Fog had crept in from the Thames at some point while she was inside. It would protect them tonight from biplanes and zeppelins. She watched it swirl in front of the nearest light, moving so slowly that it nearly looked immobile. But it wasn’t. Nothing ever was, it seemed.

At the corner, she paused. Looked toward the park, cold and dark. She didn’t have to see to know where Mrs. Rourke usually sat with her crocheting. Where the stranger had taken up residence at the wrought-iron table instead of Gregory, playing no one at Go.

He wasn’t there now, of course. Even from here she could see the silhouette of the empty chair. But why was he ever? Who was he? And where had he come by that game?

“Have you any spare change, miss?”

She didn’t jump, but she did jerk her head toward the voice more quickly than if she’d noted the figure before his words snuck through the fog toward her. There, someone shuffling toward the light.

Male. Twenty-two to twenty-five, were she to guess. Five feet eleven inches, if he’d been standing up straight, which he wasn’t. He was hunched against the chill and hobbling with that distinct gait that suggested a missing limb. Hair of an indeterminate color in the dim light. A cap pulled low against the cold. A scarf that was more holes than knit—Maman would have been appalled.

He didn’t come any closer. Whether the distance was out of respect or because he knew he’d get nothing from her if he scared her, she could only guess. But she opened her handbag. The journal that the duchess had given her still protruded from the top, but she reached in around it and pulled out her change purse. She never carried much on her, not unless she was going to the shops. But she counted out what she had and held it all out in her palm. “Here.”

The man hesitated, edged a bit closer, and then took a single florin. “I won’t take all you have, miss. You’ve no doubt a husband and little ones at home.”

“No, I haven’t. Take it all.” She followed his hand and spilled the coins into it. Maman would have given more conservatively, always mindful of the house in Brussels that would need repair and the accounts that might be drained when they were no longer frozen.

But Margot’s equation was different.

The man’s fingers closed around the offering. “I don’t—I mean, thank you. I hate to have asked. To have had to ask.”

He must be new to such hard times.

“I’ll work for it. If I can. That is . . .” He edged back half a step. No expression of pain accompanied the awkward movement, so perhaps the injury wasn’t as new as the low circumstances. “There’s not much I can do these days.”