Morgue Files

1800

The first time Mycroft met Georgiana, she was hauling his younger brother up the muddy street to the house in a prodigious downpour. He'd been hiding in the kitchen for the dual benefits of proximity to hot chocolate and protection from his sadistic fencing instructor when there'd been a great to do among the cooks. He'd gone over to the opened door — rain spattering inside and onto his carefully shined shoes — to see a furious and dripping-wet girl dragging Sherlock toward Epperley House by the ear, ignoring his shrieks of protest, loud enough to be heard over the summer storm.

"Oh, my," he said, when she'd stopped short on the stone step, the hem of her dress dark brown and streaked charcoal black from the London streets, one hand still clutching Sherlock's ear despite his clawing.

"Does this," she asked with barely banked fury, "belong to you?"

The head cook, long subject to Sherlock's cruel jibes, was speechless with delight at the state of him, so Mycroft swept in to say, "Regretfully — "

Sherlock squawked in fury.

" — he does. Dare I ask what he's done?" Mycroft asked.

She shook her hand clear of Sherlock, giving him an irritated shove into the kitchen, where he rubbed at his ear and dripped across the flagstones with equal ferocity, his expression mutinous.

"He ferreted himself away in the Bow Street Runners' office and interrupted several investigations, that's what he's done," she replied, cheeks pink with irritation, brown eyes gleaming, her fringe pasted to her pale brow. "And then he fled like a coward when caught and forced me to slog my way through London in a rainstorm to deliver him safely home."

"I didn't need an escort!" Sherlock shouted finally, too wronged to remain silent. "I would have been fine on my own!"

"Trust me, had I known what a trial you would be, I would have left you for the bodysnatchers and thieves," the girl assured him, and ripping off her drenched bonnet, she wrung it out pointedly before tugging it back over her coal-dark hair. She made a surprisingly elegant curtsy, given the circumstances. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I must go."

"And don't come back!" Sherlock hissed at her.

"If I catch you again I'll box your ears," she promised, barely staying long enough to make sure Sherlock look sufficiently horrified before she turned and dashed off into the storm once more.

By then, most of the downstairs house staff had gathered to wreath the kitchen door and stare at the the girl's retreating back with undisguised awe. Mycroft, who had made knowing exactly what to say nearly a science, felt his jaw gape open for an age before he grabbed blindly for the umbrella stand by the door, taking the first one at hand, and chased her out into the drenching rain.

She didn't hear him over the deluge when he asked her to wait, so he reached out —  clothes sticking and shoes soaked through, hair plastered to his head — and seized her wrist before she vanished out the mouth of the alleyway.

Her eyes were huge when she whipped around on him, pink mouth an 'o' of surprise on her heart-shaped face, and he'd gone speechless all over again watching rain drip off of her dark, dark lashes, fumbling stupidly until he managed to open the umbrella over both their heads.

"I — thank you," she said, barely a whisper, really, but Mycroft heard it with utter clarity.

He wanted to introduce himself, to say "thank you" for retrieving his wayward brother, to manage something witty and erudite.

He said, "What's your name?"

"Georgiana," she said, and flushing, corrected herself. "Georgiana Lestrade."

"Miss Lestrade," he said, solemn, and he could feel himself smiling at her blush. "Thank you for returning my brother."

Cheeky, she said, "I'll thank you to spare me ever having to deal with him again, Mister — ?"

"Holmes," Mycroft said finally, horrified. "I beg your pardon, Miss Lestrade. It's Mycroft Holmes,"

Her smile — shy and sweet without a single pretension toward coyness — undid him, and five minutes later when he finally staggered back into the kitchen at Epperley House sans umbrella and dignity, he was shivering and confused.

Two days later, he was still shivering.

"I've read about this," Sherlock declared knowledgeably, sitting at the foot of Mycroft's bed and worsening his rain-induced illness by leagues. "Mummy has dozens of books on this sort of thing."

Mrs. Holmes, who had strong feelings on politics and maths and none whatsoever on medicine, had no such thing, Mycroft croaked at his brother.

