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‘professor of psychopaths,’ as she so eloquently calls my current occupation. And I would like to keep it that way. She has a rather overactive imagination, and I would not want to stir the pot, if you please.”
    “You know, I think you may be right about her overactive imagination,” Rowan said thoughtfully. “My sister told me the most incredible tale, that Miss Finch is actually the author of that horrid penny-dreadful everyone reads in the Post-Dispatch .”
    Sasha glared at Rowan. “Are you really discussing a penny-dreadful at a moment like this?”
    Rowan sighed. “Quite sorry. I will be discreet when making my inquiries.”
    “And tell Inspector Drexler to have Matthews resume following her.”
    Rowan began to nod, then hesitated, his expression darkening. “Resume? You mean you often have your secretary followed? Don’t tell me you’ve known about this … interest the murderer has in Miss Finch!”
    “No,” he growled. “I have my secretary followed because of her habit of frequenting St. Giles on her day off to wager away her salary at the Automaton Races.”
    Rowan looked suitably shocked. “Miss Finch? A gambler?”
    “Inveterate. And with no idea of the danger she courts, the little fool. You don’t want to know how many bookmakers she has indebted herself to, or how many arms Matthews has had to break this past month after her last visit.”
    He couldn’t keep the exasperated fondness from creeping into his voice, despite the urgency of the moment. As foolish as Finch was to visit the stews, he couldn’t help but admire her audacity.
    Rowan shook his head. “I would have never suspected it of Miss Finch. She looks so … wholesome.”
    “Never play her in cards, if you value your fortune. She cheats like a sharp in a St. Giles hell,” Sasha said, feeling a sudden pang of longing for his quixotic little secretary.
    He frowned at himself. It had to be worry he was feeling, not longing. He’d not longed for anyone or anything in centuries.
    “I wonder if my sister knows this. She plays whist with your secretary every week. I’ll have to warn her,” Rowan said, interrupting Sasha’s strange thoughts.
    Franco, his patience expired, began sending the guard in their direction once more. Sasha turned to Rowan. “Give me your word you’ll protect her, that I have nothing to worry about while I am detained,” he demanded.
    “You have my word.”
    “And your word that, as my counsel, you’ll not reveal this conversation to Franco. He’d use this information against me.”
    “You have my word, as counsel and as a friend, Sasha. How can you doubt it?”
    “As easily as you doubt me,” Sasha said bitterly, turning back to his fate.
     

Chapter 3
    The turmoil within the House of Lords reached new heights of the ridiculous yesterday afternoon when members of the radical Luddite Party stripped down to their Unmentionables when challenged to prove their Persons are as Anti-Welding as their Rhetoric. Opposing parties in various states of dishabille hurled vitriol at each other for an hour before the assembly disbanded. Only Lord Ll— of the Steam Party managed to say anything sensible at all when he begged the notoriously gouty Lord R— to put his shirt back on…
    -from The London Post-Dispatch , October 1890
     
    London, 1896
    ALINE’S first moments on terra firma once more had begun auspiciously. The hellhounds, as if for once taking pity on her, had been relatively docile during the return crossing, though she’d been just as sick, and with no one to hold back her hair. But she’d refused to surrender her dignity altogether, despite the vomit in her hair, or to allow the hellhounds to have the upper hand.
    Perhaps they’d sensed her desperation … or understood her threat to sell them to the Automaton Races for parts if they didn’t behave. Battered and dizzy, exhausted to the bone, she’d let the hellhounds nudge and prod her down the disembarkation ramp and onto the air docks