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Taunted her, even. Why? What did it serve? Maybe he felt she had taunted him first by implying he wasn’t trustworthy.
    She should have told him that no one was trustworthy. No one but Lady Tallant. And once upon a time, Augusta’s parents, lost so suddenly.
    Certainly not Augusta herself.
    Handsome and unpredictable as he was, the idea of taking Joss Everett as a lover had a sort of brute appeal. But it terrified Augusta as much as it enticed her. He would not be satisfied to take her body and leave the rest of her alone.
    It was better that he had said no. For his sake…and for hers.
    ***
    He couldn’t believe he had declined Augusta Meredith’s offer.
    Joss regarded himself in the cracked glass over his battered trunk, tugging his cravat free with careful fingers. He hadn’t the linens to spare for spoiled neckcloths, nor the coin for unnecessary starching and laundering. As deliberately as he had knotted the cloth earlier, so did he now coax free its folds and lay it flat.
    His lodging was like his dress: outwardly adequate, secretly scrimping. He had taken a room on respectable Trim Street—but in the top story of the building, a narrow chamber to the side of the house. The walls and ceiling sloped beneath the mansard roof, and the plaster walls were unpapered, the floor of bare wood. Mildew had made a spot on the ceiling, and the room smelled faintly of damp during the near-ceaseless drizzle. Had this building belonged to a single family, Joss’s room would be in the servants’ quarters.
    Well. That was what he was, wasn’t he? For now. Maybe not for much longer, if he had his way.
    If he had his way. He turned aside from the glass, disgusted with the blurred, cracked surface that made a horror of his face. Only too much would he like to have his way with Augusta Meredith. She wore costly bespoke silks as carelessly as other women might pin on a nosegay. She moved with determination, yet possessed a heartbreaking uncertainty. She was ripe for seduction; she asked to be seduced.
    If he obliged her, though, she was the one who would suffer—either in the loss of reputation or the burden of an unwanted child. He could not take his pleasure only to leave suffering in its place.
    That was, after all, how Joss had been knit into existence.
    He crossed the room to his desk, wishing for more moonlight to leak into the lamplit attic space. So many letters for him to read; so many questions to answer. Yet instead of taking up his work at once, he shuffled aside the papers on his desk and found a thin octavo-sized ledger. The black leather binding was unstamped and plain, worn from decades of handling.
    Why did he carry it about? Why did he bother to look at it? It was not as though he would find more enlightenment within its covers this evening than he had in the past.
    Yet he flipped it open, skimming the curling Devanagari script of his grandmother’s native Hindustani, the English translations his mother had later jotted in the page margins. Here and there was a spidery botanical drawing, the ink browned with age. He remembered some of these plants from his youth, when his mother still lived to tend them. Their names twisted and lilted over the tongue: ghikumari , which could soothe burns; tindora , the ivy gourd, which strengthened the blood and quieted palpitations. Shikakai and reetha , for cleansing hair. Neem , a tree too tall for the shelter of the glassed-in conservatory. Before a series of cold winters nipped it, its seed oil had been pressed for use in nearly every stillroom concoction, from drinkable tonics to skin creams to treatments for rheumatic joints.
    And here was a drawing of somalata , a deceptively innocent-looking grass. It could ease the terrifying symptoms of asthma—or, as the present baron had discovered, it could stimulate the mind and body. Over the years, Sutcliffe had given over more and more of Sutcliffe Hall’s conservatory to its