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the hubbub, something wary and disquieting in his eyes. ‘I don’t mean to be foolish, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.’
    ‘Champagne makes fools of us all, my love. Speak.’
    ‘The argument at White’s three days hence, with the Earl of BenRuin. Was that a surprise to you?’
    Crispin should not be thinking of that, still, in the flush of tonight’s triumph.
    ‘It would hardly have been gentlemanly to spit my coffee out when he arrived,’ Darlington said.
    ‘I just . . . it’s awfully impertinent in me to think it, but I couldn’t help wondering . . . Was that a game? Did you mean for it to happen? Because I’ve been racking my brains, and I just can’t think what you meant to gain by it, if it was.’
    He hadn’t thought Crispin watched him so closely, nor thought so deeply on what he saw. Soon he might have to do away with even this small indulgence of company.
    That single moment between himself and BenRuin, when his life had hung exquisitely on the edge of extinction, had been the work of six months of planning. Players arraigned for and against. He had liked having the mechanism there, like a favourite shiny toy, but had been almost convinced he wouldn’t ever use it.
    Then his father had died, and he had been given that iron key, and all he could think of was meeting BenRuin’s rage.
    For all the good it had done him.
    ‘You think far too much of me,’ he said, ‘if you suppose I can divine what that great lummox might do from one moment to the next! I’ll be happy never to see him again in my life. But my pretty boys, we haven’t yet plumbed the depths of my character. I feel we can be much more pithy. Much, much more pithy.’
    He ushered them out not long after, with a graceless, abrupt dismissal. He waved the concert bill at Crispin and said, ‘Get thee to a print house!’
    Darlington sat on the edge of his bed, shaking. His heart pounded in slick, baseless beats and he tried to slow them down by breathing, but he couldn’t breathe and he couldn’t slow his heartbeat, and his fingers slid wet against the bright thread of his counterpane.
    Her body, in the dark. The noisy pleasure in her voice. The dark, sucking way he had wasted himself in her, on her.
    It went deep in him, what he had done to Lady Marmotte tonight. As if she had poisoned him, and he had forced his throat to be soft and swallow it down.
    He tried to unbutton his jacket, to pull the garment from his skin, but he couldn’t get the thing off on his own, and he couldn’t call Grey. Everyone believed the Duke of Darlington was a dandy of middling intelligence and more than average charm. He couldn’t bear for his valet to see him as he was now, drenched in his own sweat, wrestling his jacket as if it were the devil on his back, and ready to cut himself if that would only free him of it.
    He couldn’t think of a single person he could call to his side. A single person he didn’t lie to, or use, or mislead. A single person who would look at him and really see him.
    He held a shaking hand against his chest, where his heartbeats slid by so fast.
    Before he had learned to hide all but the smallest part of himself he had regularly scared the people around him. He had never scared himself, before that day he sat in St George’s with his father’s body five feet away.
    Now, fear followed him wherever he went.
    It had followed him into bed with Lady Marmotte.
    There was a quiet knock on the door, and Grey entered.
    ‘There’s a lady to see you, Your Grace. Do you desire to change, before you see her?’
    He tried to focus. A lady.
    He reminded himself that Grey did not see a grotesque, sweating beast, but a man. A duke.
    ‘I’ll need the blue coat you ordered last week, and the gold silk waistcoat.’
    ‘Forgive me, Your Grace. Uh, Jones says he won’t deliver the coat until you fix up your account. I told him —’
    Darlington waved it away. ‘My dressing gown will suffice. The red