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you say,” she announced. “Think of the condemned Protestants who have been martyred here.”
    “I’ve been trying not to.” As they walked past the fringes of the fair, Oliver heaved a great sigh. “I have failed.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I wanted to make you laugh and smile, and you have not. Where did I go wrong?”
    “Well, you could start with our near drowning while shooting the bridge.”
    “I thought you’d find that exhilarating.”
    “I found it foolish and unnecessary. As was your greeting to the woman called Nell.” Lark lifted a skeptical eyebrow. “Heaven in her lap?”
    He had the grace to blush. “She’s an old friend.”
    “What about your treasonous little exchange with a monkey?” Lark continued, enumerating the outrages. “And your prurient interest in a bull’s, er, his two…”
    “Pizzles,” Oliver supplied helpfully.
    “Hardly a cause for great mirth from me.”
    “I know.” He had a rare gift for looking both sulky and charming at once. “I’ve failed you. I—” He broke off, glancing over her shoulder. The sulkiness disappeared, and his face glowed with sheer delight. “Come, Mistress Lark. Here is something you’ll like.”
    Pulled along in the wake of his enthusiasm, she found herself at the stall of a bird seller. Wooden crates ofburbling doves, huddled robins and moth-eaten gulls were stacked about haphazardly.
    “How much?” Oliver asked the man.
    “For which one, sir?”
    “For all of them.”
    The man’s jaw dropped. Oliver grabbed his hand and dumped a small fortune of coins into it. “That should keep you in your cups a good while.”
    “My lord,” Lark said, “there are hundreds of birds here. How will you—”
    “Watch.” He drew a silver eating knife from the leather sheath attached to his belt and pried open each cage. With a flourish he removed each little door.
    “Oliver!” Lark barely noticed that she had used his Christian name. The bird seller uttered a blue oath.
    Like a great, winged cloud, the once-captive birds rose. The sound of beating and whirring feathers filled the sky above the fair. It was an awesome sight, darkening the sun for a moment, then turning light as the flock of liberated birds dispersed.
    Oohs and aahs issued from nearby fairgoers.
    “‘The stars compel the soul to look upward,”’ Oliver de Lacey recited, “‘and lead us from this world to another.’ Plato.”
    “I know.” She squinted up at the birds, now mere specks in an endless field of marbled blue. And against her will, a smile unfurled on her lips.
    “Eureka!” Oliver spread out one arm like a seasoned showman. “She smiles. Eureka! Archimedes. When he first said ‘Eureka,’ he went running naked through the streets.”
    “That,” she said, “I did not know.”
    “It is said he made his discovery about the displacementof water while in his bath. The insight so aroused him that he forgot to dress himself before running to tell his colleagues.” Oliver lifted his face to the winter sun as the last of the birds disappeared. “There, you see, my angel. They can soar. I have set them all free.”
    “All of them,” she agreed, feeling strangely content.
    “Well, not quite.”
    She peered at the cages. Not a single bird remained. The bird seller was already stacking his crates in a two-wheeled cart.
    Oliver slipped one arm around her waist, and his other hand rested on her bodice, the fingers drumming on the stiff corset of boiled leather.
    “There is still one little lark in a cage, eh?”
    His barb hit home with a sting of unexpected pain. She tried to look imperious. “Sir, I am insulted. Unhand me.”
    He bent low to whisper in her ear. “I could free you, Lark. I could teach you to soar.”
    Heat swept from her toes to her nose, and she could not suppress a shiver as his warm breath caressed her ear. Alarmed, she broke away and stepped back. “I do not want you to teach me anything of the sort. I simply want help with a certain