“You are thorough,” Ned said, “and those are good questions, but we don’t have all the answers yet. I can tell you Lady Champlain and Lord Stapleton don’t get along, don’t occupy the same box at the opera. One of our fellows chatted with Stapleton’s head maid over a pint. Stapleton is threatening to dispatch her ladyship to the north again after she spent the Season at the family seat, but the settlements say she must be housed in London if she so desires.”

“What of her ladyship?” Abigail said, getting up to pace. “Has she undertaken any new relationships lately, does she have debts, could she be expecting a child?”

The duchesses exchanged a look.

“My professional activities don’t permit me to shy away from human foibles,” Abigail said. “Somebody has those letters, and Stapleton has decided that now—years after Champlain’s death—the letters have significance.”

Stephen had put Abigail’s situation to his family in plain terms, saving her the recitation: Champlain had implied a promise of marriage, though Abigail hadn’t realized he was dissembling until it was too late. Champlain’s letters had gone missing several months ago, and Stapleton had started attempting to steal them from about the same time. Stephen had omitted mention of a child, for which Abigail was grateful.

If anybody thought Abigail an idiot for succumbing to Champlain’s charms, they were too well bred to show it.

“Do you have copies of any of the letters or can you recall portions verbatim?” Duncan Wentworth asked. “Sometimes codes can be secreted in the most innocuous-sounding prose. When Stephen and I traveled on the Continent, we were approached several times with requests to carry sensitive documents, though they were always described as reports, testaments, or simple correspondence.”

Stephen stuffed a pillow under his knee. “Duncan would not allow me to involve myself in any intrigues. I could have been a dashing spy, but, alas for me, my self-appointed conscience objected.” He lounged in his reading chair, not a care in the world, when twenty minutes earlier he’d been declaring himself the best trifler in all of England.

I will miss him. Abigail set that thought firmly aside, and focused on Duncan’s suggestion. “You think Champlain was involved in some matter of national security?”

Stephen was hard to read, Walden nearly impossible to read, and Duncan’s self-possession put sphinxes to shame.

“I have no idea,” Duncan replied. “Stephen described his lordship as a fribble, but a good spy would know how to impersonate a fribble.”

Abigail considered what she knew of Champlain. “He was a fribble, the genuine article. No clandestine operative intent on the king’s business would have dallied with a gunsmith’s daughter.”

Ned spoke up from behind his desk. “Guns are items of interest to most governments. Was your papa a gunsmith or, like His Pestilence here, a designer of weapons?”