Griffith felt as though he’d been pummeled in the chest and had all the air knocked out of him. The heir? To something he neither hoped for nor had ever imagined?

“And,” Robson continued in a softer voice as though he knew what Griffith was thinking, “Fred is sick. So there’s a bit of urgency to it.”

Sick? The third musketeer? No, it couldn’t be. None of this could be happening, Griff thought to himself. Not Robson retrieving him from jail, not being told he was the heir, not hearing that Fred was ill.

But even as he denied it, he knew it was the truth. And he knew just how he felt.

“Fuck.”

Robson chuckled grimly. “That’s one way of putting it.”

“He’s gone?” Della frowned at the officer, who frowned right back. “But where?”

“I couldn’t say, ma’am,” the officer said, in a tone that indicated not only couldn’t he say, but he absolutely could not care either.

Della had made certain Sarah was recovered, then stepped outside of their London town house to find her way to naval prison. It had taken a lot of questioning to figure out just where the viscount-captain had been taken; it wasn’t as though Della had ever known anything about the Navy, much less where they took people they arrested.

The building she was directed to was squat and forbidding, and even normally fearless Della had to take a deep breath before entering. The inside of the building was just as unpleasant as the outside, built of stone and grimness. The few windows were small, letting in a tiny portion of the already meager London light.

“Hmph.” Della whirled around, gesturing to her maid to follow her.

That she needed a maid to accompany her everywhere when she was already ruined, for goodness’ sake, irritated her, but Sarah had pointed out that it would reflect badly on the Society for Poor and Unfortunate Children, where both she and Della taught, if Della was seen gallivanting about London on her own. And she’d said “gallivanting,” which had made Della laugh.

Sarah and Della shared a fondness for idiosyncratic phrasings.

“Where to now, my lady?” Becky sounded anxious. Not surprising, since she was barely sixteen years old, and was intimidated by the thought of being a duke’s daughter’s lady’s maid, a fact she’d reiterated several times to Della.

Becky had been one of their first rescues when they’d arrived in London. She had been lured from the country with the promise of employment, only to discover when she arrived that employment was a genteel name for prostitution. She was sweetly pretty, with enormous blue eyes and a chin that seemed made for quavering.

“We’re going to find this Viscount Whatshisname,” Della replied determinedly. Because without him, Sarah might never know what happened to her beloved Henry.