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his heart gnawed at him constantly.
    This was why he’d accepted Jos’s invitation to go to Texas. In that rough country the contrast didn’t seem so great. He could enjoy the hillsides covered with veils of bluebonnets; bathe in clear streams churning with white rapids; ride beneath live oaks choking with grapevines and moss; and never once hear an upper-class accent or see a carriage blazoned with a coat of arms that would remind him of what he’d sprung from.
    But now he was back in a country that was a kingdom, not a nation. Back in the place where he’d been born the son of a coachman who’d drunk himself out of every position he’d ever gained and taken his failures out on his wife and children. By the time he was eight, Pa hadn’t needed the excuse of a lost position to beat his wife.
    Ma would shove him and his sister, Tessie, out of their one-room apartment in St. Giles whenever Pa fell into one of his rages. Nick would always sneak back and listen to the beatings and cry—until one day when he was fifteen. That day he fled with Tessie, left her with neighbors, and sneaked back as he always had. But this time he went inside instead of cowering at the door.
    This time he took a cudgel, and this time when Pa came after Ma with a broken chair leg, Nick blocked his way. The sight of his son enraged Pa further. He could still see Pa’s face, red and purple with drink and violence.
    “Bleeding young shaver,” Pa had said with spittle wetting his lips. “Teach you to defy me, I will. Bleedingprig. I won’t show no mercy. Not a hap’orth of it.”
    Pa had been almost twice his size, but Nick had grown up on the streets, had survived among the dodgers and prigs of Whitechapel. He beat his father senseless, told him to get out of the apartment and never come back if he wanted to live. He and Ma and Tessie had done just fine after that. Pa hadn’t been there to drink up the profits he brought home from his burglaries and schemes.
    “No mercy,” Nick said softly to himself. He sighed, went to the bootjack, and began removing his boots. “Get the job done, Nick old chap. Get it done quick and get out. You don’t belong here.”
    He scowled at the bootjack as he remembered Lady Georgiana’s emerald eyes and the way she’d looked down at him from her perch on the freight wagon as if he were a fly on the Valenciennes lace of her gown. She reminded him of one of those statues. Which one was it? Ah, yes, the one of Athena, goddess of war. He could picture Lady Georgiana, with her majestic stature, wearing a bronze helmet and carrying a sword.
    “I’ll wager she’d like to whack my head off with it, too,” he mused. “What a duel that would be.” What would she look like, coming at him in a flimsy white gown, swinging a short sword? Her legs would be bare except for the straps of leather sandals. Her arms would be bare too, and her breasts free …
    “Holy bleeding hell, what am I doing?”
    Nick snatched up the boot he’d just removed and threw it across the room. It smacked against the wall beside the door as Pertwee came through it. The valet gasped, put a hand to his throat, and closed his eyes.Nick heard him count to ten before he opened them again to glare at his master.
    “Sir’s bath is ready. If I may enter without risk to my life, I will prepare one of sir’s dress day coats. The sterling-silver studs, I think, along with the silver tie pin.”
    “Sorry, Pertwee.”
    “Sir is in need of a calming influence. Perhaps if sir would care to recite a little of the Plato we were reading last night.”
    “Nah.”
    Pertwee gave him that implacable glance Nick had grown to dread. “If you please, sir. ‘Beloved Pan and all ye other gods …’ ”
    “Oh, all right! ‘Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as none but