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Chocolate. He’d never had chocolate before he came to live at Fairleigh Park, but when he was seven someone had given him a shred of paper that had once been wrapped around a piece of imported chocolate. He’d pressed the wrapper to his nose and inhaled as deeply as his lungs allowed, dreaming of chocolate enough to bury him.

Her custard smelled like that, a good smell made mythical by fervid imagination and true hunger. Suddenly he was famished again. He wolfed down the whole content of the ramekin in seconds, barely tasting anything as he ate.

Only as he slumped back into his chair did the residual flavors ambush his senses. For a moment the inside of his mouth tingled and luxuriated, a burst of glory. But the sensation faded just as quickly, leaving in its wake only the same obstinate, inexplicable craving.

A craving that was not limited to chocolate custard. He saw himself invading Madame Durant’s kitchen and trapping her in a dark corner of her domain. He imagined her wordless consent, the urgency of her ungentle grip on his arms.

She would be thin and frail, with the heartbreaking strength of those too long accustomed to hard work. He’d cup her face between his hands and kiss her. She’d taste of whiskey freshly consumed, hot and pure. And all about them would billow the scent of high summer, strawberries ripened to the seduction of juicy red lips—

He came out of his chair. He was thinking of
her
again, when he’d already decided, most firmly, not to think of her anymore. A man could not set his life by the eclipses of the sun.

At least, try as he had, he could not.

His bedchamber was dark and silent. A fire burned low in the grate, casting just enough of a glow for him to see his way to the window. He parted the curtains. The sky had largely disappeared. Between mounds of clouds flickered a few small, distant stars.

Something made him look down. A spark of reddish light glimmered on the terrace. The light quivered, stilled, then moved more languidly, and stilled again. He squinted.

A waning moon peeked out from behind a bank of clouds and illuminated a woman in a white cap, smoking a cigarette. She stood with her back to him, wrapped in a bulky shawl, her black dress melding into the shadows of the night.

Madame Durant.

The moon vanished. She became once more a dot of burning ash. Then even that sputter of light disappeared. When the moon emerged again, the terrace was empty, save for silvered granite and latticed shadows.

Chapter Five

July 1882

N
o one answered Verity’s loud knock: no feet shuffling across floorboards, no surreptitious movement behind the curtains. Number 26 Cambury Lane remained as dark and silent as the inside of a mausoleum.

Verity could barely control her desire to kick the door. Would nothing cooperate this day?

She’d meant to depart Fairleigh Park first thing in the morning. But Mrs. Boyce had taken ill the night before and had asked Verity to supervise the jammaking—the strawberries were at their ripest and couldn’t wait another day. She’d reluctantly agreed.

By the time the jam had gone into jars, the letter had come: a piece of paper in a neat handwriting that detailed Michael’s doings and whereabouts for a week. The message was unmistakable. Her aunt knew who Michael was—Verity was never to embarrass her again.

When she’d burned the letter and stopped shaking, the skies had opened. What would normally have been a pleasant walk to the village had turned into a veritable slog, and she’d sat, for much of her train journey south, in stockings that had become drenched despite her galoshes.

And then, after she’d found a good place of lodging, put on dry clothes, and gone through much trouble to make herself presentable, did her luck improve? No. One’d think Stuart Somerset had a price on his head, the way he avoided his own residence. Not even a servant to answer the door and tell her the whereabouts of the master. What kind of a man bought a four-story house—six stories, if she counted the basement and the attic—without hiring a staff for it?

She’d knocked on his door at eight, retreated to a pub a quarter mile away, where she drew many inquisitive looks from the regulars, and returned at nine. And ten. And now eleven.

Ten o’clock was to have been her last try—the third time either the charm or an unmistakable sign that it was not to be. But she couldn’t give up. Couldn’t face the prospect of returning to Fairleigh Park without having accomplished a single one of her objectives.

She had it all thought out. First, she would become Stuart Somerset’s cook. Then she would become his lover. Then, since it was her understanding that he was some sort of a lawyer and an MP, he could, as a favor to her, prove her identity. And once that was done, he would of course jump at the chance to marry her.

She would have loved to see Bertie’s face at the wedding.

The letter from her aunt, however, took the wedding entirely off the table—Verity dared not contest the truth, not when Michael was exposed and vulnerable. And Stuart Somerset didn’t get to where he was in life by marrying domestic servants with no known provenance. But with his help, she could still hurt Bertie.

