She shook her head vehemently. "No." Her voice was little more than a scratch. "Not home. Not there."

"Where, then?"

But she would not give me an alternate direction, no matter how much I plied her. I wondered where she had left her conveyance, where her retinue of servants waited for her. She offered nothing, only moved swiftly along beside me, head bent so I could not see her face.

"You must tell me where your carriage is," I tried again.

She shook her head, and continued to shake it no matter how I pleaded with her. "All right, then," I said, at my wit's end. "I will take you to a friend who will look after you. Mrs. Brandon is quite respectable. She is the wife of a colonel."

My lady stopped, pale lips parting in surprise. Her eyes, deep blue I saw now that we stood in the light, widened. "Mrs. Brandon?" Suddenly, she began to laugh. Her hands balled into tight fists, and she pressed them into her stomach, hysteria shaking her.

I tried to quiet her, but she laughed on, until at last the broken laughs turned to sobs. "Not Mrs. Brandon," she gasped. "Oh, please, no, never that. I will go with you, anywhere you want. Take me to hell if you like, but not home, and not to Mrs. Brandon, for God's sake. That would never do."

In the end, I took her to my rooms in Grimpen Lane, a narrow cul-de-sac off Russel Street near Covent Garden market.

The lane was hot with the summer night. My hardworking neighbors were in their beds, though a few street girls lingered in the shadows, and a gin-soaked young man lay flat on his back not far from the bake shop. If the man did not manage to drag himself away, the game girls would no doubt rob him blind, if they hadn't already.

I stopped at a narrow door beside the bake shop, unlocked and opened it. Stuffy air poured down at us. The staircase inside had once been grand, and the remnants of an idyllic mural could be seen in the moonlight-shepherds and shepherdesses pursuing each other across a flat green landscape, a curious mixture of innocence and lust.