HAVING TAKEN DOWN AN ORDER, IN SPITE OF THE heavy accent of his customer, for twelve dozen Bath buns to be delivered daily to the exhibition pen of Monsieur Malempré, an elated baker escorted Monsieur and Madame into the street. He took leave of them with a surfeit of bowing and repeated pledges that his buns would most assuredly contain a generous measure of white currants. Having bespoke the buns, at a price so outrageous that it would have embarrassed His Majesty's pastry chef, Trev took Callie's arm and turned her toward the High Town.

He kept his hat brim low and gave the veiled lady on his arm the benefit of his full attention and gallantry. He was not overly concerned that Hubert would be recognized in the city of Hereford, but he was not so sanguine about himself. Here in the marches of the West Country, close by to Bristol—that first-rate source of burly butchers' boys anxious to enter the prize ring—the very soil seemed to produce prime pugilists. Trev had always limited his own scouting to the south and east, deliberately avoiding Hereford and Shelford and Callie, but he would be a fool to count himself perfectly safe here. He was too well-known among the Fancy.

Jock and Barton had been busy chasing up old acquaintance for the past several days, calling in all favors on Trev's behalf. And he had a wealth of credit to call upon, he found, for the thing he'd done for Jem Fowler's wife and baby boy. The hefty green-coated footman who now walked behind the Malemprés had only recently been pummeling a challenger in some set-to in a Bristol training yard. Across the way lounged a pair of regular brutes in the science, who owed their success and early opportunities largely to Trev's patronage. The men assigned to handle Hubert were experienced both in cattle yards and prizefights. There was a marvelous inf lux of boxing men to Hereford at the moment.

For his own part, Trev had discarded his Belcher necktie and adopted a sword cane and several other sartorial details to camouf lage himself as a continental beau rather than a sporting buck. Walking beside Callie now, he regretted having chosen the name Malempré for their masquerade—he'd been in a hurry, arranging for the van and commanding the painting of the canvas to swathe Hubert's pen, and the first name he'd summoned to mind was a town in Belgium where he'd spent a few weeks of his imprisonment just after Napoleon's first abdication.