"She does!" Sherlock protested, and produced a fistful of — oh for God's sake, Mycroft thought bleakly — penny dreadful romances and scattered them about Mycroft's prone form, buried away under a mountain of quilts and huddling in on itself for warmth. "I've consulted more than a dozen, and I am certain in my diagnosis. Mycroft: you have lovesickness."

"I've no such thing," Mycroft said through gritted teeth.

Eyes gleaming, Sherlock offered too innocently, "I can go back to the Runners? Find her for you?"

Mycroft resisted smothering himself with a pillow only because the estate would be doomed if left in Sherlock's care.

"Please, I beg you," he mumbled in between coughs, "just leave her alone."

***

Sherlock didn't. Not at all. Not for years.

1815

Mycroft had carefully placed and extremely well-trained operatives planted at embassies, ports, the French court, major importers, among the leading salons, and in the beds of very powerful men — and none whatsoever where he desperately needed one now. Who would have thought that after decades of mutual espionage using the well-traveled corridors of politics and the back doors into brothels, the French would be so crude as to resort to wives?

"There's Maria," Harry mused, settling into an armchair near the fire which burned continuously in the Diogenes Club's most concealed of concealed back rooms.

"Maria is an opera singer," Mycroft sighed, rubbing at the bridge of nose.

"Meaning she gets invited to soirees and dinners all the time," Harry protested.

Mycroft didn't bother to glare at him, slouching into the wingback chair and swirling the brandy in his tumbler as he said, "While that is true, Harry, I doubt Maria — despite her manifold skills — would be particularly welcomed among the ton's wives with opened arms considering her assignations with half their husbands."

Fondly, Harry said, "So spirited, that one."

Mycroft supposed that the War Office's tendency to recruit loners fueled by danger and unconcerned with fostering long-term relationships had more than a little to do with their current dilemma. Still, it was humbling to realize that of the thirty-odd employees within his direct report, none of the men were speaking with their wives and none of the women were highly placed enough in society for such an intrigue.

"We could work around it," Harry suggested, and Mycroft took a moment to spin out the possibilities of that.

There were household staffs of course, but that was a much broader base among which to win loyalty, or the possibility of dispatching Norah or Clarissa, who were both excellent governesses and well known for seducing society ladies. Of course, either of those possibilities would require more time than their intelligence implied they had at their disposal. The ton might be a tiny sliver of the teeming population of London, but it was a tiny sliver composed of a thousand possible traitors.

Taking a resigned sip of brandy, Mycroft said, "It'll take too long — their plant might already be passing along information."

It had been a trickle of rumors at first over the course of months that had turned into a veritable flood when news of Napoleon's escape from exile had reached London. Mycroft had spent the better part of a week systematically eviscerating their existing intelligence network searching for flaws, to determine how the man had managed to waltz out of Portoferraio with 600 men and make his way all the way into the royalist arms of Provence without interception.

Mycroft had only been halfway through that infuriating exercise when his best agent in Paris had managed to send a single message of warning that there was information coming from the ton's ballrooms and bedrooms that could only, realistically, be privy to a wife: plans for troop movements were a dime a dozen, but the petty details of finances and the tone of good society's parties and fundraisers in London were rarer and more worrying leaks. Mycroft could plant fifty plausible rumors about troop movements from the front in Brussels, but if someone was telling the French how much money was going where then it didn't matter how many people he had seeding the French semaphore lines with lies.

It also hadn't helped that Mycroft's request for a follow-up report had been from his operative's handler, passing along details and professional regret.

In reality, there was only one truly feasible route, and Mycroft had known that even before he'd engaged Harry in this particularly awful conversation.

"I supposed you might say that," Harry replied, because he'd known, too. Rising to his feet, he straightened his jacket and cuffs, asking, "Then may I ask which of our operatives I may be wishing congratulations upon shortly?"

For King and country, then, Mycroft thought, and said, "Me," before he tossed back the rest of his drink.

"I would think you'd want to select a duchess with...well, different considerations and qualities than those we would be seeking," Harry demurred.

