She had deduced that, in fact, and spent a number of her nights composing scornful remarks to her pillow on his general perfidy and falsehood. But she only said, "I see."

"I made an attempt to recover it," he said, "and all I received for my trouble was to find myself in the clutches of a moneylender the likes of whom I'd knife in the back if I met him today. But I was young and witless, and I wanted to have Monceaux; I wanted to go to my grandfather and tell him I had it back. Sadly for these fine ambitions, what I got was beaten sense less in a back alley of Paris."

Callie listened with her eyes lowered. In mockery he called her worldly wise, but she had stayed in Shelford, dreaming of adventures, reading his letters full of humor and invented tales, while he had gone out and been beaten up in an alley.

"But to shorten this unedifying story," he continued, "I fell in with some English deserters after the war. Big fellows. We were all starving to death." He gave a humorless laugh. "I had the lucky notion of making an exhibition of English boxing in Paris. None of us knew a thing about fighting, so we fixed it. It was a sensation. I'd call for a volunteer to take on these English goddamns—you'll pardon another lesson in my language, Mademoiselle, but I'm afraid that's what we French call your countrymen under certain circumstances—and we'd have some hulking local géant ready to come up and fight. There'd be a lot of sound and fury before we made sure he won, and split the takings with him." He crossed his arms and leaned back against the mantel. "But Jem got tired of it. He began to fight in earnest. And he was good." His voice softened, and he shook his head a little. "He was amazing. But we couldn't make any profit in France by thrashing Frenchmen. So we changed his name, came back to England, and made a bid for the championship."

"Instead of coming home to your family," she said tartly, "as you might have done in place of starving on the streets of Paris or becoming a… a—"

"An operator of the Fancy," he supplied. "I arranged bouts and held the stakes. I didn't want to come back. My grandfather was still alive." He paused. "Among other reasons."