She’d been six or seven years old at the time, a tiny, grubby little thing, indistinguishable from every other ragged street urchin in London. Lady Amanda Clifford might not have noticed the girl at all, if it hadn’t been for the blood.
It had dried by then, Sophia’s mother having met her fate some days earlier, but such a quantity of blood—great, dark red gouts of it streaked across the child’s pinafore—wasn’t the sort of thing one overlooked.
Then there’d been the child’s eyes. Green, rather pretty, but mere prettiness would not have swayed Lady Amanda in Sophia’s favor. No, it was the shrewdness in those green depths that decided her, the cunning.
It was far better for a woman to be clever than beautiful.
Lady Amanda chose the child’s surname to please herself. Arrogant of her, perhaps, but it was best when Lady Amanda was pleased. As for everyone else…
In the Year of Our Lord 1778, Seven Dials was a sweltering, fetid warren of narrow streets, each one piled on top of the next like rotting corpses in a plague pit. One could only assume the doomed souls residing in Monmouth Street weren’t pleased either by the name or by their fate.
But it couldn’t be helped. It was pure arrogance to think one could leave their past behind them, the past being, alas, a devious, sneaking thing, apt to spring up at the most inconvenient of moments, in the unlikeliest of places. One could never entirely escape their origins, and Sophia Monmouth—tiny, grubby little thing that she was—was no exception.
And so, her surname was Monmouth, despite it being a name that pleased no one, aside presumably from the succession of dukes who’d borne the title, excepting perhaps the first of them, who’d been beheaded several hundred years earlier.
Treason.
Grisly business, but then it so often was, with dukes.
If Lady Amanda had suffered any misgivings about upending the child’s fate, she didn’t recall them now. And truly, who was to say what fate had decreed on Sophia Monmouth’s behalf?
Not Lady Amanda Clifford.
After all, if the son of a king could lose his head on the edge of an executioner’s blade, there was no reason to suppose a Seven Dials orphan—tiny, grubby little thing that she was—couldn’t someday turn the tide of history.
Chapter One
Great Marlborough Street, London
Late July, 1793
There was a boy, lying on the roof of Lord Everly’s pediment.
Tristan Stratford, Lord Gray, frowned down at the glass of port in his hand. No, it was still half full. He wasn’t foxed. Delusional, perhaps? It didn’t seem so far-fetched a possibility as it once might have done. Even the sanest of gentlemen could be harassed to the point of hallucinations.
But a boy, on his neighbor’s roof? It seemed a curious choice, as far as delusions went.
Tristan abandoned his port on the corner of his desk and crept closer to the window. He closed his eyes, drew in a deep breath, then snapped them open again.
Blinked.
There was a boy, lying on the roof of Lord Everly’s pediment.
He was a puny specimen, all in black, more shadow than substance, more figment than flesh. Tristan was a trifle disturbed to find he’d conjured such a singular delusion, but questions of sanity aside, a boy on a roof must spark a tiny flicker of interest, even in a chest that had remained resolutely dark and shuttered for weeks.
The boy wasn’t doing anything wrong. Just lying there on his back, quite motionless, staring up at the sky. Still, a boy, on a roof? No good would come of that.
Perhaps he should alert someone. It was what a proper neighbor would do. No doubt Everly hadn’t the faintest idea there was a boy on his roof. Even the most perceptive of men might overlook such a thing, and Everly wasn’t the most perceptive of men. Tristan had never cared much for his lordship, Everly being a shifty, squinty-eyed creature, but neither would he stand about gaping while a child thief stripped the man of all his worldly possessions.
Whether the boy was real or a product of Tristan’s fevered imagination remained in question, but if he wasn’t a phantom, he was certainly a thief. There could be no innocent explanation for his presence on Lord Everly’s roof.
After all, Tristan knew a thief when he saw one. He’d been a Bow Street Runner, once upon a time. He couldn’t say what he was now. An earl who lazed about and sipped port while his neighbor was robbed, apparently.