"Marriage is transactional, Harry," Mycroft said. He was neck deep in self-pity, yes, but that still gave him plenty of room for lecturing. "I see no reason to romanticize it. A woman with the qualities of a professional spy may actually be the best fit for me."

Harry arched an eyebrow. "I assume you already have a woman in mind?"

"That discussion," Mycroft declared grimly, "is going to have to wait until I'm significantly drunker."

***

The Diogenes occupied a patch of Bloomsbury populated mostly by barristers and physicians, men who worked for their money, and although seeing Mycroft Holmes, the sixth Duke of Sussex strolling through the neighborhood was a curiosity, it was one that had happened with enough frequency that most of the longtime residents politely ignored him. He'd left Harry, his attendants, and his carriage at the club in favor of a walk and found himself — probably inevitably — standing on the front step of Sherlock's lodgings.

After being thrown out of both Eton and Harrow, Mycroft hadn't held out much hope for Sherlock's tenure at Cambridge, but someone must have shown him a corpse early on during his time there because he managed to complete his studies with relatively little damage. ('Relative' in this case meaning only one significant fire.) His return to London had been marked by a splashy disregard for the peerage, three fascinatingly awful interactions with debutantes, and the leasing of a set of offices and private chambers to set up a medical office. Mycroft assumed most of his patients were there out of perverse curiosity more than any hope Sherlock would be a helpful physician.

Or, he amended, observing the rather infamous widow powdering her bosom in the small sitting room off of Sherlock's offices, they came with intentions more perverse than curious.

"Your grace!" swooned Mrs. Norwood, the dowager Lady Darby, who managed to fan herself and adjust her gown lower down her impressive decolletage at the same time. Pity she couldn't be trusted with a shilling, much less the country's secrets; so much coordination and conniving — wasted.

Mycroft made a neat leg. "Lady Darby," he said benignly.

The fan fluttered, and yet another acre of her breasts appeared. Mycroft felt himself driven toward horrified respect.

"What brings you here this afternoon, your grace?" Mrs. Norwood asked, narrowing the space between herself and Mycroft in a series of swishy steps forward that sent Mycroft taking an equal, smooth number to the side, bringing him closer to the sitting room door and the possibility of escape.

"Same as you, I imagine," he said politely. "To see my brother."

"Could you not summon him?" she asked, commencing now with a frankly unattractive amount of eyelash-flitting.

Mycroft couldn't repress his smirk. "Lady Darby, you must not know my brother at all."

Before she could take offense and demand he satisfy her honor by marrying her, there was a great commotion in the hall, a door banging open and the sound of running, a child shrieking, and Sherlock's voice crying, "You're being completely irrational! My scientific methods are far less invasive than typically prescribed bleeding!" and a woman sighing, "Yes, thank you, Sherlock, I'm sure that'll make her more compliant."

Lady Darby fell into a stunned silence, her mouth half-open, and Mycroft took the opportunity to sigh, make his bow, and start toward the corridor, saying, "If you'll excuse me."

Well-trained, there was already a servant scurrying to usher Lady Darby away for another day as Mycroft ascended the stairs to the first floor, where the worst of the damage usually occurred. He could hear the vague sounds of protestations on the landing, but then the other woman's voice rang out from upstairs again, saying, "Oh for goodness sake — wait here. I'll be right back," and there was the tell-tale tap-tap-tapping of feet going down the back staircase.

The smoke billowing out of Sherlock's consultation room on the second floor was fairly standard, and so was Sherlock himself standing in the doorway outfitted in a white smock and tanner's gloves, some metal contraption looped around his neck, looking impatient and clutching a beaker of foul-looking liquid.

Looking marvelously uncooperative at the other end of the hall, back pressed against a glass-enclosed curio cabinet overflowing with taxidermied animals, was a little girl with a halo of dark curls, a scowl on her pink mouth, and her brown-eyes belligerent. Alarmingly, she was clutching a bone saw to her chest.

"Well done, Sherlock," Mycroft said mildly. "You've driven a four year-old to sharp objects. You must be very proud."

