To Tempt a Saint - By Kate Moore Page 0,1

tidy empire of investments, a comfortable house off Berkeley Square, a gentleman’s education for her sons, and now a snug cottage between the Surrey Hills and the Thames, where she meant to retire in widow-like respectability once Kit was launched in the world. A boy could do worse in a parent.

Her affair with Kit’s father had scandalized London when Xander was seventeen and making his way through university. Then somewhere in India under Wellesley, long after the man’s folly had ceased to be the latest London gossip, the poor fellow had died. Sophie Jones was doubtless the only one who still wore black for him. She had taken no new lover.

Fog as murky as the Thames itself swallowed the huge cart ahead of them. Its rumble faded, and Xander and Kit walked on, only a few stragglers in their wake. “Most fellows don’t look at it that way, do they, Xander?”

“Most fellows don’t have a pair of first-rate brothers.” A man couldn’t choose his connections, but Xander preferred his Jones brothers to his father’s lofty family. He had long ago cut short the one name his father had been willing to give him. Alexander had become Xander at school.

Kit tugged his sleeve. “You know what makes a first-r ate brother?”

“Enlighten me.”

“One that’ll take a fellow to mills and teach him to use his fives.”

“That bad at school, is it, infant?” Xander hadn’t seen any marks on Kit, but he, too, had been good at concealing the evidence of his schoolmates’ assaults.

Kit kicked a loose cobble. “Not so bad. But a miller gets respect, you know.”

“Then we’ll make you a miller.”

Kit gave a leap and shot a fist into the air with a triumphant cry. The sound echoed in the fog. “You taught Will, didn’t you, Xander?”

“Everything he knows.” About boxing.

They left the thinning crowd behind, turning up a narrow street of cook shops, cheap stationers, and secondhand clothes dealers. Watchful proprietors pulled in goods hanging from doorways and canvas awnings and put up shop shutters, cutting off what light illumined the way. No oil lamps had been lit, and darkness closed off all the adjoining lanes and courts. This was the edge of the London their mother feared—crumbling, stinking, disease ridden, and vermin infested—where gin was the purest substance a body could find and survival meant preying on others.

Elsewhere in London, Xander’s London, the London of the future, the Gas Light and Coke Company was lighting up the night with miles of gas lines and new streetlights. Xander had joined the admiring crowds at each new illumination, caught by the Promethean promise of banishing darkness. He counted himself among the new breed of men who envisioned a city with wide thoroughfares to replace narrow, stinking lanes, and efficient channels of commerce flowing with clean air and water. He had staked his small fortune on that vision of a new London.

Here was a reminder of the work to be done. Decaying buildings sagged against one another, and the dark felt coal-bin close and heavy. They were far from the boxing crowd now, but for a moment Xander thought footsteps trailed them. He steered Kit northward. Rumbling wheels on stones and a confused murmur of sound, distorted in the fog, told them they were nearing one of London’s main east-west thoroughfares.

They turned a corner and stepped into chaos. A mob of men with blackened faces and ragged sailors’ uniforms rained stones and offal on a pale yellow carriage at the center of a milling detachment of Life Guards, their scarlet coats lurid in the light of flaring torches. Giant shadows of the combatants writhed on walls and shuttered shop windows.

Xander needed only one glance to know the carriage with the royal crest on the door panel. Popularity was never the prince regent’s strong suit.

A pole wedged in the spokes of the coach’s rear wheel had disabled the vehicle. Its windows were cracked. The liveried driver held his hands up to ward off stones while the horses reared and backed, tangling their traces.

Xander yanked Kit back against the shop fronts. This was not their fight.

The guards, outnumbered three to one by Xander’s count, drove their mounts into the mob, swords drawn, flailing at the circling men while the officer in charge fumbled with his shining helmet. A bloody gash on his cheek showed where the strap had been cut. Bloody hell! Men were going to be skewered or trampled because the damned idiot couldn’t get his hat on.

Three men reached the prince’s coach.