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groom with you, you must always supervise the harnessing of your cattle. A badly harnessed team will pull unevenly and soon wear itself out, besides being difficult to control. I always see to the harness myself before a curricle race,” he went on with some enthusiasm, then paused and added bitterly, “that is, I used to.”
    No doubt he lost his curricle to a wager, Isaac guessed contemptuously. A typical spoiled scion of the nobility with no consideration as to who paid for his extravagance.
    “Shall I take the reins now?” he asked.
    “No. Stopping again will just waste time, you’ll have to wait until we reach the first stage. In the meantime, repeat what I’ve told you about the harness, if you can remember.”
    Isaac was word perfect, but he suspected that actually dealing with the tangle of straps and rings would be another matter altogether.
    His thoughts drifted back to the infuriating female inside the berline. Wealthy, beautiful--he could still feel the shock of delight that had overwhelmed him at his first sight of his prospective bride--Miss Miriam Jacobson ought to have easily found another husband after brutally rejecting him. Instead, it seemed, she had been wandering across Europe, shabbily dressed, with none but her maid to accompany her.
    The Jacobsons were still pillars of London Jewry, and Isaac couldn’t believe they had cast off their only daughter, their only child. Miriam was still beautiful; her mahogany-red hair, glimpsed under her bonnet, unfaded; her pale complexion translucent as fine porcelain. Despite the years and the dowdy clothes, her loveliness had once again made his heart jump, before he realized who she was. She should be married and raising a family, not guiding an expedition fraught with danger across an enemy country.
    He wondered how Jakob Rothschild had persuaded her to set off on a long journey with a man who detested her and another who despised all Jews.
    In fact, Isaac himself was strongly tempted to walk back to Paris and quit the Rothschilds’ service without further ado. He foresaw nothing but trouble. However, persistent by nature, he was unwilling to give up on a job he had undertaken. Besides, Nathan Rothschild had been good to him and deserved his loyalty, and last but not least, delivering the gold to Viscount Wellington would strike a blow for England. Roworth might make it plain that he didn’t consider a Jew to be a true Englishman, but Isaac was as patriotic as any man born and bred in Britain.
    Whatever her faults, England was his country. Change must come from within, not be imposed from without by a bloody-handed tyrant like the Emperor Napoleon.
    “Bloody hell!” swore Roworth as the berline’s wheel dropped into a pothole and jolted out again. “You’d think the Emperor of most of Europe would spend some of his ill-gotten gains on repairing his roads.”
    Inside the carriage, Miriam groaned. “The road has been amazingly good so far. I knew it couldn’t last.”
    “It’s not so bad in a decently sprung carriage,” Hannah consoled her. “Just be glad we’re not in the diligence again, praise God.”
    “How right you are. And we shall be able to get out and stretch our limbs at the posting houses. We’ve been travelling at least two hours, at a reasonable pace compared to the diligence. Surely we must be near the end of a stage by now.” She leaned forward to look out of the window. “Yes, I believe I see an inn ahead. I trust that toplofty lord has the sense to stop there.”
    The toplofty lord did indeed have sufficient sense to pull into the yard of the Auberge du Chapeau-rouge, a low, whitewashed building that appeared to be deserted. As Miriam opened the carriage door, Lord Felix swung down from the box and a vacuous-faced ostler slouched out of the stables, chewing a straw.
    “Catter newvo chevalls,” called his lordship.
    The ostler gaped at him, the straw falling unnoticed from his gap-toothed mouth.
    Light dawned on Miriam.