To his side, there was the clatter of a bone saw making abrupt acquaintance with the floor — Mycroft spared a minute to feel pity for Sherlock's landlord — and he took a knee just in time to catch an armful of now-smiling girl hurtling toward him, shrieking in delight. And because it was only his brother watching, Mycroft allowed himself a squeeze and to press a kiss into her silky hair — her skin was too warm, and Mycroft thought instantly, fever, recent cold snap, three days bedrest — before rising to his feet and balancing her on one hip.

"Miss Phoebe Clarendon," he said, when she tipped her flushed face up to smile at him.

"Your grace," she answered, the words too solemn in her little girl's voice, even as she hooked her small hands round his neck with guileless affection.

Sherlock, never one to miss an opportunity, said, "Perfect: Mycroft, keep her immobile," and advanced all of two steps — Pheobe whining as he drew closer — before Mycroft stopped him with a glower. Scoffing, Sherlock said, "Honestly, Mycroft, you would think I was torturing her."

"You are torturing me," Phoebe retorted, because in addition to being a terribly pretty child, she had a charming streak of willfulness.

Sherlock narrowed his eyes at her. "I never should have encouraged you to speak. Or your mother to read to you."

Phoebe's response was to sniff and ignore him. (As it should be.) Mycroft's response was to ask her, "Where is your mother?"

"Acquiring a bribe," Georgiana called out, a thread of familiar laughter in her voice, emerging from the servant's staircase.

At thirteen, with night-dark hair and doe eyes, Georgiana had been a lovely girl, and Mycroft been arrested by the spark in her. At twenty-eight, the sweet curve of her face was thinner, haloed by black, loose curls drawn away from her cheeks, strands escaping from a mass of braids at the back of her head. Soot-colored lashes fringed copper-brown eyes, crinkled up in a smile, and Mycroft thought that admiring her now was to risk being engulfed by flames.

"Mrs. Clarendon," he said, when he caught his breath again.

She rolls her eyes, and without his polite detachment or any evident care for his societal standing, pulls her daughter out of Mycroft's arms — momentary brushes of warmth through the fabric of his jacket — as she says, "Mycroft, how many times have I told you? It's Georgiana."

"Mummy," Phoebe interjected, pressing her hands to Georgiana's cheeks and addressing her mother seriously. "Mr. Sherlock Holmes is trying to poison me."

Sherlock's outrage was automatic, as was Mycroft's smile. Georgiana, apparently immune to adorable children, schooled her face into one of firm command. "Doctor Sherlock Holmes most certainly is not," she said. "He's trying to give you medicine for your cold."

Mulish, Phoebe said, "I'm not ill."

Georgiana arched an eyebrow. "Odysseus would disagree."

Mycroft slanted a querying look to Sherlock, who explained, "She threw up on the dog."

Odysseus was an tiny cocker spaniel, the runt of a litter from Mycroft's most prized hunting dog. His gameskeeper had recommended drowning, but Mycroft had opted to put the little thing into his pocket instead and bring it to Phoebe — all of six months, then, who had all of Georgiana's effortless sweetness and a wide-open curiosity native only to children, before they learned that things were not all discovery and delight, that life could hurt them.

"But now all the sickness is on the outside so I'm fine," Phoebe insisted.

"My God woman, what have you been telling her that she would arrive at such an absurd conclusion?" Sherlock erupted, horror plain on his face.

"Ah, but the sickness is like a weed," Georgiana explained blithely, exercising a particular skill for ignoring Sherlock that was surely at the root of their years-long friendship. "It grows and grows in your belly, and if Doctor Sherlock doesn't kill the weed, you'll just feel poorly all over again."

Phoebe looked aghast. "It is poison," she said in a hush.

"For the weed," Georgiana laughed, "not for you, silly."

That declaration took a loop through Phoebe's head, circled twice, navigated her thoughtful frown, and when it reappeared as words, they sounded curious. "So I can't be poisoned?"

Sighing, Georgiana promised, "You can't be poisoned."

"I'm magic," Phoebe murmured, wariness transforming into awe.

