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tightly within her, keeping her warm. She hadn’t eaten for a couple of days, but her physical hunger did not match her sharper one for revenge.
    Protector
. Sweet word.
    He didn’t have to be handsome. He didn’t have to be young, she thought as she strode swiftly through the streets, not looking back, her arms folded tightly around her. He didn’t have to shower her with finery and jewels.
    He only had to be gentle and not make it too unpleasant for her, and he had to help her get Papa out of the Fleet and stand by when she faced that unspeakable brute.
    If fate sent her such a person, she swore bitterly to the heavens, now that she was fallen, she would make it very worth his while.
    ----
    “O ‘
Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?

And whence such fair garments, such pros-per-ity ? “O ‘
didn’t you know I’d been ruined?” said she.
    —Thomas Hardy
    Bait the hook well! This fish will bite.
    —Shakespeare
    ----
     
CHAPTER TWO
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    In the bracing sea breezes of Brighton Hawk found that he could breathe. Whether it was the distance from the crowds of London and all the places that reminded him of
her,
or the influence of the calm majestic sea, grief began to loosen its stranglehold over his heart.
    The nights were relegated to his quest, but during the balmy April days he found solitude whenever he wished it, walking barefoot on the sand with his trousers rolled up around his calves. Far from the Promenade and the bathing machines, there was only the sough of the sea and the cries of the gulls. He felt himself healing, growing stronger.
    Most mornings he liked to row straight out from the shore until England was hardly in sight. He fished. One day, warmed by the high spring sun, enticed by the placid, pale jade water, he took off his boots, pulled off his coat and waistcoat and dove off the side of his little dinghy.
    The water was frigid and it stole his breath as he plummeted straight down through the tossing waves, shot like an arrow from a bow. The water was painfully cold, but it cleared his head to the point of an almost visionary lucidity. He swam deep, savoring the dull silence, the blue-green light below the surface. He thought of Lucy drowning in the pond and tried to imagine what that had been like.
    Holding his breath until his lungs ached, he felt alone as always, yet free, floating, felt himself slowly coming untangled from her thrall, until at last he burst up to the surface, gasping, with no pearl in his clutches but the vague, strangely comforting notion that perhaps he had been more in love with his
idea
of Lucy than with the woman herself. It was both a virtue and a fault in him that he lived too much in his head, he knew.
    Feeling more himself than he had in months, at length, he rowed back to shore with long, vigorous strokes, shivering in the brisk wind. He was staying at the Castle Inn on the west side of the Steine. Reaching his lodgings, he bathed, changed clothes, ate, then set out for the night’s usual party. His new chum, Dolph Breckinridge, would be attending a concert in the Regent’s garden, and so would Hawk.
    Cultivating the baronet’s rakish set had been easier than he could have hoped, though it was still too soon to broach the subject of Lucy without raising suspicions. Among the wastrels he had to put up with a good deal of ribbing about his superior morals, but they accepted his casual association as an enhancement to their own reputations. He bided his time, sensing that his goal was ever nearer.
    The parties the Regent threw at Brighton were so vast that Hawk felt almost anonymous, strolling idly from room to room and out onto the greensward where the German orchestra was playing. To his satisfaction, he happened across Dolph standing alone at the corner of the terrace, staring out to sea in a pensive mood.
    Maybe after ten days of cultivating the baronet, tonight at last he might