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her astonishing proposal. What he didn’t know was why she hadn’t found one.
    “If she has twenty thousand and needs a husband, why should I call you?”
    “Because, if anyone has less heart than I do, Brother, it’s you.”
    A short, harsh laugh was the only reply as Will slipped into the darkness.
    Xander didn’t envy him much. Will seemed to seek those roles that most hardened a man. As a Bow Street Runner he entered London’s darkest streets, places that never saw another officer, without hesitation. His fellow Runners declared that he could see in the dark. Xander didn’t credit that assertion, but he knew Will had uncanny abilities, honed as an army spy, to operate with swiftness and sureness where other people stumbled blindly. Sooner or later his brother would get whatever information Nate Wilde possessed.
    Xander stood alone in the middle of Bow Street. Across the way the Brown Bear did a brisk trade in spirits, indifferent to which side of the law a man was on. Up the street, luckier souls streamed out of the colonnaded front of the Opera House, laughing and chattering about the evening’s performance, climbing into carriages and hacks, heading for bed or assignations, or a club, people careless of the light, not imagining how quickly darkness could snatch away laughter.
    Xander’s search for Kit had been fruitless. First, injuries delayed him. Then the regent’s fickle solicitude and his father’s objection in the Lords to Xander’s knighthood cost him precious days. By the time he recovered and Will returned from France to begin the search in earnest, London’s darkest rookery had swallowed Kit deep into its fetid belly, and their mother had retreated into impenetrable grief.
    Now he had a new chance. Lighting St. Giles meant entering the dark places at will, tearing down walls, tearing up streets, taking picks, axes, and shovels to all the district’s secrets. Lighting St. Giles meant unlocking a dark closet in the heart of London and freeing those huddled inside.
    A woman’s high, brittle laugh caught his good ear, a false laugh of the kind he’d heard too often in the months after he’d been knighted. In those first months of searching for Kit, when finding him seemed possible, the exclusive ballrooms of London, and some of its still more exclusive bedrooms, had opened to Xander as they never had before, and he’d discovered he could draw on the vanity and self-interest of certain fine ladies to fund his search with no other price than his own body. And perhaps some pieces of his soul. The scent of his mother’s letter caught his notice again. He reached for it, and his fingers encountered a piece of straw.
    In the bank in that first moment of realizing he had an audience for his awkward proposal, he had expected to find Meese or some underling of Miss Finsbury’s father paid to spy. Then he had seen the girl’s wretched bonnet on the chair. Ironically, it was the straw on her hem that had convinced him she was no spy. Whether she proved to be an heiress or not, he had to thank her for making him understand his reluctance to marry Miss Finsbury. And for making him laugh. He would go home and put his mother’s latest letter in a drawer with the others. He knew its message.
    Leave the lamps burning. He will return.

Chapter Three

    X ANDER found Fernhill Farm just where his brother’s information had placed it, at the edge of the village of Woford in a low-lying set of acres along the river. The summer just past still had a grip on the fields and hedgerows, and the morning mist had burned off in the heat of a long afternoon. Nothing about the place suggested that its mistress possessed a fortune.
    A plain brick farmhouse and barn stood at the end of a boggy lane past a pond. A few geese made a welcoming party, waddling away with unhurried arrogance as his rig approached. Xander tended to his pair, armed himself with the picnic basket he’d purchased from the local inn, and strode in the