"Exactly so," Mycroft cut in neatly, before Sherlock's tantrum could boil over and send them on yet another round of cajoling. Nodding at Georgiana, he asked, "And what's this about a bribe you mentioned?"

"Ah, yes, the bribe," Georgiana said with relish, bouncing Phoebe in her arms and smiling at her giggles. "The bribe is only for good girls who allow Doctor Holmes to administer treatment and take their medicine."

Behind the pair, Sherlock waved his flagon of evil-looking liquid impatiently. Phoebe spared him a glance before turning back to her mother, demanding, "Bribe first!"

Georgiana turned her brown eyes on Mycroft, like she was sharing a secret joke with him, which always had cataclysmic effects on his composure; one year, after a particularly devastating run-in on Bond Street, he'd gotten all turned around and managed to commission a miniature of her before he'd come out of his fugue state half a day later.

A smile twitching at the corners of Georgiana's mouth, she produced from one of her pockets a seemingly ordinary apple, except Phoebe's gasp of delight meant it was anything but.

"It's a flower," she murmured, closing her hands around it, and Mycroft leaned in a touch closer to see that it was.

In the skin of the rosy red fruit had been carved the white petals of a rose, furled tightly in the center and spreading more widely at the edges, as beautiful as anything one of Mycroft's terrifying cooks would produce for a formal dinner.

"Do we have a deal, Miss Clarendon?" Georgiana asked, pressing her forehead briefly to her daughter's.

Phoebe mulled it for another moment before she cradled her apple close to her chest and grimly turned to Sherlock, sticking out a tiny hand as she said, "I'll take the poison."

"God keep me from children," Sherlock muttered darkly under his breath, but passed Phoebe the beaker without any further commentary, watching her drink it in three quick gulps before making a high, keening noise and wriggling until Georgiana released her.

"Water, water, water," Phoebe chanted, and tore off down the servant's stairs still clutching the glass and her apple, Sherlock hot on her tail, crying, "Wait! Come back! I need to keep a record of your temperature you horrible little creature!"

Georgiana, with her signature bizarre fondness, sighed happily, "He's going to be a marvelously entertaining father."

"Bite your tongue," Mycroft replied, aghast. "You'd inflict him on children? And a woman?"

"People change," Georgiana said firmly, and smoothing her hands down the front of her dove gray dress, asked, "What brings you here today, Mycroft?"

His cane became suddenly fascinating: cherrywood with an elegant top in the shape of an elephant, a souvenir from one of his many excursions, a ruby the color of furious blood and faceted until it was gleaming pressed into the animal's forehead.

"Mycroft," she repeated, in the same tone of voice she used to send Phoebe off or corral Sherlock into behaving like a normal human being: patient, but to a point.

Anyone else, he'd fob off with a comment about the commonness of visiting one's sibling. But this was Georgiana, who — during their youth — used to send Mycroft helpful missives like, Sherlock is at the prison interrogating a poisoner the Runners just sent down. You may want to intervene before he takes any more notes, and Your brother was just deposited in my father's office for harassing some gravediggers. He has a trowel. Where on Earth did he get a trowel? and most memorably, I have boxed Sherlock's ears and locked him in a cupboard since he came to ask if he could measure...well, bits of me, for an experiment. I recommend you send someone to fetch him before I have him murdered and sold for parts.

Clearing his throat, Mycroft admitted, "I find myself in..."

Georgiana arched a dark brow. "I find myself speechless you're speechless," she says, and growing serious, asks, "Is it bad?"

Yes, Mycroft didn't say. "Vexing, really," he signed, knuckles going white on his cane. "Although upon reflection, it was pure foolishness to bring such a problem to Sherlock's doorstep."

"Is it one you could bring to mine, then?" Georgiana said.

Yes, Mycroft also didn't say, because to bring his problems to Georgiana was a luxury he couldn't afford to indulge. She'd always been beyond him, by arbitrary rules of social status and then marriage and now duty, and to linger too long in the illusion of shared intimacy would only make the inevitable break of reality worse. Instead, he smiled and shook his head, no. Georgiana looked like she'd like to argue the point further — there was a particular wrinkle between her brows that always telegraphed obstinacy — when Phoebe tore back up the servant's staircase, and her high, shrieking laugh filled up all the corners of the room.

