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About this story
One wallflower. Four gentlemen. One Season to find a husband, and a murderer.
London, 1814. Miss Evangeline Hartwell has spent three Seasons against the wall, talking about ciphers to anyone who'll listen and frightening off every suitor with Latin. Now her father is dead, her uncle is drowning in debt, and the ultimatum is simple. Marry well by Midsummer, or marry the Earl of Wexcombe, a man who has already buried two young wives.
But Eve doesn't believe her father's death was an accident. And when a pickpocket on the frozen Thames steals the one page of his journal she could never decode, and leaves a note behind, Stop looking, or join him, she knows she's right.
Suddenly the most curious wallflower in London has four men at her door:
The Duke of Ravensworth, who cut her before four hundred people and then sent her violets.
Viscount Ashdown, the notorious rake who put her name in White's betting book.
Captain Gideon Hale, a scarred dragoon who nearly drowned chasing her thief.
Mr. Tobias Kingsley, the self-made shipping magnate who owns every penny her family owes.
Each of them knew her father. Each of them is hiding something. And each of them, one stolen kiss at a time, is stealing her heart.
Eve has a plan: let all four court her, and use every one of them to find the truth.
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grief
murder
parental loss
steamy
The Thames has frozen, dear readers, and all of London has gone out to walk upon it — which only proves that this Author has long suspected: Society will stand on anything, provided it is fashionable and likely to give way beneath them.
— Mrs. Inkwell's Society Papers, 5 February 1814
The river had been dead for four days, and London was dancing on its grave.
I stood at the top of the Three Cranes stairs with my sisters on either side of me and looked down at the Thames, and for a moment I could not breathe for the strangeness of it. Where there should have been brown water and barges and the slap of oars, there was a white road. It ran from Blackfriars to London Bridge, lined with tents and booths and smoking braziers, and it was crowded with more people than I had ever seen in one place, all of them walking where no one had any business walking.
"They've named it," Pip said, hanging over the rail. "The main street. It's called the City Road. There's a man down there who says he'll print your name on a card, Eve, on a real printing press, on the ice, and it costs sixpence."
"Then we'll have to see whether he's honest," I said, and caught the back of her pelisse before she could go over the rail headfirst.
Philippa Hartwell was twelve years old and had never once in her life approached a thing at a walk. Clara, who was eighteen and therefore far too grown to be excited about anything, stood on my other side with her hands in her muff and her eyes enormous.
"It doesn't look safe," Clara said.
"It isn't," I agreed. "That is rather the point."
She gave me a sideways look, the one that meant she was trying to decide whether I was teasing. I was, a little. But I was also telling the truth. There was nothing safe in our lives that winter. The ice at least had the decency to look dangerous.
A waterman in a battered hat stood at the foot of the stairs with a plank laid from the last step onto the frozen river, and he was charging tuppence a head for the privilege of crossing it. His trade was dead under the ice, so he had made a toll of it instead. I admired him for that. I paid him sixpence for the three of us and told him to keep the rest, and he touched his hat and said, "Mind the edges, miss. She's been groaning since dawn."
"Who has?"
"The river, miss." He spat neatly to one side. "She don't like being walked on. Never has."
I thought about that while Pip dragged us out onto the ice.
It was the fifth of February, and the fair had been running since the first. Everyone said it would not last. The weather had softened overnight, and there was a dampness in the air that had not been there the week before, and the ice under our boots was slick with a thin skin of water. But no one seemed to care. If anything, the crowd had the wild, giddy feeling of people at the end of a party who know the candles are guttering and have decided to dance harder.
There were gin tents, dozens of them, with names chalked on boards: The City of Moscow, The Wellington, The Free and Easy. There were skittle alleys and swings and a man selling hot gingerbread from a tray around his neck. A whole sheep was turning on a spit over a brazier, and a fellow with a voice like a foghorn was crying, "Lapland mutton! A shilling a slice!" There were fiddlers. There were dogs. There was, I was quite certain, a pickpocket at every third elbow, and I kept one hand on Pip's shoulder and the other on my reticule.
I had a particular reason for minding my reticule.
Inside it, folded small and tucked behind my handkerchief, was a single page torn from my father's journal. It was the one page I had never been able to read. The rest of the journal sat at home in my writing box, and over the past ten months I had worked my way through most of it, page by page, the way he had taught me to work through his puzzles when I was a girl. Substitution ciphers, transposition grids, the Vigenère square he had drawn for me on the back of a supper menu when I was nine. A lady should have a secret language, Evie, he used to say. Everyone else will be speaking French.
