“Never mind,” said the Dowager Countess Melton, patting a white-faced footman, who had been standing next to it, consolingly on the arm. “Ugly thing; it’s always made me look like a squirrel. Go fetch a broom before someone steps on the pieces.”

She stepped through the French doors onto the terrace, fanning herself and looking happy.

“What a night!” she said to her youngest son. “Do you think they’ve found the range yet?”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Grey said, glancing warily down the river toward Tower Hill, where the fire-works master was presumably rechecking his calculations and bollocking his subordinates. The first trial shell had gone whistling directly overhead, no more than fifty feet above the Countess’s riverside town house. Several servants stood on the terrace, scanning the skies and armed with wet brooms, just in case.

“Well, they should do it more often,” the Countess said reprovingly, with a glance at the Hill. “Keep in practice.”

It was a clear, still, mid-August night, and while hot, moist air sat like a smothering blanket on London, there was some semblance of a breeze, so near the river.

Just upstream, he could see Vauxhall Bridge, so crowded with spectators that the span appeared to be a live thing itself, writhing and flexing like a caterpillar over the soft dark sheen of the river. Now and then, some intoxicated person would be pushed off, falling with a cannonball splash into the water, to the enthusiastic howls of their comrades above.

Conditions were not quite so crowded within the town house, but give it time, Grey thought, following his mother back inside to greet further new arrivals. The musicians had just finished setting up at the far end of the room; they would need to open the folding doors into the next room, as well, to make room for dancing—though that wouldn’t begin until after the fireworks.

The temperature was no bar to Londoners celebrating the news of Clive’s victory at Plassey. For days, the taverns had been overflowing with custom, and citizens greeted one another in the street with genial cries condemning the Nawab of Bengal’s ancestry, appearance, and social habits.

“Buggering black bastard!” bellowed the Duke of Cirencester, echoing the opinions of his fellow citizens in Spitalfields and Stepney as he charged through the door. “Put a rocket up his arse, see how high he flies before he explodes, eh? Benedicta, my love, come kiss me!”

The Countess, prudently putting several bodies between herself and the Duke, blew him a pretty kiss before disappearing on the arm of Mr. Pitt, and Grey tactfully redirected the Duke’s ardor toward the genial widow of Viscount Bonham, who was more than capable of dealing with him. Was the Duke’s Christian name Jacob? he wondered darkly. He thought it was.