see which one was drawn into the center. No proof positive of ill-will, not with the bead apparently innocent, but it could have directed an investigation.

As it was, the thing was utterly inert, and might as well be useless. She made a cutting gesture with her wand, severing the circle of protection, and dropped the ebony stick beside the altar. Her hair was lank with sweat. She wiped it from her forehead.

"The carriage is ready, Abby Irene," Sebastien said from the doorway. She had not an inkling how long he'd been standing there, waiting for her concentration to break. He was that silent. "Have you any luck, mi corazón?"

She swallowed uncomfortable dryness at the unprecedented endearment, trying not to remember that he'd been as affectionate to Mr. Priest when she was not meant to overhear. How could he feel anything for her that was any greater than the casual affection for a pet, the fondness he already betrayed for the orange tomcat? She'd be gone as if in instants, she realized, dead to him between one breath and the next.

Not that he breathed.

"Thank you, Sebastien," she said, and began bundling her tools into the bag. He crossed the circle, stepping over the rolled-up carpet and scuffing the salt with his foot, and stayed her with a hand when she would have lifted handkerchief and rosary bead. "Leave it, por favor," he said. "Unless you must maintain it for evidence? I think that Jack may find a use, before the week is out."

"Of course," Garrett answered, and kissed him on the cheek before she drew off her white gloves.

* * *

It had been kind of Sebastien to loan her his carriage again—"I won't need it until sunset"—and though it rattled her teeth, Garrett was grateful not to brave the crowded subway. She had long since stopped finding it ironic or eerie that the city at large paid no attention to a murder, whether the victim was a prominent citizen or a guttersnipe.

And in all reality, it shouldn't. Life went on; there were apples in the markets now, and squash, and cabbages and potatoes to set by for winter. It was Garrett's job to be concerned with justice and the dead. And this particular case seemed to be falling together more or less neatly—but, so often, they did. Murder was usually quite simple and solving it routine.

Unlike politics, which were typically messy, she mused, her attention drawn by the unusual number of redcoats and even a few of what the Frogs would call grasshoppers—green-coated riflemen—in the streets. Garrett wondered whose homes they'd been garrisoned in, and whether they were New England men, or troops sent from the old country in anticipation of continued trouble along the border with Quebec.

She was home by teatime, and Mary, bless her heart, had it waiting. Doubly fortuitous, because Mary also refused to let Garrett see any of the paperwork until she'd eaten. Mike at first spurned her, sulking in his basket, but eventually Garrett's groveling and bribes of tea-cake moved him to resume his post on the chair beside hers.

He was about the color, shape, and size of an ostrich-feather duster, and suited Garrett much better than either of them suited the décor in her townhouse. She'd bought it furnished; it ran to Oriental carpets and perfectly nice carved cherry. Garrett was far more attached to the dog than to the needlepoint chair cushions.

Mary laughed, though, when she came in with fresh cream and found Mike sitting upright on the chair, determinedly ignoring the proffered le-

mon cake.

"Just like a man," Mary said. She was a thin middle-aged mulatto, her fingers so spare of flesh as to seem rectangular in cross-section. "Never let them know they have the advantage, or you'll be running after them all the rest of your life."

Garrett laughed too and ate the lemon cake herself, licking her fingers for the icing. She stretched inconspicuously. Her leg ached, but no more than normal. The food set aside the last of her lightheadedness, which she almost mourned. She pushed her plate away and swept the crumbs into her palm. "May I have those papers now?"

Mary huffed, but brought them. Telegrams from London, on the undersea cables. She laid them on the table while Garrett dusted her hands over the empty plate, pretending not to notice when Mary set another cup of

tea with cream and sugar to hand. The surprising thing was, Mary approved of Sebastien.

Garrett wondered if that would continue if she knew about Mr. Jack Priest.

The telegrams were written in a thaumaturgic code, keyed to the oath and useless to anyone but a Crown Investigator. They contained more information than their size would indicate, and while it took some time to extract it, Garrett had her answer in no more than a quarter hour.

The useful telegram came from the archivist of the Enchancery at Christchurch Greyfriars on Newgate Street, the main London headquarters of the Crown Investigators. The Shambles, the Crown's Own called it, for the slaughterhouses that had given the parish its previous name: St. Nicholas Shambles—as discrete from the Bridge, which was their shorthand for the laboratories, safely isolated over and insulated by running water in the mansions of Old London Bridge, now closed to traffic as a safety precaution.

The Shambles was the administrative and archival anchor of Crown Investigators scattered to the corners of the Empire. And Goodwood's fingerprint and aura pattern were on file.

He wasn't Emmett Goodwood—if any such person had ever existed. Colm Sheridan, on the other hand, was the son of Owen Sheridan. And Owen Sheridan's was a name Garrett knew well from her time in London. The old Fenian bastard, an Irish hedge-sorcerer, had been the special project and the bane of the Crown's Own for close to fifty years, until he was felled by nothing more mysterious than a heart attack.

It didn't tell Garrett who had killed Sheridan, of course. But the available evidence was falling into a satisfying pattern. This might even be an easy case.

And if the case proved as straightforward as it seemed, there would be a certain pleasure in bringing down a Fenian sorcerer who used his power

to kill.

She was setting aside the last yellow flimsy when the doorknocker thumped. Reflexively, she glanced at the window. The sun was still above the horizon; it would not be Sebastien.

Garrett's dining room had long ago been converted into a laboratory. She took tea in the library, and so she clearly heard the voice that greeted Mary when she opened the door. Richard, the Duke of New Amsterdam.

She closed her eyes and hurriedly finished the sweet, rich tea, wishing there was brandy in it. There was, however, brandy on the sideboard, and she poured two—her own quite stiff—before Mary could bring Richard in.

The Duke was a big, broad-shouldered man with bark-colored hair that might once have been blond, or brown. He swirled the brandy in the glass and tasted it, then watched as Garrett took two large sips of her own. Mary, clearing the tea things, vanished in her thin brown manner, as if she were just another stick of furniture, but Garrett never forgot she was there.

"Don't worry," she said dryly, after Mary had left the room, "he's not turned me into a vampire, Richard."

Richard set his glass down and frowned. "How can you trust him?"

"Because he's trustworthy." She finished her drink and poured another. "Have you come to denigrate my friends, or would you like to stay to supper?"

It made him laugh, which was what she wanted. "Actually, I came with news. Before Eliot heard it. And to ask what you've learned regarding the Goodwood murder."

"Sheridan," she said. "Goodwood was an alias. He was Colm Sheridan. What's your news?"

Richard paused, considering what she'd said in all its implications, and then silently handed her a telegram. The flimsy paper crackled as she unfolded it. Unlike the ones she'd been perusing before tea, it was brief.

MY SISTER EXPECTING HEIR STOP PLEASE INFORM OUR FRIEND STOP HENRY END