Miranda

“Look after this one,” he said, indicating her with a nod of his dark head. “I’ll go for the lad.”

“Christ, you’ll die trying,” the watchman said. “There’s no way to get to the child.”

But the man was gone, rushing toward the flames, disappearing into the burning building. The watchman pulled her to the end of the alley, where people were starting to gather.

A kaleidoscope of horrors wheeled around her. She saw the walking wounded, people with blackened burns and bleeding cuts, their faces lacerated by flying debris. Shredded paper made a snowstorm of confetti that flurried through the night sky. A woman ran past, cradling a child in her arms. A man walked by, his face as blank as a sleepwalker’s. From the front, he appeared unscathed, his starched shirt and cravat perfectly white. Then, making no sound, he pitched forward and landed facedown at her feet. In the back, his clothes had been burned and shredded away. Smoke rose from his blistered flesh.

She bent to help him, scooping water from a bucket onto his skin. He screamed and shuddered, choked out a prayer, fell silent. She gestured frantically to two men who were bearing off the wounded on litters made of bedsheets and rough blankets. While they moved the victim onto the litter, she chanced a look at the tenement. The stranger who had helped her was now climbing the burning stairs toward the child. For a big man, he moved swiftly, gracefully, as if accustomed to performing with great competence during a disaster. He snatched up the boy. For a fraction of a second, he simply stood and clasped the child to his chest, holding the small form as if it were infinitely precious. An orange glow formed a halo around them so that they were beautiful together, bejeweled in flickering light.

Ah, she knew what the child must be feeling. Those all-powerful arms enveloping her, bearing her to safety.

She had just decided that he was an angel when the stairs collapsed. She half expected him to sprout wings and fly. A whimsical notion, a fleeting hope. Both the man and the child plummeted into a pit of burning timber. Sparks gushed upward from the broken skeleton of the building.

Choking with sobs that tasted of sulfur and soot, she tried to go to them. A wall of flame obscured them from view.

Someone grabbed her roughly, drew her back. “Too late,” the watchman said. “You’re needed here.”

She heard someone else shout, “Miss, over here! Help us with this one!”

She struggled with the watchman, but he held her fast, shoving her to her knees beside a man with something metal embedded in his leg. “Concern yourself with the living, for chrissakes,” the watchman ordered.

The eyes of the wounded man pleaded with her. She had no choice but to stay with him.

Moving like a dreamwalker, she survived the night, helping, grieving, casting glances down the alleyway and hoping against hope that the tall man would come out, unscathed, with the little boy in his arms.

She had no sense of the passing of time, but rain began to fall as dawn tinged the sky. People raised grateful, smoke-blackened faces, welcoming the rain, letting it deal a final death blow to the fire they had battled all night.

The watchman found her as she was offering sips of water to a shaken old man. She looked at the blackened remains of the tenement. He shook his head. “There were no other survivors, miss. I tried to stop him, but...” He lifted his shoulders in a helpless shrug. “You’d best be finding your way home.”

Home. She mouthed the word. No sound came out.

“Your family’ll be asking after you.”

She stared at the harsh, weary face, the small, speculating eyes. Despair trickled through her, drizzling like the rain.

“Miss?” He cocked his head. His singed brows drew together. “Shall I send for someone?”

She felt a great well of emptiness open up within her. Heard a silent scream inside her soul. And finally forced herself to face the truth she had avoided all night.

She had no memory, no notion at all of who she was, no knowledge of what she had been doing in the warehouse.

Or why someone would want her dead.

The thought chilled her, but she knew she was the reason for the disaster, knew it just as certainly as if the devil himself had whispered it in her ear.

She gave a strangled cry and put her hand to her dry, raw throat. Her fingers encountered a metal object there, something round, suspended from a thin chain.

A silver locket. She pulled it from her bodice and squinted at it through smarting eyes. Something was engraved on the locket. A word. Someone’s name. Her name.

Miranda.

* * *

Ian MacVane stared out the window of his fashionable Hanover Square house, watching a piece of torn silk blowing on the breeze and feeling a cold sense of doom.

