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dozen identical folds.

    “Look,” he said gruffly, by way of preamble.
    Miles obediently looked. Henrietta had always said that Miles was excellent with direct commands. The recollection made Richard wince, but he continued doggedly on,
    nonetheless. It was Christmas, devil take it, and he was bloody well going to be noble if it killed him.
    It did occur to him that there might be something a little self-defeating about framing the sentiment in that way, but he dismissed that as beside the point.
    Richard cleared his throat. It was the port, of course. Bloody viscous stuff, port. “Look,” he repeated. “Shall we let bygones be? New year, new leaf?”
    Miles grinned at him, an all out grin that all but split his face in half. “I don"t see any bygones here, do you?”
    Richard could. They were all around him, like evil sprites. Lost friends, lost opportunities, lost causes. “No,” he said. “Not a one.”
    “Excellent.” Miles rubbed his hands together, flinging himself back across his chair with an unaffected exuberance that seriously taxed the capabilities of the two hundred year old frame.
    “There"s something I"ve been wanting to run by you, something that came across my desk at the War Office….”
    Stretching his legs out in front of him, Richard permitted himself a groan. The port must be mellowing him. “I miss the War Office.”
    “They miss you, too,” said Miles sympathetically, before getting down to business. “Do you know a Captain Wright?”
    “With an arr or a double-u?”
    Miles did some quick mental spelling. No one watching him would ever have been able to guess that he had been top of their class at Eton for classical Greek.
    Triumphantly shaking back the hair from his brow, Miles announced, “Both.”
    “Has a boat, hasn"t he?” recalled Richard.
    Miles was generous enough not to point out that the word “captain” generally implied the possession of some form of nautical conveyance.
    It was beginning to come back. “Captain John Wright? He"s a naval man. He carried the odd packet back to England for me, when I couldn"t get hold of another means of convoy.”
    Miles nodded. “He"s carrying more than correspondence these days. There"s a rumor than he"s been smuggling émigrés back into France.”
    “What kind of émigrés?”

    Miles flopped back in his chair. “That"s the devil of it. We don"t know. They might just be simple souls yearning for home and hearth. Or….”
    That “or” carried a multitude of possibilities, most of them dangerous. All of Richard"s old instincts twanged discordantly. If Captain Wright was smuggling across French émigrés intent on fomenting revolution against the revolution, their amateur bumblings might do more harm to the royalist cause than—well, than any number of Bonaparte"s canons. The last thing they needed was another failed Royalist coup to give Bonaparte an excuse to tighten security and call public sympathy to his side.
    If that was the case, something would have to be done immediately to neutralize the amateur plotters. They would have to—
    Richard caught himself up short. They. Not he. He had nothing to do with it anymore. He had been retired. Rusticated. It was Jane Wooliston"s business now. The Purple Gentian had left the garden.
    Richard took a long swig of his port before speaking. “Why tell me? I"m out of commission these days.” He could feel himself wallowing. Surely, a little wallow was permissible, on an occasion such as this.
    “Only in France,” said Miles helpfully.
    “If you"ll forgive me pointing out the obvious,” Richard said sarcastically, leaning over to splash a second round of port into Miles" glass before topping up his own, “France just happens to be where the enemy is.”
    “That doesn"t mean there isn"t work to be done here. Some of us never got to go romp around France in a black mask in the first place.”
    “Do you expect me to feel sorry for you?” Richard tossed back, setting the stopper