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could literally not remember a time when Bonaparte’s name had not stood for everything Britain must fear.
     
    William had been only two years old when Napoleon seized power in France, and he remembered his boyhood as being conducted to the beat of the war drums on the Continent. Napoleon had gobbled France, Italy, Germany, and the Hapsburg Empire; stripped lands from Prussian and Austrian control; waged a bloody invasion in Spain; and left at last only Britain standing fast against him, alone and with the knowledge that the tyrant schemed to cross the water and hang the tricolored flag on Buckingham Palace as well. William had always known that Napoleon plotted the destruction of England; and William had always known that at sixteen, he would enter the Army and help bring about the madman’s downfall.
     
    Well, he had entered the Army. But he had not seen so very much combat on the Peninsula before receiving the wound that ruined his right arm and his military career, and though Napoleon had indeed been defeated not long after, William had not been present to aid in the defeat. Worse, Britain’s victory had not lasted even a year, and Napoleon now again held France in the palm of his hand. He had marched into Paris three months ago without firing a single shot. Without needing to fire a shot, because not one Frenchman lifted a hand in opposition. Since then, he had reassembled most of the force that had allowed him to conquer Europe before.
     
    William tightened his left hand around the coffee cup, then forced himself to relax it. He would have clenched his right hand instead had the muscles been willing to obey him. His scarlet-coated brothers, and their Dutch and Prussian allies, would face Bonaparte’s fanatic French in a drawn battle sometime soon. Sometime very soon—the cannons might be firing even now. But William Carrington, worn and weak from his winter’s illness, strength gone forever from his right arm, could do nothing but sip coffee in a drawing room and beg his London brother-in-law for news.
     
    The ladies behind him had moved on from balls in Belgium to social matters nearer home. “Charles Wilton has come to visit at last?” Lady Anderson said. “I do hope to catch a glimpse of him at some Assembly or another. I declare I had begun to doubt his existence, all these years we have heard of him and never seen his face.”
     
    “Mrs. Wilton pledged to bring him to call one morning this week,” Mrs. Carrington said. “We must be content to wait our turn, of course. With all my daughters so advantageously married, there is not so much to interest him here as there might be elsewhere.” William could not see her, but he could tell from her voice that she was smiling first upon Mary, then upon Caroline, and then at the portrait of Frances.
     
    “Has he been long in the neighborhood?” Mary asked.
     
    “He only arrived yesterday,” Mrs. Carrington said. “Today his aunt took him to call upon the Bartons at Westerfield.”
     
    “Better him than me,” George muttered, suddenly close beside William. “From all I hear of that young dandy, he’ll find something to like in Elizabeth Barton’s impertinence, and perhaps then her mother will cease foisting the chit on the rest of us. You’d think she was some cottager’s brat, the way she romps about.”
     
    “Does she?” William said without much interest. He had only recently grown well enough to be dragged into company, and he could not remember Elizabeth Barton doing anything so very noteworthy at last week’s Assembly. “I hadn’t noticed.”
     
     “Well, you haven’t been obliged to dance with her, now have you? Pretty enough, I grant you, but I assure you the elegance goes no deeper than her skin.” There was a pause. “Thirty thousand pounds, of course,” George added, in an overly hearty tone. “There is that.” He appeared to have belatedly remembered that he ought to be encouraging his brother to meet young