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cheeks and hair back on your head, chickie, what then? Where’re you goin’ to find any eligible part-ee to take you in hand, that’s what I want to know. Not in Bloomsbury with some—”
    “Mind your tongue, Robbie Tuthill.”
    Rob still grumbled. “Should of taken the womanizer. A little arsenic in his coffee, you could of been free in no time. That’s why they call it widow powder, ain’t it?”
    *
    Annalise could not look Rob in the eye when she reached the carriage and had to tell him what the watchman had said, that Aunt Ros was traveling abroad with a gentleman friend. “Of course there must be some innocent explanation,” she added, wishing she had the imagination to conjure one up. More important, what were they to do now? Her friends had already given up their home for her. How much more could she ask? “Do you think we should try to find her in Vienna?”
    “Thompson’s sure to be having the ports watched. ’Sides, I ain’t never been on no boat, and I ain’t goin’ on no boat now. Good Lord wanted men to swim, He’d of given us gills.”
    “Pshaw, Robbie, and here I’ve been telling everyone back home we were off to the coast so you could go fishing!”
    “Cut your nattering, woman, and let me think.”
    “Well, do your thinking in a hurry, Robbie Tuthill, for this coach is passing damp, and Miss—Annie needs to be in a warm bed. All that jouncing around in the cold and wet, and eating what I wouldn’t toss to the pigs, why, I can see my lamb fading right away.”
    Annalise bit her lip. Henny’s shorn lamb would fare even less well locked away in some insane asylum for the rest of her bound-to-be-short life. She’d heard of such things, unscrupulous physicians taking money to declare an unwanted family member mad. Right now Annalise was so mad, she could just—
    The door of Number Eleven, Laurel Street opened and a young girl in a gray uniform with white apron and cap peered out. “Was it you knocked on the door a minute ago?” she called over to the carriage. “I was on the ladder, doing the chandelier.”
    The maid’s name was Lorna, and she allowed as how the travelers could rest in the kitchen for a bit, the younger female looking so pulled and all. Of course they had to be gone by four o’clock, when a young lord was coming to look the place over to rent, she told them, happy to have someone to talk to. And she wouldn’t mind a hand with moving the heavy furniture at all, because she was hoping his lordship would keep her on as daytime help if the house met with his approval. “Of course he’ll still need to hire a housekeeper and a cook and a man of all work. Was you folks interested in the positions?”

Chapter Five
    Ross Montclaire, the sixth Earl of Gardiner, loved women. All women. Tall or small, lithe or rounded, haughty or shy, exquisite or plain. He loved the way they moved, the way they smelled, the way their emotions were written on their faces, the way they played off their charms for a man. Old ladies delighted him; tiny moppets enchanted him. The only females he did not enjoy were the predatory debutantes on the Marriage Mart and their ambitious mamas. Luckily, he never encountered these greedy, grasping representatives of the fair sex in his rambles through London. In fact, he avoided the polite world’s piranhas like the plague. Worse, for if there were a plague, he would offer to help bury the dead; Lord Gardiner could not even bear to witness his friends’ weddings.
    The earl’s friends, those still speaking to him after his refusal to attend their nuptials, called him Gard. The broadsides and scandal sheets called him Earl en Garde, because he was always ready. The duels they referred to were not affairs of honor, either, simply affairs: the duello d’amore, whose field of honor was a bed, a couch, a closed carriage, or a blanket in the woods, the eternal skirmish from which both combatants rose satisfied, if the passage d’arms was conducted properly.