“Some odd letters,” Madeline said. “They made no sense.”

“It was Greek, my darling. But I didn’t pay enough attention in school to be able to read it.”

My heartbeat quickened with a combination of anxiety and unworthy delight. It could only be Sebastian.

“Your imagination is running away with you entirely,” Colin said as he untied his cravat and pulled it from his starched collar. The Markhams hadn’t stayed late, and Colin and I had retired to our room soon after their departure, while his mother and Cécile opened another bottle of champagne. “Although that’s not a bad thing in the current circumstances.”

“How can you not see something so obvious?” I asked, brushing my hair, a nightly ritual in which I’d found much comfort from the time I was a little girl. “This screams Sebastian!”

The previous year, during the season, an infamous and clever burglar who called himself Sebastian Capet had plagued London and never been caught by the police. He moved in and out of house after house in search of a most specific bounty: objects previously owned by Marie Antoinette. When he broke into my former home in Berkeley Square, he liberated from Cécile’s jewelry case a pair of diamond earrings worn by the ill-fated queen when she was arrested during the revolution. But he left untouched Cécile’s hoard of even more valuable pieces. The following morning I had received a note, written in Greek, from the thief. Later, swathed in the robes of a Bedouin, the devious man imposed upon me at a fancy dress ball to confess he’d been taken with me from the moment he climbed in my window and saw me asleep with a copy of Homer’s Odyssey in my hand. Correctly determining that I was studying Greek (the volume I held was not an English translation), he had delivered to me, over the following weeks, a series of romantic notes written in the ancient language.