“You should say Captain Lightbourne,” Ned replied.

“Captain of what? Your house fell off a cliff. Captain of a horse, perchance? Or a rented carriage?”

Ned said nothing, swallowed whiskey. He looked sidelong at the sleek, gray-haired man, seeing only angles like a scimitar, eyes like char, cruel suggestions in the shadows. Behind him, at the far end of the room, Alex was glancing back worriedly. The whiskey burned in Ned’s throat.

“I’ve been looking for you,” Morvath said ominously.

Ned shrugged. “I was busy with a personal matter.”

“You have no personal matters until you get my job done. Who was that man you were just talking to?”

“Some idiot trying to sell me on an investment idea.”

“I hope you didn’t listen to him. Believe me when I tell you people can’t be trusted. Which reminds me, there was an explosion in Chesterfield Street earlier. If you were the one responsible . . .”

“I wasn’t,” Ned lied complacently.

“I want the girl brought to me safe and sound, Lightbourne. No explosions. Do you understand?”

“I understand.” In fact he was only too well aware of the writhing depths of Morvath’s psyche, where a bastard heritage the captain could never properly claim lurked like an aquatic monster, rearing now in a moment of narcissism, now in a moment of abject worthlessness. Morvath was riding that monster with the intention of destroying anyone who had offended him, but his plan for Cecilia seemed in some ways worse than destruction.

Ned tried not to think about it. “You can count on me,” he said.

The captain expelled a hissing laugh, and Ned understood he was not counted on beyond the merest fraction. It came as a relief. People whom Patrick Morvath relied upon tended to end up facedown beneath the roses.

“Anyone tries to assassinate her, you kill them,” Morvath said, and Ned tried not to smirk. “Darlington house is on the move. I heard it from over on Curzon Street. Someone is making a real hash of the spell’s unmooring phrase.”

“Interesting.” Ned drank whiskey again and wished he could unmoor himself and fly away to some cozy hearth fire miles from here, where the drink was warm milk and the company not a homicidal maniac.

“Follow them,” Morvath ordered. “Steal a house or, I don’t know, a wheelbarrow for all I care. And no more distractions with ‘personal matters’ if you don’t want me to start docking you.”

“You haven’t paid me any wages at all yet,” Ned reminded him.

“I wasn’t talking about docking wages,” Morvath said, and stared pointedly at Ned’s ear. “Time is running out. Everything must be in place before the Queen’s Jubilee Banquet. All the other elements of my plan are coming together like the lines of an exquisite poem. My spies are ready, my artillery complete. It’s beautiful, Edward, the best plan that’s ever been made. Only this last thing remains. If you fail me with it, or betray me, you’ll be sorry. ‘In the next world I could not be worse than I am in this.’”