After that, it was easy to fall into the proscribed rhythm of things. Sherlock offered tea served by his resentful housekeeper and Georgiana declined. Mycroft offered Georgiana and Phoebe the use of his carriage to take them back to their home just beyond the most fashionable border of Mayfair, and she declined in favor of a hackney cab. Both Holmes brothers saw her out, Sherlock sending a kitchen boy for the Diogenes club to call for Mycroft's horses, which left the pair of them standing on the step of Sherlock's house, where — inevitably — it began.

"You're pathetic," Sherlock said.

Mycroft sighed.

"It's been what, fifteen years now?" Sherlock went on.

"I should have drowned you as an infant," Mycroft told him.

Blithe, Sherlock went on. "First, you watch her with wretched desperation as she marries another man."

Mr. Thomas Clarendon had been the third son the Earl of Whitstable, and he'd fallen passionately in love with Georgiana one night when he'd seen her telling Sherlock off outside the gates of Vauxhall Gardens. (Yet another reason Mycroft loathed his brother.) Their courtship and subsequent marriage had been a terrible scandal one that was only softened when Mycroft had, in his first official act as the new Duke of Sussex, held a ball and invited Clarendon and his new wife, who'd come with shy warmth in her eyes and keen affection in her smile. It had been worth it, all of it, for the way she'd found him hiding on a balcony and pressed a grateful hand to his cheek as she'd said, "You're quite the kindest man I know, Mycroft Holmes."

"He was a good man," Mycroft muttered. He'd ascertained that, and had unsavory characters on standby to derail the romance had that not been the case, anyway.

"And now that she's a widow," Sherlock went on, long-suffering, "and a more-than-acceptable candidate to become your mistress — "

"Georgiana Lestrade," Mycroft intervened, firm, "is no man's mistress."

What a monstrous suggestion. Mistresses were to be kept cloistered away, into one of the carefully subdivided portions of a gentleman's life located somewhere in between the Houses of Parliament and his club, before supping with his wife and taking brandy his acquaintances. Mycroft couldn't imagine a universe wherein Georgiana could be so contained — that he would want to.

Any further thoughts on the subject were always put aside with a disciplined hand and a firm recognition of the impossibility of such a thing.

"You're unbearable," Sherlock observed and tipped his chin toward the road, saying, "Your carriage is here — leave before you leave a reek of pathetic longing all over my lodgings."

For that, when Sherlock whirled round foppishly to take dramatically to a fainting couch or something, Mycroft casually tripped up him the steps.

***

Odd.

The word kept chasing itself around Georgiana's head, jostling along with the Hackney cab as Phoebe curled up — still a touch warm but improving — against Georgiana's chest. Outside, Bloomsbury was melting into Fitzrovia, the evening sky going pink at the edges and a chill spiderwebbing in the wind that made Georgiana feel quiet, thoughtful.

She couldn't shake the sense that Mycroft had been odd today, more so than his ordinary oddness. He'd been witty and alert as ever, but pensive somehow, and Georgiana couldn't imagine the state of things that could make Mycroft Holmes pensive — as if the world would dare to put a toe out of place with that threat hanging overs its head.

In all the years Georgiana had known Mycroft, he had only ever carried his responsibilities as the eventual heir, and then the duke, and now his extremely obfuscated duties with the War Office with effortless grace. Only today he'd looked perturbed, uncertain, touched through with a very human look of indecision that appeared utterly foreign across his patrician features, in his lingering, gray-eyed looks.

It had made her feel a touch reckless, wish that she had the right to worry over him: press her hands to his cheeks and force his gaze to hers, to ask him what was wrong and know he'd tell her the truth.

But that, Georgiana reminded herself firmly, is ridiculous.

And fortunately, it was also the moment Phoebe woke up again, still a touch cross and whining from a week of being ill, and demanded Georgiana's attention.

