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youngest of the Wooliston sisters and, in Miss Gwen’s opinion, too docile to be memorable.
    Jane held up a piece of paper, ill written and marred by blots. “I’ve had a letter from my father.” That in itself was news enough. Bertrand Wooliston could write? Who knew? “Agnes has disappeared from Miss Climpson’s seminary.”
    “Are you sure they haven’t just misplaced her? She’s not very noticeable.” Allowed to join the adults, Agnes had blended into the background at the Christmas festivities at Uppington Hall that past year, noticeable only for taking up an extra seat at the table.
    Jane shook her head. “She’s been missing for well over a week now. They notified my parents first. They haven’t been able to find her.”
    Gwen doubted they had looked very far. Bertrand Wooliston had eyes only for his ewes, and his wife was decidedly myopic.
    She put a comforting hand on Jane’s shoulder. “She’s probably just run off with some scrounging half-pay officer,” she said reassuringly.
    Jane gave a choked laugh. “I wish I could believe that were all it might be.”
    “Why shouldn’t it be?” Gwen picked up Betrand Wooliston’s note from the table. The seal had been lost somewhere along the way. Not surprising. The postal routes between England and France were dodgy at best. Technically, commerce and correspondence between England and France were still strictly forbidden. In practice, a thriving postal service went on across the Channel, often with a side of muslin and brandy. “All young girls are flighty.”
    Jane looked at her askance. “Were you?”
    “Flighty” wasn’t the word she would have used. Headstrong, yes. Defiant and proud and infinitely foolish.
    There were times when Jane reminded her uncannily of herself at a similar age. Oh, not in comportment. She had never had Jane’s Olympian calm; she had always preferred to express herself directly. But Jane’s self-containment was its own form of stubbornness. In that, they were alike.
    “Your sister is probably halfway to Gretna Green by now,” said Gwen heartily. “Let’s just hope she picked a handsome one.”
    Jane shook her head. With her hair down, she looked very young and very vulnerable, hardly the mistress of the spy operation that had terrorized Bonaparte for the past two years. “She’s not alone. Another girl has gone missing too.”
    “Even better,” said Gwen. “They’ve run off together. They’ve probably gone to London to see Kemble perform, or some such fool thing.”
    Jane laced her fingers together. Aristocratic, Gwen’s father would have called her hands, with his merchant’s instinct for divining the details of his betters. “If that were the case,” she said quietly, “they would have been back by now.”
    Gwen looked at the controlled face of her charge. “Are you suggesting foul play?”
    “You think I’m overwrought.”
    Gwen gave a harsh bark of laughter. “You don’t know what overwrought is.” Her sister-in-law did a fine line in overwrought. A delay in dinner could bring out a performance worthy of Mrs. Siddons. “But foul play? It hardly seems likely. The girl is sixteen—”
    “Seventeen,” corrected Jane.
    “A distinction without a difference. She’s practically a babe in arms. How many enemies can she have?”
    “She might not,” said Jane. “But I have.”
    The words polluted the air between them, stinking like the Seine. Gwen looked at Jane’s pale, anxious face. She wanted to argue her into comfort, to smash her theory into harmless little bits. But she couldn’t.
    “It’s unlikely,” she offered instead, knowing just how weak it sounded.
    Jane’s face was set in a way none of her suitors would have recognized. “But not impossible,” she said.
    No, not impossible. No matter how careful they were, leaks occurred. Too many people knew Jane’s double identity: former agents, former contacts, her loathsome toad of a cousin. And those were only the ones they knew