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should have seen their faces.”
    Walking over to sit on the edge of her desk, her brother looked down at her with haunted eyes. “That day I learned to ride bareback and crawl up to a Russian sentry on my belly and slit his throat from behind. He told me to do it or he’d kill me himself, since he wasn’t going to die simply because real fighting wasn’t ‘quite the thing’ among cavalry officers.”
    “This man made you crawl in the mud with a knife in your teeth and … and—”
    “And I’m alive. But he’s still a bastard, Liza. You don’t know what he’s like. Propriety forbids me to speak of his habits to you. When I think of a dukedom going to a murderous savage like him … Do you know that most of DeBrett’s is wiped out? I don’t think there are more than a handful of noble families with an heir left. And two weeks ago old Harry was killed.”
    William Edward played with her ivory letter opener as his voice lowered. “Poor old Harold Airey. Harry Airey, we used to call him. Always falling off his horse in drill. Never on parade, but always in drill. He got through Balaklava and then got himself strangled, garroted, they said. In Whitechapel. I didn’t think old Harry Airey knew where Whitechapel was.”
    “Some of my best maids were born in Whitechapel.”
    William Edward waved a hand. “Well, maids, yes, but not Airey. He was a cavalry officer, Liza, a cavalry officer.”
    He said the words as if they were only slightly less honorable and noble than “her majesty.” Liza had sympathized with William Edward, knowing that she could never make him understand the skin-and-bonepoverty of the London slums, the stench-ridden sewers and soot-laden air. The children who slept in doorways and ended their short lives in ditches.
    She had read about them in
The Times
and in pamphlets she secreted in her bedroom where her father couldn’t find them. Papa didn’t approve of women reading about such things. He would hand her mother portions of the paper that dealt with society, and Mama would pass them to her. Liza got the day-old papers from the butler, who was susceptible to bribery. The papers had been one of her few releases from day after day of grinding boredom. She wasn’t bored anymore.
    Liza shot to her feet. What was she doing, sitting here lost in the past? Choke would notice her absence if she didn’t hurry. She thrust her cap on her head and pushed her long curls up inside it.
    The memory of her last conversation with William Edward still haunted her. If it hadn’t been for that chance remark about Harry Airey’s being garroted, she might never have suspected William Edward’s own death. But he’d gone from her house to a political meeting at the house of the viscount, whom he resented and with whom he’d quarreled, and never returned.
    He’d died exactly the way the Honorable Harold Airey had died, and in the same nasty area of the city. William Edward was supposed to have been at a political meeting, not in Whitechapel. Two men from the same regiment, who attended the same political meetings, died the same way. The similarities were too great to be by chance. She was sure of it. And she was going to prove it.
    William Edward had been the brightest and most loving of men. When Papa had raved at her forspeaking her mind to suitors instead of pretending to have dried flowers for brains, William Edward had distracted him with tales of cavalry drills. William Edward had loved her in spite of her being different from other girls.
    Enough musing. Liza patted her cap, then stuffed her torn dress in her trunk and locked it. She sneaked back into the kitchen and through the scullery to the small room where the knife boy polished boots and did other messy chores. She had yet to clean the viscount’s boots. If she accomplished this task, she would have an excuse to go back to his rooms.
    After what had just happened, she needed to search for clues to his guilt and escape the house quickly.