Garrick’s love curdled into a hate that turned inward, souring his very soul. The entire affair blossomed tragically on the third Sunday of June, during the matinee. As he was preparing to insert the steel blades into their slots for the Divide the Lady trick, he noticed that Sabine’s gaze was directed to the gantry above the stage. To his amazement, the trollop actually blew a kiss skyward. Garrick leaned close to issue a stern admonition and, almost incredibly, he saw his rival reflected in his beloved’s eyes.

An irrepressible fury consumed the young Garrick and he slammed the center blade into the slot without reversing the handle, which meant that Sabine had no chance of avoiding the sharp steel when it eventually fell.

Garrick’s fury was replaced by cold satisfaction and, with a shake of his bloodied glove toward the young Morhamilton, he fled through the stage door and into the night, never to return to the Adelphi, though superstitious theater folk swear that the Red Glove still haunts the stalls, searching for the man who cuckolded him.

Albert Garrick was never prosecuted for his crime because, ironically, he was found guilty of a lesser one. Two days later the destitute magician attacked a sandy-haired youth outside the Covent Garden Theatre and beat him half to death. His sentence gave him the choice of a fair stretch in Newgate or a spot in the Queen’s army, on a train leaving for Afghanistan that very evening. Garrick chose the latter, and by nightfall he was squeezed into a troop carriage on his way to Dover, without anyone ever realizing that Albert Garrick’s hat fitted snugly on the Great Lombardi’s head. He arrived among the Afghans just in time for the great battle of Kandahar and covered himself in bloody glory. Garrick was offered a commission and could have made a career for himself in the army, but he reckoned there was more coin to be made if he struck out as an independent.

“Sabine,” Garrick muttered to himself, half in slumber. “Riley.”

Garrick was not alone in the Orient. In fact, a band of dyed-in-the-wool knaves had been lodged there for the past couple of days, waiting for Garrick to return from his mission in Bedford Square. These were no ordinary kidnappers, but a trio of superior punishers handpicked for the grisly mission. Their boss reckoned them the bloodiest in his stable and trusted them with this contract, which was bringing in a considerable pocket of chink for the brotherhood.

“One body only?” Mr. Percival had asked, the most experienced of the three, a man who often boasted of having performed at least one killing on a different continent for every decade of his life.