watched for him. Well, didn’t she need to discuss something important with him? So she’d asked several of the staff if they knew where she could find him, since the maids would have had to make up a room for him. They said they didn’t believe he’d stayed even one night at the castle. She expected he’d gone off on another mission for her mother, or returned to London to report to his superiors. But here he was now, hunting her down as if she were a hound that had wandered from the kennel.
“Did you just call me stupid, sir?”
He winced. “You’re an intelligent woman,” he said, as if this were a rare thing in his experience. “What happened the other day on your way north is not an isolated incident. You’re putting yourself at risk walking out alone like this.”
She laughed. “He was a college boy, drunk and politically confused. Acting on impulse and his own fantasies, John Brown says. Not part of any nefarious plot.”
Byrne stepped closer. She eyed him warily, took a step back. Only three men had ever touched her in an intimate manner. Donovan, her mother’s physician, and . . . him. After all, if being pinned to the floor of a coach by a man’s hard body as he manhandled her wasn’t intimate, what was? At that shocking moment she’d barely been aware of the existence of clothing between them.
“As it happens, that’s all true,” Byrne said. “The boy had no intent to murder. But had he not interrupted the journey and prompted us to change our route, I fear a great deal worse might have occurred.”
She raised her eyes to the pink-gray dawn sky, seeking patience, then turned away to continue her walk. The man obviously loved the drama of his job. Or else he was insane. She simply couldn’t communicate with him.
Byrne strode up beside her, nearly nudging her off the narrow path with his wide shoulders. “Listen to me, please, Your Highness.”
“You have a vivid imagination, Mr. Byrne. I fear listening to you would make me scared of my own shadow.”
He drew something from his coat pocket. “This isn’t imaginary.”
She looked down. The thing resting in his bare hand looked like a dirty little piece of twine, nearly invisible against the deep grooves on his calloused palm. She said, “I have no idea what you’re going on about or what that object might be.”
“It’s a fuse,” he said.
Something colder than the frost clinging to the dead twigs underfoot closed around her heart. She stopped walking. “As in part of a bomb?”
“Precisely.”
“And you found this here on the castle grounds?”
“No. It was on the Edinburgh road. Just north of Leicester, where we were stopped by the young idiot with the pistol.”
It took her a moment, but she suddenly understood. “That was the way Brown originally had intended to bring us?”
“Yes.” His eyes, she realized now, were not dark brown at all, as she had earlier supposed. They were as black as any she’d ever seen. As black as the night sky over Osborne House, where she’d spent long weeks searching the heavens and her soul.
“And you’ve reported this to Brown and the queen?”
“To Brown, yes. Whether he chooses to inform Her Majesty, I can’t say.”
She thought for a moment. “And it’s your belief that this was part of an ambush, a bomb meant to blow up the entire party?” Because she couldn’t imagine the Fenians being able to target just one person in an entourage as large as theirs.
Until recently, the explosions the radicals had set off were unpredictably destructive—taking out a wall here, the house of a minister there, or going off in an omnibus and killing dozens of innocent people. Only recently had the dynamiteers seemed to become terrifyingly efficient, blowing up an exterior wall of Parliament, as if to reveal the men inside as . . . what? As fools for arguing against freedom for Ireland?
“No,” Byrne said, snapping her attention back to him, “not the whole wedding caravan.” He was studying the bit of fuse, less than two inches long, rolling it between his fingers. “No, I think this was a trap meant to disrupt the journey, create panic, stop the carriages, and throw the guard into disarray.”
“Stop us? From coming here to Balmoral? Why on earth—”
His eyes darkened with such suddenness and intensity that, when they lifted to meet hers, she felt compelled to close her lips and look away. Instead she fought the urge and held