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far past caring about the wild rumors, the shocked outrage, and even colder stares of the Earl, who should have been wild with grief. The stench had been just as overpowering then, of white calla lilies, their powdery scent invading every crevice of the mausoleum that the Duchess had never called home.
    Kate lay lost on the big bed, staring unseeing into the distance, beyond the high-ceilinged room where they had prepared her for burial for the following morning. Incredulous, he had leaned in close, stroking her cheek, the flesh already cold as stone. Half expecting some response from the still form, he continued caressing her face, feeling the fine bone beneath the blue skin like the map of a familiar territory. Her eyes were open and clouded, the brown indistinct and muddy as the waters in which she had drowned.
    He had gripped her hand, the small fingers like stiff twigs. Perhaps he said something, whispered near her cold and parted lips, but she no longer responded to him, her frame still against the pillows, straining against a death that came too soon. For what seemed like hours, although it must have been mere minutes, he continued to sit in the silence she had left behind, waiting for a breath that would never come.
    Mrs. Banks’s shrill voice, charged with outrage, pierced the fetid air, displacing the scent of lilies with the heavy fugue of decomposition. Rushford placed his left hand to his eyes, but it was as though his right hand still held Kate’s. He smiled grimly at his folly, his gaze lifting to the lone begrimed window overlooking a narrow alley. For an instant, he thought that he wasn’t quite alone, half expecting a face at the window. In two strides, he was at the dust-streaked casement, peering into the alley. Nothing.
    He hesitated for an instant before returning to the bloated form beneath the soiled sheet. He didn’t like what he saw. There was a cruel symmetry here. Death by drowning. Another woman whose unexpected and violent demise had been quite deliberately brought to his attention. His eyes moved along the length of the table, and back up to the face that remained unrecognizable. The vivid blue silk and rich lace of the woman’s garment poked out from beneath the gray sheet, incongruous details that hinted at a greater story.
    Rushford scrubbed a hand down his face. He had all but promised Archer that he would make this pilgrimage to Shoreditch. To accomplish what exactly, he wasn’t entirely certain. Perhaps he’d hoped to scare away the demons that regularly bedeviled him.
    At the thought of demons, he decided that he didn’t want or need to think about Rowena Woolcott for the moment. Their encounter the past night had taken on the shape of a shadowed delusion, yet another ghost come back to haunt him. Fortunately for him, a ghost that was summarily exorcised. He recalled her widening eyes, her shocked expression, moments before she had slipped away from him. This time for good, he hoped, despite his clamoring instincts that told him differently.
    He was a man who couldn’t afford to believe in happenstance or coincidence. Yet, he convinced himself, there was nothing else behind Rowena Woolcott, in her blindness, finding her way back to him again. The broadsheets had been full of the Cruikshank murders and the name of Lord James Lyndon Rushford, the narrative holding out tenuous hope to a young woman intent on finding answers.
    He should feel guilty for turning her away. But he knew with unshakeable conviction that Rowena was safer without him. He had done as much as he could, as he’d learned in the bitterest way possible. Kate’s cold face and unseeing eyes still mocked him.
    Behind him, Mrs. Banks’s shrill words penetrated the dampness, a wet cold that seemed impervious to the bright sunshine cutting through the small windows of the one room with floors so warped by time and humidity, it was like walking the deck of a rolling ship. She was