He blinked. A shadow slipped beneath his lashes and disappeared again. “Morvath stabbed her. She was a famous seer, she held séances, and every month he’d come to talk to the Brontës. When he found her secret table-knocking device, he murdered her right then and there. I wanted to fight him—”

“You were only a boy.”

“I was weak. I ran. It was Cilla who found me. I’ll never forget her striding out of the London fog in a long scarlet coat, with all that golden hair and a gold-handled gun. She looked like the queen of pirates.” He gazed at Cecilia unfocusedly, seeing her mother instead. “When I told her I owed her my life, she made me repay it with a promise.”

Cecilia nodded. “It’s the pirate’s code. Never give something without a return.”

He smiled. The memory of Cilla’s ferocious beauty was vivid in his mind, as if he hadn’t gazed upon her insipid, sentimentalized portrait only the other day. She’d been so much more than paints could capture. He remembered, too, the way she’d hugged him, gentle yet fierce, while he wept in anguish. It was entirely different from how he held her daughter in this moment, eleven years later, a man now and strong in body and mind. He’d been awestruck by Cilla Bassingthwaite, but it was Cecilia’s coolness that paradoxically warmed him; her implacability that made him hot in dangerous places; her shadows, so deep beneath the still surface, that burned right through his heart.

He had made his promise to the mother, but he lived it for the incomparable daughter.

“We have to get out of this house,” he said.

“So you really are Captain Ned Smith.”

He grinned. “No. But I am an agent of the Crown. And I am on your side. Cilla bade me work to make the world a safe place for her child.” He paused, releasing one of her hands so he could draw a strand of hair from her brow. The gentle touch made her shiver. She laid her free hand against his cheek, but he caught it, pressed it instead against his heart.

“From that day, everything I’ve done has been for her. For you. I used money she gave me to become a pirate so I’d be strong and cunning. I took Lady Armitage’s contract so a real assassin did not. I endured Morvath’s poetry so as to know his plans and protect you from them. I thought surely he would recognize me, but he never did. I thought more than once I’d kill him, but he has always been too well defended.

“So I stayed, spying on behalf of the Queen but in my heart motivated by that promise to Cilla. Then I met you and grew to realize you didn’t need me after all. You could protect yourself well enough. So the promise became an excuse just to be with you. Not because you’re Cilla’s daughter, but because you’re you.”

“Oh,” she whispered. “Thank you.”