Bertie had come to value her as a cook. And he was beginning to believe that he had in her a talent to rival that of any betoqued Parisian chef. It would be a blow to his gastronomic aspiration were she to defect to his greatest nemesis—and make his brother’s table the most celebrated in all of England.

And then let him see his adventuress in bed with his brother. Oh, that would work wonders. On her own she could not hope to wound Bertie: She didn’t matter enough, as she’d so belatedly learned. But in league with his brother, well, the least bit of nothing having to do with Stuart Somerset sent Bertie into a rage.

It was only fair that Bertie should know a little of the pain that blinded her. She hadn’t been able to eat or sleep for weeks. Let
him
toss and turn. Let
him
lose his appetite for once.

But the door to 26 Cambury Lane did not open.

She kicked it. Still it did not open. Her big toe now throbbed awfully.

She hobbled onto the sidewalk and faced a choice of directions: toward the pub, to wait another hour in agitation, or toward Sloane Square, for a hack to take her back to her inn. A choice between folly and defeat.

Her feet started in the direction of the pub—reckless, as her choices often were. Sense wasn’t her strong suit. Had she more sense, she would not be here like this, a random caller with a recitation of browraising goals.

Instead, if she visited this particular house at all, it would be because the respectably married noble-woman she should have been had met Stuart Somerset at some soirée or another and decided to make him her piece on the side. She’d be fascinated by his unusual childhood and beg him to tell her titillating particulars—Had there been rats as big as cats in his house? Had he been illiterate? How had it felt to be hungry and poor?—then she’d whisper what details she’d gathered to her friends, tittering and perhaps shuddering delicately.

She made herself stop and turn around. Even the best neighborhoods in London were not entirely safe at night. She must leave now, or she’d be asking for trouble—her third stop at the pub had generated more than a few speculative looks, some from men she wouldn’t want within fifty feet of her.

She’d walked no more than two minutes when she heard footsteps behind her—a man, approaching her fast. She spun around. Could it be Stuart Somerset, home at last and…coming after her? Of course it wasn’t. She recognized the man—medium height, spindly, with bloodshot eyes and the smell of too much beer and inadequate soap. All night he’d loitered outside the pub with another man, the two of them raking her with interested stares, that interest multiplying each time she returned and left.

The man was surprised by her sudden about-face. They stared at each other. His hands shot out toward her reticule. Without thinking, she clenched her fingers together, drew her right hand back, and socked him in the face.

In the side of his neck, rather, as he jerked his head away. It was still a solid hit. The man staggered a step, she noted with panicky satisfaction. She might be dressed the part of a lady tonight, but she was far stronger than any gentlewoman: She could lift stockpots half her height and carry a whole side of beef if necessary.

He swore and grabbed for her reticule again. He was not going to have it—her money was in her shoes, but in her reticule was the only photograph she had of her parents, brought along for luck.

She swung the reticule at him. Another solid hit. She’d stopped at a bookseller’s and bought a Mary Elizabeth Braddon novel for her return trip. She hoped the book had wonderfully sharp corners.

“Bitch!” groaned the man, and seized her wrists.

She sank the heel of her right boot hard into his in-step. He howled and slapped her. She barely felt the burning of her cheek and the snap of her neck, only the satisfaction of his next howl as she stomped his in-step with her heel again, harder.

Her free hand spread open. She poked her fingers at the man’s eyes. He screamed. She turned to run, hoping she’d hurt him enough to discourage him altogether—only to come face-to-face with his friend, an even more malodorous man.

“Get away.” Her lips moved and words came out. “My husband will be here any minute.”

The second man cackled. “You ain’t ’ave a ’usband any more than you ’ave a willy.”

A hand grabbed her hair from behind and yanked her head back. She kicked the shin of the man behind her and tried to brain the man in front of her with Mrs. Braddon’s book. But she wasn’t so lucky this time. He knocked her reticule aside. Then he caught her arm and twisted hard.

She yelped in pain and kicked his shin. He grunted and let go of her arm. She rammed her elbow into his rib cage. The other man pulled her toward him by her midsection, lifted her up in the air, and then threw her down. One of them jumped atop her; she was no longer sure who was who.

“Let’s jus’ take the bag an’ go,” the man standing to the side implored. “There be coppers soon eno’.”

“I’ll teach ’er a lesson first.”

An enormous fist came at her. She shut her eyes and braced for the skull-shattering pain—and the loss of the only connection she had left to her former life.

Stuart walked. It had been a long sitting in the House of Commons this day. He had the cabdriver drop him off some distance from his house, so he could have a little exercise.