The message had been his first real dead-drop retrieval. He’d practiced the maneuver many times, both in the Thorndike’s War Room and in Hyde Park, but this time he’d sweated, sure that everyone who saw him knew he was up to something clandestine. The prearranged signal that a message was waiting, which he had nearly missed in his haste to get to work at Bow Street, had all but leapt out at him once he recognized it.

The chalk mark on the newel post of his rooming house had been easy enough to remove as he passed. Then it was a matter of buying a copy of a morning paper, taking it to the pie seller on the corner, setting the paper on the man’s cart while Daniel purchased a mince pie for breakfast, and retrieving the note stuck into a crevice on the underside of the cart beneath the concealing paper.

The fact that he’d managed it perfectly both gratified and grated on him. The last time he had been called upon to use some of his new spy craft, he’d fallen over his own feet in front of Lady Juliette. The archery tournament exchange had not exactly been a rousing success, and his cheeks burned each time he thought of it … even as he remembered the feel of her in his arms, the scent of roses, the racing of his heart.

As he made his way down a flight of steps, slick with the damp night air, other dark shadows also moved toward his destination. Men in heavy coats, a few women in cloaks and bonnets. Silent mouths, careful footsteps, furtive glances.

Daniel’s conscience nudged him hard. This gathering was illegal. Assembling together to plot the overthrow of the government, the economy, the orderly structure of daily life was contrary to the laws of the nation. While he sympathized with the workers’ plight, violence was an extreme response, and in this case, he felt, unjustified. Certainly murder was always outside the pale.

Jasper Finch, though impassioned and erudite when speaking at a social gathering, had been stretching to justify violence as a response. Surely if he could amass a large enough body of workers who all agreed on a peaceful course of action, those who employed them would have no choice but to listen and change. But Finch did not seem interested in peace. He fomented disorder instead.

Men slipped through the half-opened door of a large brick warehouse, and Daniel joined them, hands deep in his pockets, hat pulled low. He’d added a streak of coal dust to his cheek and had spilled a touch of ale on his lapel, giving the impression that he was a collier who, before attending the meeting, had stopped off at a pub after his last delivery.