Kent. England’s garden. Spring was advancing well here, with green leaves budding out on the trees. In a month or so, the many apple orchards he passed would burst into bloom. Shepherds worked in their paddocks, and new lambs stayed close to their mothers. Dairy cattle grazed the fields, and the sun rose fully above the horizon.

He inhaled deeply of the chilled air. It was good to get out of the city and blow away some of the soot and grime and frosty fog. The country air reminded him of his boyhood.

He’d been so miserable all those years ago when he had been yanked from his agrarian life as a servant on an estate and shipped off to boarding school. The location of the school had been rural, but the boys were not allowed to roam the countryside. They were kept within the confines of the school grounds, surrounded by a high wall.

Almost like Newgate Prison.

And then he’d gone to Oxford. It was the first time Daniel had lived in a town that size, full of people and commerce and street after street. At first he felt suffocated, pressed in, and at the end of every day, exhausted. Gradually, he had acclimated, but on days like today, when he got out of London, the busiest metropolis in the world, he realized how much he missed the countryside and the pace of life it afforded.

He approached a wagon laden with bulging burlap sacks heading toward town. Potatoes? Apples? Too lumpy to be grain sacks. The driver, a stout man with a florid face, touched the brim of his hat and raised his whip as Daniel passed. At the rate the wagon was traveling, he wouldn’t see London before midnight.

The chestnut snorted and leaned into the bit, eager for a gallop, still fresh though they had been on the road since first light.

“You have bags of stamina, my boy, but are you fast?”

The stable lad who’d saddled the gelding at dawn had warned that he was headstrong and not an easy ride, but Daniel loved a challenge, and with a long, straight bit of road before him, he anchored his hat and loosened the reins. The horse leapt forward, his hooves beating out a quickening tempo. Daniel rose in the stirrups, placing his weight over the chestnut’s withers, the cold air slicing across his face, some of the irritations and shortcomings of the current investigation falling away for the moment.

He’d spent hours on horseback as a youngster, exercising the master’s hunters once he’d proven he could handle them, but since coming to London, his opportunities to ride were few. Most often at the behest of his mysterious patron, who delivered messages through the offices of Coles, Franks & Moody.