Nothing. Which left a couple of disturbing possibilities in mind. Don’t try world-walking in your bedroom, she sternly warned herself, and check the computer for back doors in the morning. She packed the computer and its extras—and the gun—in her suitcase. Then she lay down and drifted into sleep disturbed by surprisingly explicit, erotic phantoms that left her aching and sore for something she couldn’t have.

She was awakened in the dim predawn light by a clattering of serving maids. “What’s going on?” she mumbled, lifting her head and wincing at her hangover. “I thought I said—”

“Duke’s orders, ma’am,” Meg apologized. “We’ve to dress you for travel.”

“Oh hell.” Miriam groaned. “He said that?”

He had. So Miriam did her waking up that morning with three other women fussing over her, haphazardly cramming her into a business suit—about the most inappropriate travel garb she could think of—and then from somewhere they produced a voluminous greatcoat that threatened her with heat stroke while she already felt like death warmed over.

“This,” she said through gritted teeth, “is excessive.”

“It’s cold outside, ma’am,” Meg said firmly. “You’ll need it before the day is out.” She held out a hat to Miriam. Miriam looked at it in disbelief, then tried to balance it on her head. “It goes like this,” said Meg, and seconds later it did. With a scarf to hold it in place, Miriam felt cut off from the world almost completely. Are they trying to hide me? she wondered, anxious about what that could mean.

They led her downstairs, with a trail of grunting porters hefting her trunks—and incongruous metal suitcase—and then out through a pair of high double doors. Meg was right. Her breath hung steaming in the air before her face. In the past week, autumn had turned wintry with the first breath of air rushing down from the Arctic. A huge black wooden coach balanced on wheels taller than Miriam stood waiting, eight horses harnessed before it. A mounting block led up to the open door, and she was startled to see the duke standing beside it, wearing a quite incongruous Burberry overcoat.

“My dear!” he greeted her. “A final word, if I may, before you depart.”

She nodded, then glanced up as the porters hoisted her trunks onto the roof and a small platform at the back of the carriage.

“You may think my sending you to court is premature,” he said quietly, “but my agents have intercepted messages about an attempt on your life. You need to leave here, and I think it best that you be among your peers. You’ll be staying at the Thorold Palace, which is maintained as a common residence in the capital by the heads of the families; it’s doppelgängered and quite safe, I assure you. It will be possible for you to return later.”