Page 37 of A Spy’s Guide to Seduction

“I’m afraid not. Do you go to Lady Vange’s ball?”

“Yes.”

“You may see him there. I’ve tried to interest him in this Season’s beauty, a girl named Allegra Walhouse. Do you know her?”

Emily shook her head.

“Well, he’ll have none of the girl. I suppose I’m well served for my matchmaking efforts.”

“I will keep an eye out, shall I, and report to you?” It was both a truth and a lie at once. She could easily report to Beatrix, but her first report would be to Lynley, a report he would take to his mysterious colleagues in the Foreign Office.

“Would you? I’m afraid Archer is in a bad crowd. He boasted to me that he won fifty guineas earlier this winter on a wager that a certain married lady would take a lover. You can imagine my shock, but he laughed at it and told me I have grown duller than dishwater.”

In no time at all, the visit passed. Emily reached over to give her friend’s hand a squeeze. By giving up on husband hunting, Emily had unintentionally separated herself from friends who did marry. “Before I go, I must know that you, yourself, are well and happy?”

Beatrix’s smile reappeared. “I am. Fashionable people would laugh at me, I know, but I like motherhood. It may not be the thing to pay so much attention to one’s babies, but I confess they fascinate me. They go so rapidly from knowing nothing of the world to speaking and counting and questioning everything.”

“I’m glad to hear you say it. Would you call on Roz if you can? She’s approaching her confinement, and it would do her good to hear you talk.”

“Of course. She probably feels like your poor elephant.”

“She does.” Emily laughed.

“You see, I do keep up. I read your letter in the Times.”

In parting they agreed to meet again and compare notes on their relations.

Lynley stood on the flagway to assist Emily up into the curricle.

He turned the vehicle, and they headed back to Candover House.

“Tired of spying?” he asked.

“Am I so easily read?”

“Yesterday, there was danger and excitement. Today must seem tame.”

“That’s not it exactly. It’s more the falseness of the thing. I did not feel so false pretending to be Mrs. Culley, as I do pretending an interest in my friends for the sake of gaining information from them.”

“Did you gain any information?”

“Beatrix’s brother Archer won fifty guineas earlier this winter on a wager that a certain married lady would take a lover.”

“Lady Ravenhurst?”

“Beatrix didn’t know, or didn’t say, but Lady Ravenhurst is unhappy in her marriage.” It struck Emily that one could be isolated in the midst of a great city, a city of a million people. The thread connecting the two women she’d visited had been loneliness. And now that she thought of it, Malikov had been lonely and isolated in death. And perhaps his loneliness had begun with his becoming a spy, with choosing to step out of the circle of genuine friendship, to become instead an observer and a manipulator, a keeper of information on others, rather than a man who exchanged the true thoughts and feelings on which attachments were founded.

“Lynley, if you were taken by the Russians, England would not send a man to silence you?”

“You think Malikov’s government ordered him killed?”

“That’s why he wrote Zovsky’s name in the beer, isn’t it?” The possibility troubled her. Malikov could not have been an entirely good man, but he had been loyal to his country, and his country had abandoned him in a foreign jail and, perhaps worse, had contrived to have him killed.

“Possibly, but Zovsky may have acted on his own to protect himself.”

“It’s just that—” Emily broke off. What she’d been about to say shocked her and was better left unsaid. She would not let errant thoughts just spill out, as he had.

“Just what?” he asked.