always been tacitly understood that Luc would inherit the role of the Nightjar, but when he’d turned eighteen, he’d insisted on enlisting in the Royal Navy under Admiral Nelson to “do his bit” in tackling Napoleon. He’d been wounded in the leg at Trafalgar only a few months later. His convalescence had been slow and painful, and his resulting disability had rendered him unable to take part in the physical element of the heists.
And so, for four years, from the age of fourteen to eighteen, Emmy had helped her father and brother track down and steal back the crown jewels of France.
She was singularly ill-suited for a life of crime. She was physically small, at only three inches over five feet, and while constant exercise ensured she retained a certain agility, no amount of practice could cure her dislike of heights. She steadfastly refused to steal anything that required being more than ten feet off the ground.
Father had maintained that stealing the jewels back was a moral imperative. If it happened to be contrary to the law, well, then, the law was simply wrong. Committing a few lesser, secondary crimes was necessary to serve justice for a much larger one.
Emmy agreed. The jewels belonged to France. They should undoubtedly be returned.
She just wished the role had fallen to someone—anyone—else.
Father had never asked his children to complete his task. Not in so many words. But Emmy had always felt the weight of his silent expectation on her shoulders. The pressure to finish what he’d started.
The back door banged open, interrupting her brooding thoughts.
Sally Hawkins, who’d left her job as a costumier at Covent Garden Theatre eight years ago to become their “cook-housekeeper,” bustled in, looking artlessly seductive in a crimson shawl. As she dropped a basket full of fruit on a stool and unbuttoned her matching cherry-striped pelisse, Emmy suppressed an envious sigh at her friend’s voluptuous figure. Sally needed neither corset nor stays to achieve that gorgeous hourglass outline.
“Mornin’, all.”
Sally slapped a folded newssheet onto the table in front of Luc, who made a valiant effort not to stare at the cleavage that appeared in front of his face as she leaned over. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed, and his eyes closed as if he were in acute pain.
Sally settled herself on one of the kitchen chairs, and Emmy half smiled at her efforts to avoid touching Luc as she did so. Even a blind man could see the attraction between the two of them, but as far as Emmy knew, neither of them had ever done anything about it.
It had been Sally who’d helped Emmy nurse Luc during those terrible first few months of his convalescence. Sally on whom his gaze lingered whenever he thought she wasn’t looking. And yet there seemed to be some intangible barrier between them, some tacit agreement to keep their distance.
Emmy sometimes wondered whether Luc thought of himself as less of a man because of his prosthetic foot, an unsuitable mate for the beautiful Sally. As an aristocrat, albeit a French one, he was socially her superior. Sally had been born in the roughest part of London’s East End, and her voice still retained the accent of her youth. She was sharp as a pin, utterly unapologetic for the fact that she’d made her own way in the world, and possessed of a canny ability to read people’s true intentions.
Their father had first encountered her as she fended off an armed assailant in a Covent Garden back alley. Sally had coshed her attacker around the head with a wooden sewing case and rendered him unconscious without any assistance. Impressed, Emmy’s father had helped her move the body out of the road and escorted her safely home.
Sally’s father, it transpired, had been George Barrington, one of London’s most infamous gentleman thieves. As a child, Sally had assisted him in creating costumes and disguises for his various jaunts, but when Barrington was convicted of pickpocketing and transported to Sydney, she’d found work as a seamstress and makeup artist at the rowdy Covent Garden theatre.
Emmy’s father had offered her a job—one that didn’t require fending off unwelcome advances from drunk theatregoers on a regular basis—and Sally had quickly made herself indispensable in providing disguises for the Danverses’ various criminal escapades. She was a genius with a needle and a pot of rouge. She could turn Emmy into a chimneysweep, a flower seller, or a duchess, at the drop of a hat.
And when Luc had returned