Like Jane, the girl was tall, tall enough to carry off the long-lined classical fashions swept across the Channel by the revolution, with the sort of finely boned features that showed to good effect in the uncertain light of the faltering candles. But there the resemblance ended. There was nothing the least bit demure about the girl across the room. The light struck blue glints in the smoothly arranged mass of her black hair and reduced the fine fabric of her muslin gown to little more than a wisp.

"She is lovely," remarked Jane, in a considering sort of tone.

Lovely wasn't precisely the word Vaughn would have chosen. It implied a sweetness that was utterly lacking in the self-possessed stance of the woman in white. Luscious didn't serve, either; it suggested Rubenesque curves and dimpled flesh, whereas the woman by the candles had the perfectly carved lines of a marble statue. Wanton? No. There was a discipline in both her straight-backed posture and the proud set of her head that gave the lie to the suggestive cling of her dress. Whatever her revealing gown might have been meant to convey, to the astute observer she was more Artemis than Aphrodite.

There was one word, however, that Vaughn had no difficulty at all applying: notorious.

Vaughn hadn't followed the Pinchingdale Peccadillo (as the scandal sheets had unimaginatively dubbed it), but it had been impossible to avoid learning the basic outline of the story. It had entirely eclipsed Percy Ponsonby's latest fall from a window as the gossip of choice as the Season lurched to a close. Attempting to elope with the famed beauty, Miss Mary Alsworthy, the besotted young Viscount Pinchingdale had somehow erred and managed to dash off with the wrong sister. Suffering from a foolish adherence to propriety, Pinchingdale had marched up to the altar with the compromised sister, one Laetitia, who was chiefly famed for boasting the largest collection of freckles this side of Edinburgh. It was the sort of absurd bedroom farce that couldn't fail to appeal to the jaded palettes of London's bored elite.