“You didna tell me there was a girl involved,” he said in a low, furious voice. Its tone was even deeper than usual because of the smoke and fumes he had inhaled from the warehouse explosion.

His visitor followed his gaze to the window. Heavy velvet draperies framed a view of elm and cherry trees, elegantly understated wrought-iron fences in front of handsome houses. A blue-eyed stare sharpened on the bit of blowing silk.

“What do you suppose that is, flying about like an infernal kite? A piece of someone’s parade flag or aerial balloon, no doubt. London is simply crawling with dignitaries this summer. One can hardly take a chaise down Regent Street without stumbling upon a Prussian prince or a grand duke or some war hero draped with decorations.”

The speaker turned to face Ian where he lounged on the bed, naked from the waist up. “These are interesting times we live in, darling, are they not?”

Ian glared at Lady Frances Higgenbottom. “The girl,” he repeated. “You didna tell me the traitor was a girl.”

Lady Frances sighed. She took out her silk fan and idly waved it in front of her round, beautiful face. “If I had mentioned a girl, you might have gone and had a fit of scruples and possibly refused to help us. We are charged with safeguarding all the crowned heads of Europe while they’re in London. That duty must come first.”

Ian shifted on the satin sheets, wincing as the fabric brushed his burned shoulder and back. He told himself to be grateful to be alive at all. God knows he had wished for death in that moment when he’d looked down, realized that he had climbed to such a great height to fetch the child.

More than death, more than heated battle, even more than the past locked up tight in his heart, Ian MacVane feared heights.

The fall should have killed him, but somehow both he and the lad had managed to survive. He remembered being dragged to safety on a length of sailcloth. Gingerly he lowered the sheet farther so the fabric wouldn’t chafe him.

Lady Frances fell so still that her golden ringlets stopped bobbing. “Good Lord, MacVane. Must you be so damnably alluring? The fate of Europe is at stake, and all I can think of is your body.”

“You don’t even like me, Frances.”

“Whatever gave you that idea?”

A wry smile curved his mouth. “I think it was the time you made me fight a duel with an unloaded pistol, or perhaps your sending me by unarmed tender to deliver a message during a naval battle. I began to suspect—” Ian stopped himself, for she had done it again. Twisted the conversation away from the point he was trying to make. It was one of her many talents, and one that made her so effective in her secret role as chief spymaster of the Foreign Office.

“The lass,” he said grimly. “I’m still waiting for an answer.”

Frances snapped her fan shut and slapped it against the palm of her gloved hand. “You would have balked. Or gotten—heaven forbid—passionately entangled.”

He narrowed his eyes at her, giving her the full force of an icy glare. “When have I ever gotten passionately entangled?”

She rubbed her hands up and down her arms as if the room had grown chilly. “God, MacVane. You’re as cold as a Highland winter. I’ve always wondered why.”

There was a reason, but Frances was the last person he would tell. She knew far too much already.

She went to a cherrywood butler’s table and poured sherry from a crystal decanter. Ian studied each dainty, deceptive movement. Her costume was a confection of pink silk and frills, with little pink topboots showing beneath the scalloped hem of her skirt. To anyone but the most astute observer, she was an empty-headed miss with no more on her mind than a plumed cap. The one concession to her true vocation was a tiny black lily stamped on the heel of her left boot.

She tasted the sherry and regarded Ian with a half smile. “We had been watching Miranda Stonecypher for some time—along with her father, Gideon. She is presumed to know very little.” Frances’s sweet, kiss-me-you-fool mouth twisted into an ironic smile. “Even less now.”

“Bitch.” Ian blew out a sigh and flung his forearm over his brow, scowling out the window again. The scrap of silk had caught in the branch of an elm tree, fluttering red and royal blue on the summer breeze.

He squeezed his eyes shut, trying not to see the wounded with their bleeding faces and wide, wondering eyes, the eyes of innocents caught in the maelstrom of the explosion, eyes that asked the one unanswerable question: Why?