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that assaulted him every evening at this hour, as he prepared to climb the stairs and fill his lonely bed.
    Isabelle’s body, white and rounded in the candlelight. Isabelle’s flesh, yielding to his. Her little sighs in his ear, her fingers on his back, her quickening movements. The drive to climax, the shudder of release, the slow pulse of its aftermath. Isabelle’s kisses on his unmarred skin, her body tucking itself in the shadow of his.
    Ashland let the curtain fall back.
    With exaggerated precision, he placed his empty sherry glass back on the tray and straightened his empty right cuff.
    The hall was deserted. The servants had all gone off to bed, knowing the duke’s preferences. He climbed the stairs alone, and alone he readied himself for bed, because the challenge of handling his own buttons and sleeves kept his mind fully occupied.

THREE

    E milie awoke from a profound sleep to a familiar sound: the rough, metallic rattle of the coal scuttle as a maid lit the fire in her bedroom.
    She opened her eyes, expecting to see worn velvet hangings and rioting unicorns on a medieval tapestry, to see sunlight pouring past the cracks of her sapphire blue curtains and her escritoire covered with books and notes and pencil stubs. She put her hand out, expecting to feel the warmth of her sleeping sister.
    But her hand found only the coolness of empty bedsheets, and her eyes found only a thick gray darkness smudged with the shadows of unknown furniture.
    She flung herself upright.
    “Sir!” A crash sounded from the fireplace, and then the clatter of metal on stone.
    Sir.
    Emilie covered her cheeks. She had taken off her whiskers last night, because they itched so abominably, but her head was encased in a long woolen nightcap and her body bundled in a purely masculine nightshirt. “I’m sorry,” she gasped out, hoping the maid couldn’t see her clearly. She brought the bedclothes up to her nose.
    “I thought ye was sleeping still, sir,” said the maid, turning back to the grate. She was nothing but a pale outline in the darkness; her basket of kindling seemed larger than her body. The grate itself was smaller still, which was of course natural, Emilie reminded herself, since Tobias Grimsby slept upstairs with the servants and not in the grander bedrooms below.
    The grander bedrooms, the bedrooms for the duke and his family and their honored guests: paneled and papered and gilded, hung with silk and oil paintings, spacious and well furnished.
    Emilie remembered few details from the night before, as she’d readied herself for bed, but she had a general impression of a clean space, plain and pleasant, with a few sticks of necessary furniture and a single window, curtained in striped cotton. The bedclothes beneath her fingers were smooth and woolen and unadorned. Comfort, not luxury.
    “Have you the time?” she asked the maid.
    “Why, I do suppose it’s near enough six,” said the maid, straightening. “There, then. Nice and hot afore ye knows it.”
    “Thank you.”
    The young woman turned and grasped the handle of her basket. “Ye’d best be up soon for breakfast, sir.”
    Breakfast? Emilie’s mind was still aching with fatigue. Five hours’ sleep had not been nearly enough to recover from the drama of the previous day. Breakfast? Her belly echoed with hunger, but she couldn’t imagine pushing her heavy limbs out of bed and into her shirt and trousers and plain woolen jacket.
    The maid left, banging her basket behind her. Emilie lay back down to contemplate the gray ceiling. Dawn was no more than a rumor beyond the glass. The wind, at least, had stilled for the moment, lulled by the approach of sunrise.
    Breakfast. The duke was an early riser, then. And since early risers tended to look with scorn on those who weren’t up at the first searing crow of the nearest cock, Emilie had better take the maid’s advice and stir herself.
    Half an hour later, her trousers buttoned and her whiskers neatly in place, Emilie