But the last page had defeated me. It was written in a cipher I did not know, and it was dated the day before he died.
I carried it with me everywhere. I could not have said why, except that it felt like the last thing he had been trying to tell me, and I did not want to leave it alone in a box.
"Eve!" Pip had found the printing press.
It was a real one, iron and wood, set up under a canvas awning with a sign that read PRINTED ON THE RIVER THAMES. The printer was a cheerful red-faced man with ink to his elbows, and he was doing a roaring trade in little cards that said your name and the date and a verse about the frost. Pip gave him her name, and he set the type with great ceremony, and pulled the lever, and handed her a card still damp with ink.
Miss Philippa Hartwell. Printed on the Ice, Feb. 5, 1814.
Pip looked at it the way other girls looked at pearls.
"Clara too," she demanded. "And you, Eve."
"I don't need a card."
"You do. You'll want to remember this."
I looked at her, at her pink nose and her bonnet gone crooked and her face alight, and I thought: Yes. I will want to remember this. I will want to remember that there was a day this winter when we were happy.
Because tomorrow morning, at ten o'clock, my uncle Bartholomew had asked to see me in my father's study.
He had not said why. He had not needed to. He had inherited my father's title and my father's house and my father's debts, and with them the guardianship of my father's three unmarried daughters. For ten months he had made it very clear which of those inheritances he resented most. I was twenty-three, on the edge of my third Season, and I had already refused two offers that he considered perfectly adequate. I had a fairly good idea what the interview in the study would concern.
So I gave the printer my name, and he gave me a card, and I tucked it into my reticule next to my father's last page. Miss Evangeline Hartwell. Printed on the Ice.
That was when the boy took it.
I never saw his face. I felt the tug at my wrist, sharp and expert, and the cord of my reticule went slack, and by the time I had turned round he was already three yards off and running, a small grey shape in a cap, slipping through the crowd like an eel through reeds.
I did not think. I have been told since that this is a besetting fault of mine. I picked up my skirts and ran after him.
"Eve!" Clara shrieked behind me.
"Stay with Pip!" I shouted, and then I was in the crowd and shoving, and someone swore at me, and someone else laughed, and I caught a glimpse of grey cap between a gin tent and a skittle alley and went after it.
I am not a fast runner. No lady is; it is not a thing we are encouraged to practice. My boots were made for walking on Bond Street, not on wet ice, and I went down hard on one knee before I had gone twenty yards. I was up again in an instant, but the boy was pulling away. He was heading for the open ice past the end of the booths, toward the middle of the river, where the crowd thinned and the white stretched away gray and bare toward Southwark.
And then someone ran past me.
He was a big man in a dark greatcoat, and he ran with an odd hitch in his stride, as if one leg did not quite agree with the other. But he was fast. Faster than me, faster than the boy. He went through the edge of the crowd like a ship through a wake, and out onto the open ice, and I heard him shout, "Stop, you little fool, it's thin out there —"
The boy did not stop. The boy did not seem to care how thin it was. He skidded, recovered, and veered toward the Surrey bank, and the man in the greatcoat went after him.
I followed as far as the last booth and then stopped, because I heard the river.
The waterman had been right. She was groaning. It was a low, deep sound, more felt than heard, like the creak of a ship's timbers in a heavy sea, and it came up through the soles of my boots and into my bones. Out on the open ice, a dark line had appeared where there had been no line before. Water was welling up through it, black against the white.
The boy jumped the crack. The man in the greatcoat did not.
He stopped dead at the edge of it. For a moment the two of them stood looking at each other across the black water, the boy on one side, the man on the other, and I saw the man calculate — I saw him measure the distance, and his bad leg, and the ice — and decide.
He did not jump. He reached into his coat, drew out something that glinted, and threw it.
It was not a knife. It was, I learned later, a silver flask, and it caught the boy squarely on the back of the head and sent him sprawling onto the ice. My reticule flew out of his hand and skittered across the white and came to rest perhaps two feet from the edge of the crack.
The boy scrambled up, looked at the reticule, looked at the man, and ran. In a moment he was gone among the barges frozen in along the Surrey side.
The man in the greatcoat walked along the edge of the crack until he found a place where it narrowed, stepped carefully over, picked up my reticule, retrieved his flask, and walked back. Behind him, with a sound like a pistol shot, a sheet of ice the size of a ballroom floor tipped up on one edge and slid gently into the river.
He did not even look round.
By the time he reached me, Clara and Pip had caught up, and Clara had hold of my arm as though I might bolt again, and a small crowd had gathered to watch the show.
"Yours, I believe," the man said, and held out my reticule.
