Her maid curtsied again and disappeared. Eloise lay stiffly, staring at the blush-rose canopy that covered her old-fashioned tent bed. An awful thought had crept into her mind. What if her husband had taken to sneaking women into Brandenburg House? It sounded like a woman’s voice, now that her mind was clear and wide awake. Yes, she had heard a woman gasp. In fact, it reminded her of the time when the second housemaid went into labor, right in the parlor, without a word of warning. No matter how much the housekeeper had wrung her hands later and assured Eloise that everyone simply thought the girl was a tad large for her age, Eloise still remembered the scene with a stab of pure rage. The Duchess of Beaumont had come to take tea, and the mortification! Eloise would remember it to her dying day.

Thinking of the Duchess of Beaumont reminded her of Braddon Chatwin, because weren’t they related somehow? Eloise fancied that the duchess was dear Braddon’s godmother. He was a nicely mannered young fellow, Eloise thought. A dunce, of course, but what man wasn’t? And he came with a pretty set of relatives. It would be very pleasant to be related to the Duchess of Beaumont.

There was a sound of slippers running down the hallway, and Eloise’s maid slipped back into the room.

“Oh, my lady, there’s such a stir! Carroll has found a ladder in the back garden, and it’s set up right against the house.” She paused, native intuition telling her that the fact that the ladder was perched against Lady Sophie’s bedroom window was information better conveyed by the butler than by herself.

Eloise clambered out of bed and firmly tied her bedrobe around her. Without a word she marched through the connecting door to her dressing room and from there to her husband’s bedchamber. She had absolute confidence about the location of the ladder—directly to her husband’s window, no doubt about it. Things had come to a pretty pass when her husband had to import women up a ladder, like a spendthrift sneaking into a brothel.

Thus it was with a profound sense of surprise that she flung open George’s bedchamber door to find the marquis peacefully asleep and quite alone. What’s more, his windows were shut tight, and from the way he was snoring, he’d probably drunk more than was good for him before going to bed and wasn’t expecting visitors.

Eloise darted to her husband’s bed and grabbed his upper arm, shaking it vigorously. “Robbers, George, robbers!” She didn’t notice in her excitement that she was calling her husband by his Christian name, a courtesy she hadn’t granted him in years.