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he gave his real name.”
    “Do your best.”
    A pause. Then, haltingly, “It’s Lang.”
    Mary caught her breath. The blood in her veins seemed to freeze for a long moment, then resume its course with a drunken swoop. Foolish, she scolded herself. Utter coincidence. Lang was a common-enough Chinese surname. What did it matter that it was the same as hers – the real name she’d abandoned, yet another fragment of her lost childhood?
    “Why, there are Englishmen named Lang.” Prince Albert sounded the ‘g’ in Lang, making the name hard and Teutonic, not tonal and Chinese. “The name is of German origin.”
    “It’s the rest of his name that gives trouble, Your Highness,” said Blake with an air of apology. “His Christian names – although I doubt he’s a Christian.

    It’s something like Jinn High.”
    Mary swayed and caught desperately at the window-sil for balance, suddenly knocked dizzy by two syl ables.
    “Jinn what?”
    “Spel ed J–i–n H–a–i, Your Majesty. Jin Hai Lang.”
    Her pulse roared in her ears, so loudly she could scarcely hear the Queen’s terse thanks and dismissal.
    Jin Hai Lang, a Lascar in Limehouse.
    Lang Jin Hai, his name in Chinese.
    An opium addict.
    A murderer.
    And, unless she’d gone completely mad…
    Her father.
    Mary stumbled back up to her attic room, kicked off her boots and climbed back under the bed-coverings. Her head ached, her pulse hammering a single rhythm through her consciousness: Lang Jin Hai. Lang Jin Hai. Her father’s name, and one of the few things about him she could remember.
    He was gone – lost at sea when she was a smal child – risking al on a mission to uncover truth. His death was the reason she and her mother had suffered so. The bone-deep cold and perpetual hunger. Her mother’s desperate turn to prostitution and, not long after, her death. Mary’s own years on the streets, keeping alive as a pickpocket and housebreaker. The inevitable arrest and trial, and the certainty of death – so very close, she’d al but felt the noose about her neck.
    And then, miraculously, her rescue. The women of the Agency had given her life anew. Mary Lang, only child of a Chinese sailor and an Irish seamstress, was gone for ever. She’d been re-born as Mary Quinn, orphan. Educated at Miss Scrimshaw’s Academy for Girls. Trained as an undercover agent.
    An exciting, hopeful, active life had lain before her.
    Until this morning.
    Mary pressed her palms to her temples, as though that might stil the roar of her blood. The blood she shared with an opium fiend and a murderer. The father she’d longed so desperately to rediscover. At least while she’d thought him dead.
    What if it were a hideous, improbable coincidence? There might be another Lascar who shared her father’s name. What else had the police said of him? “Elderly”, they’d cal ed him. That was superficial y comforting. Yet her father, had he lived, would now be in his late forties or early fifties – old enough, especial y for a wind-blown, sun-beaten working man. It was not unthinkable that her father might appear elderly. What else did she know of her father? Only that in his youth he’d resembled Prince Albert: his nickname around Limehouse had been
    “Prince”. Was it possible for such a resemblance to persist, through years of hard living and wayfaring?
    Her chances of getting a look at this Lang Jin Hai were slender. He was in prison and soon to be arraigned as the murderer of the dishonourable Ralph Beaulieu-Buckworth. He might be charged with the even graver crime of high treason, depending upon the Queen’s decision. For the Queen, this whole affair was largely a question of propriety, yet nobody was wil ing to chal enge her views – not even the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. That rankled, too. It wasn’t that Mary wanted the Prince of Wales’s reputation sul ied, or the royal family disgraced through its association with Beaulieu-Buckworth. But Queen