Up close he was even larger than I had thought, broad through the shoulders and well over six feet. He had dark hair cropped short in the military fashion and a face that would have been handsome if it had not been so tired. A thin white scar ran through his left eyebrow and down onto his cheekbone, pulling the corner of his eye very slightly. His greatcoat was good wool, but old, and under it I could see the dark blue of a cavalry officer's coat.
He was breathing hard. He was also, I saw, favoring his left leg. He stood with most of his weight on the right, and there was a line of pain at the corner of his mouth that he was clearly doing his best to hide.
"Thank you," I said. "That was — you might have been killed."
"So might you, madam. You were running after him."
"I was not going to go onto the thin ice."
"No," he said, "you were going to stop at the edge and shout at him, which I'm sure would have been very effective." His voice was low and dry and roughened, as if he had spent a long time shouting over cannon. "It's thawing. They'll have the fair off the river by nightfall, if the river doesn't take it first. You should get your sisters off the ice."
I was annoyed to find that he was right. I was more annoyed to find I liked being told so by him.
"I am Miss Hartwell," I said, because it seemed absurd not to know the name of the man who had nearly drowned for my reticule. "Miss Evangeline Hartwell. These are my sisters, Miss Clara Hartwell and Miss Philippa."
Something happened to his face.
It was quick, and he hid it almost at once, but I saw it. I have spent my life watching faces; it is what wallflowers do. For an instant, at my name, his whole body went still, the way a horse goes still when it scents something on the wind.
"Hartwell," he repeated. "Sir Edmund Hartwell's daughter."
"You knew my father?"
A pause. "I knew of him."
He was lying. I was almost sure of it. But before I could press him, he had stepped back and given me a short, correct bow, the kind soldiers give.
"Captain Gideon Hale, Fourteenth Light Dragoons. Your servant, Miss Hartwell." His eyes went to Pip and Clara, and softened very slightly. "Ladies. Please get off the ice."
And then he turned and walked away into the crowd, with that odd hitching stride, and did not look back.
We got off the ice.
We went back to the Three Cranes stairs, and the waterman helped us up the plank, and Pip chattered the whole way about the man who had thrown his flask like a cannonball, Eve, did you see, and Clara said very little and kept looking at me sidelong. I could feel the ice shifting under us even then, a faint sliding unsteadiness, and I was glad when we were on stone again.
It was only when we were in the hackney, rattling home along Thames Street with Pip's head on Clara's shoulder, that I opened my reticule.
My handkerchief was there. My purse was there, with every coin in it. Pip's card was there, and mine. Miss Evangeline Hartwell. Printed on the Ice.
My father's page was not.
I went through it twice. I turned it inside out. I felt along the lining, in case it had slipped. Clara watched me with growing alarm.
"What is it? Did he take something?"
"No," I said. "He didn't take my money."
That was what frightened me. A pickpocket takes money. A pickpocket does not ignore a full purse and steal a single sheet of paper covered in nonsense letters.
And a pickpocket does not leave something behind.
It was tucked into the fold of my handkerchief, where my father's page had been. A square of plain paper, cheap and gray, folded twice. I opened it with fingers that had suddenly gone numb, and not from the cold.
There were six words on it, in a neat, unremarkable hand. Not cipher. Plain English, so that I could not possibly misunderstand.
Stop looking, or join him.
I sat very still in the swaying hackney and looked at those words until they blurred.
For ten months I had told myself that I was being foolish. That my father had died the way the coroner said he had died: a wet night on the Dover road, a carriage going too fast, a wheel that came off on the bend above the chalk pit. An accident. Everyone said so. My uncle said so. The vicar said so. The Foreign Office had sent a very handsome wreath and a letter that said so in beautiful copperplate.
Only I had not believed it. Only I had sat up nights with his journal, looking for the thing I could not name.
Stop looking.
So I had not been foolish. Someone knew I was looking. Someone had followed me onto the ice to take the one page I could not read. Someone had stood close enough to me to put a hand into my reticule, close enough that I might have felt their breath, and I had been laughing at a printing press.
Or join him.
"Eve," Clara whispered. "Eve, you've gone white. What does it say?"
I folded the note. I put it back into my reticule, next to the card that said my name. I looked out the window at the gray February street, at the houses of the city sliding past, at a world that had, between one breath and the next, become a different and far more dangerous place.
And I thought of a scarred captain who had gone very still at the sound of my father's name, and said he had only known of him.
"Nothing," I told my sister, and took her hand. "It's nothing, darling. Just a bit of paper."
Behind us, down on the river, the Thames was waking up.
End of Episode 1
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