How in the hell could that unmitigated fool Breksby send him all the way to Italy to serve as a secondhand-clothing merchant? He picked up the pieces of clothing distastefully. They were shabby, black, the clothes of a poor Parisian merchant. There was a pair of old trousers, ripped in the upper thigh, a coarse shirt that was probably white at some point in its distant past, a heavy, unwieldy jacket. Distastefully he felt through the pockets of the jacket and trousers, but there were no letters, no money, nothing. But then Alex’s eyes narrowed. The fat innkeeper said that the old Frenchman had told him someone would pick up the clothing. There must be something valuable here.

In a few minutes, he had it. Or them, rather. They had been folded many times, worked into tiny squares and placed inside the lower seam of the jacket. They were letters, and Alex had no idea how in the world they ended up sewn into a shabby black jacket. Because they were love letters, in French, and by the end of the second sheet Alex had a very good idea who had written them. They were letters from Napoleon to Josephine. And they were written before the couple were married. As a matter of fact, they were clearly written while Josephine was still married to General de Beauharnais.

Alex whistled a bit, reading the third letter. Then he grinned. He had heard that Josephine was beautiful … but beauty didn’t seem to be her only desirable attribute. By the time he had finished reading the letters, Alex’s face was somber. He could make a good guess about what the English government intended to do with these letters. The French still had many aristocrats locked up in their dungeons, and he held the ransom for at least a few of those unfortunate people in his hands. Alex folded the letters carefully, putting them in his breast pocket.

Suddenly the five months he had been stuck in Italy seemed inconsequential. He had a beloved, beautiful wife waiting for him in England. Lucien’s wife and his young son would never return. The letters had appeared too late to save them. But it might ransom a different family out of Bonaparte’s prisons. Alex shouted up at his driver with new purpose. These letters needed to be back in England, even more than he himself needed to be there.