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again to his work. Merlin and his assistant glanced over, but without particular curiosity.

The head was astonishingly realistic, and on top of the rods of the mechanism, it looked disturbingly like the victim of an execution exposed on a pike.

Alas, poor Yorick, Rothgar mused, thinking of Hamlet with the skull. This was no skull, however, or rotting head. This was a clever child with a hint of willfulness and mischief in the curving lips and large, adventurous eyes.

This was the young Diana.

Rescued and about to be made whole again.

Life, however, was not a machine to be cleaned of rust and fixed so it ran to order once more.

The adult Diana could be rescued from an unwanted marriage, but he doubted she could be made whole again. If she returned home unwed, she would be shackled by awareness of the king's suspicious watchfulness.

Then there was the other thing. Their foolhardy night at the White Goose. In bringing her to life in that bed he had created a break in her, and not in her nonexistent hymen. By any normal standard, after taking a lady's virginity a gentleman was honor bound to marry her, but it was even more unfair to introduce a virgin to pleasure and abandon her.

Would Diana live in chastity for the rest of her life? Or would she marry out of desperation? Or, even worse, would she become the sort of woman who took lovers carelessly whenever she felt the need?

Of course she'd challenged his resolve not to marry. She needed marriage now to be whole.

So tempting to save her. To follow the path of conventional honor to the place he longed to be. Had that lurked in his mind in the White Goose, leading to that weak folly?

Intolerable if true.

He gathered willpower and pushed aside temptation again. What he wanted, what she wanted, must not, should not, be.

The child's clear eyes challenged him as hers had challenged him yesterday. With a Malloren, are not all things possible?

"No."

When the two men looked at him, he realized he had spoken aloud. Talking to himself? Wasn't that a true sign of madness?

As the men returned to work, Rothgar looked back at the child, quirking a brow as if they shared a secret. It almost seemed as if the child's smile deepened. Ah, to have a son like this, to share innocent secrets with.

I am your son. If you have courage to find me.

He looked away then, down, to the complex curve of metal in his oil-stained fingers. Not Diana, but a child of theirs, and now it too challenged him for its very existence.

Was his denial courage?

Or despicable weakness?

Folly again, but it was as if the child were lost, wandering the same bleak road that he wandered through life, crying for someone to find him and care for him, someone to take him home.

He could not bear to leave a child crying -

A knock on the door broke him out of these Gothick thoughts. Carruthers came in. "Your pardon, my lord, but some messages came which you might think important."

Rothgar rose, both relieved to escape, and reluctant to abandon the child here in the hands of strangers.

He made a sudden resolution, and put it into silent words, looking into the drummer boy's eyes. I promise you this, at least. If Diana is with child, I will marry her. No child of mine will ever cry alone.

He picked up a spare cloth and wrapped it around the exposed mechanism beneath the child's head, like a blanket.

"Dust," he said blandly to Merlin and the others, and left the room.

The messages were indeed important, especially the copy of the one from D'Eon to Paris complaining that de Couriac was mad and uncontrollable. D'Eon asked urgently that the man be recalled to France before he created more mayhem.

As he'd thought, de Couriac was D'Eon's man, but one known to the official powers in Paris, not to the secret ones run by de Broglie. It was also clear that the attack on the road had not been D'Eon's plan.

This all made de Couriac dangerous, but also useful if he could be found.

It was intriguingly unclear whether D'Eon knew where the man was now or not. If de Couriac was serving the official French powers, he might have sought refuge in the embassy, and D'Eon might not feel able to dispose of him himself.

Stringle might turn out to be very useful indeed.

He dressed in finery again, for this afternoon was the day for his own