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informed Wenton that she would be reading in the library, then slipped across the hallway to examine the locked door of Everton’s study. She checked up and down the hall for the butler or any other members of the earl’s large household staff, knelt, and pulled the knife from her boot. The lock was more sturdy than she anticipated, but after a few tries she was able to wedge the door open.
    The office was larger than she expected. A door off to one side stood open, and through it she viewed a billiards table and several faded, overstuffed chairs. This smaller room ran behind the staircase in the hall, and no second door opened from it back into the hallway. Fleetingly she wondered why Alex Cale would bother hiding his game room away in his own house.
    Her main reason for breaking into the study, though, was not to analyze Everton, but to determine whether he had any hidden vices—such as ruining the lives and incomes of independent exporters. She gave a slight smile, hearing her father’s voice in her head, as she made her way around the large mahogany desk. The physical act of smuggling, Stewart Brantley always said, only touched on their work to bring tariffed goods to the citizens of Paris. She pulled open the first of the ornate drawers.
    There was nothing of interest inside, only blank parchment and sealing wax, and she went on to the next one. And raised both eyebrows. It was filled with a haphazard collection of invitations to soirees, balls, recitals, routs, dinners, picnics, luncheons, horse races, breakfasts, foxhunts, and every other sort of entertainment she could imagine. The Earl of Everton was apparently an even more sought-after guest than she had suspected.
    The next drawer contained a brace of pistols, but other than taking a moment to admire their exceptional quality, Kit wasn’t particularly interested in them. The long drawer across the top held a marked deck of cards, a geographical map of eastern Britain with several indecipherable markings along the coast, a handful of French coins, and a wrinkled, dirty parchment that said only “938 musket, 352 pistol.” She frowned at the paper, then put it back when she could come up with nothing more sinister in its meaning than perhaps a listing of the number of game birds shot on Everton’s estate last season and how they’d been dispatched. The coins, and especially the coastal map, bothered her, though. They meant she couldn’t eliminate Everton as a suspect. The objects might be innocent, and he might simply own ayacht or some such thing, but she couldn’t take the chance of assuming that.
    Beneath the map she found a rather suggestive letter from a Countess Fenwall, and a well-leafed-through catalog of farming tools and equipment, with a letter from Everton’s estate manager inserted between two of the pages. Apparently the estate’s largest hay rake had bent, and needed to be replaced before the next harvest. According to her letter, Lady Fenwall promised to bend over as well, if Alex could manage to be at Fenwall while her husband was away in Yorkshire. She also promised to do several other things that Kit was rather surprised to see a lady put into writing, though she wasn’t certain the spelling was correct. The letter was dated last year, and she suspected that the earl had kept the missive more because it was amusing than because he had answered the invitation.
    She was taking far too long looking through his private things, but the task was fascinating. Reluctantly she put away the letters and moved on. His estate ledgers lay in the next drawer, and though it wasn’t necessary to her purpose, she pulled the first book out and flipped it open. Everton’s masculine scrawl filled the page, with notation after notation of income earned from his estates, of which there appeared to be at least three, and of money spent for salaries, taxes, clothes, theater tickets, furniture, a brood mare, and a hundred other items of various value. She sat