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"What is it, Burton? I'm busy and I don't require progress reports. Just write up the case when it's done and send it to me."

"A man died."

"Who? How?"

"A cab driver named Montague Penniforth. He accompanied me to the East End and was there killed by a werewolf."

Palmerston looked up for the first time. "A werewolf? You saw it?"

"I saw four. Penniforth was torn apart. I had no way to take care of his body without placing myself in jeopardy. He was a good man and didn't deserve an East End funeral."

"The Thames, you mean?"

"Yes." Burton clenched his fists. "I was a damned fool. I shouldn't have got him involved."

The prime minister laid his pen to one side and rested his hands in front of him with fingers entwined. He spoke in a slow and level tone.

"The commission you have received from the king is a unique one. You must regard yourself as a commander in the field of battle and, on occasion, His Majesty's servants will be required to serve. It's highly likely, given the nature of your missions, that some of those servants will be killed or injured. They fall for the Empire."

"Penniforth was a cabbie, not a soldier!" objected Burton.

"He was the king's servant, as are we all."

"And are all who fall while in his service to be dumped unceremoniously into the river like discarded slops?"

Palmerston pulled a sheet of paper from his desk drawer and wrote upon it. He slid it across to Burton.

"Wherever possible in such circumstances, get a message to this address. My team will come and clean up the mess. The fallen will be treated with respect. Funerals will be arranged and paid for. Widows will be granted a state pension."

The king's agent looked at the names written above the address.

"Burke and Hare!" he exclaimed. "Code names?"

"Actually, no-coincidence! The resurrectionist Burke was hanged in '29 and his partner, Hare, died a blind beggar ten years ago. My two agents, Damien Burke and Gregory Hare, are cut from entirely different cloth. Good men, if a little gloomy in outlook."

"Montague Penniforth had a wife named Daisy and lived in Cheapside. That's all I know about him."

"I'll put Burke and Hare onto it. They'll soon find the woman and I'll see to it that she's provided for. I have a lot to do, Captain Burton. Are we finished?"

Burton stood. "Yes, sir."

"Then let us both get back to work."

Palmerston returned to his scribbling and Burton turned to leave. As he reached the door, the prime minister spoke again.

"You might consider taking an assistant."

Burton looked back but Lord Palmerston was bent over his document, writing furiously.

Propriety demands that young women do not visit the homes of bachelors without a chaperone but Isabel Arundell didn't give two hoots for propriety. She was well aware that Society was already looking down its ever-so-haughty nose at her because she'd accompanied her fiance to Bath and stayed in the same hotel as him, though, heaven forbid, not in the same room. Now she was willfully breaking another taboo by visiting him at his home independently-and not for the first time.

Her willful destruction of her own reputation bothered her not a bit, for she knew that when she and Richard were married they'd leave the country to live abroad. He would work as a government consul and she would gather around herself a new group of friends, preferably non-English, among whom she'd be considered an exotic bloom; a delicate rose among the darker and, she imagined, rather less sophisticated blossoms of Damascus or, perhaps, South America.

She had it all worked out, and, generally, what Isabel Arundell wanted, Isabel Arundell got.

When she arrived at 14 Montagu Place that afternoon, she was reluctantly allowed into the house by Mrs. Angell, who had the brazen effrontery, in Isabel's opinion, to ask whether the "young miss" was sure this visit was entirely wise. The kindly old dame then suggested that if Isabel was determined to go through with it, then perhaps she-Mrs. Angell-should