The house windows were dark when the cab arrived, and Georgiana paid the driver with a free hand before gathering Phoebe to her chest and climbing up the steps.

It was cold inside, all the fireplaces on the ground floor ashen and the sitting rooms still and quiet. Georgiana bypassed the parlor and the drawing room for the staircase to the first floor, where she tucked Phoebe under a half-dozen quilts in her snug back bedroom before lighting a fire and sitting watchfully at the foot of the bed until Phoebe lapsed into deep, undisturbed sleep.

It was still early, really, just gone seven, and there was a tremendous amount left to do, so Georgiana got on with it.

She collected the washing from the line and folded it away, cleaned the dishes and dried them, and popped back upstairs to check on Phoebe — still deeply asleep — before wandering around the kitchen taken an inventory of their supplies. Always, in the back of Georgiana's mind, was the knowledge she could only sustain them so much longer with economizing and cunning.

The downstairs parlor maids had been the first of the staff Georgiana had let go, each with pay and a warm letter of reference. Then the footmen and the the butler, and there was no need to keep the groom if she wasn't going to keep the horses, so poor Derek had been let go as well. All in all, she'd gutted the servants quarters until there was only Susan, who came by twice a week to help with the washing. Florence, the housekeeper, had been to last to leave two months earlier, fretting every step of the way. She'd taken to visiting during her afternoons off from her new place of employment — probably just to ascertain the house was still standing and that Georgiana and Pheobe hadn't starved.

Thomas's parents had been initially incensed and eventually resigned about his marriage to Georgiana, with every misstep forgiven with the arrival of Phoebe, who'd been the great apple of her grandparents' eyes. But the Earl had passed when Phoebe was only six months old, and the countess a year after, taken by the same flu that had stolen Thomas away.

Thomas's older brother, the new Earl of Whitstable, had been neither understanding nor interested in listening to Georgiana's reasoning, and although he hadn't cut her off entirely, the tiny payments she received now were nothing to live on.

Georgiana hadn't grown up with governesses or etiquette lessons, but her nannies and mentors had been the once-great actresses and once-fine mistresses of high society that fallen low enough to drift into her father's purview. They hadn't taught her all the exactly correct forms of address, or how to host a flawless dinner party, but they'd drilled into her the certainty that a woman could rely on a man only so far. They'd told her time and again with the clarity of hindsight that there was no shame in leaning on a man, but that every woman must know how to stand on her own as well.

If it were only Georgiana, she would have laughed off everyone's concern. She'd grown up all too familiar with London's fingersmiths and crooks, kept close at her father's side and motherless as long as she remembered. She'd kept house from the age of six, and Georgiana knew how to wash clothes and iron and make do with the best of them — miles away from the hothouse flowers that they raised in Mayfair. She'd been happy before she'd become Mrs. Clarendon and thus the type of woman who had a grand kitchen and no idea what to do with it, and she would be without one as well. Georgiana had two hands and a mind of her own; she would be fine.

Except there was Phoebe to think of now, and her future, which Georgiana wanted desperately to be happy, to be prosperous, to be without the uncertainty and discomfort Georgiana had known. Georgiana wanted Phoebe to have every available opportunity, and knew with a grim kind of resignation the only way to provide them would be to remarry.

Tomorrow, I'll think about it tomorrow, Georgiana promised herself, snuffing out the candle and curling up in bed alongside her daughter.

***

Sleepless nights were impractical and pointless, which was why about three hours into one, Mycroft opted to get out of bed and stage himself in the study instead. There were always accounts that needed looking into and repairs to budget, planting calendars to adjust. And after the ten minutes all of that near-reflexive work occupied, there was nothing to do but sit at his desk and brood.

If he was going to be practical about it, the business of identifying a suitable partner for this intrigue didn't have to be difficult. His mother — carefully cloistered away in Somerset where she couldn't arrive at random to visit and despair over him every day — would all all too happily produce a list of acceptable candidates, and Harry could certainly be trusted to whittle it down to women with the wherewithal to be trained for the task. Mycroft would select someone from the short list and proceedings could proceed; king and country would be safe.

Except whoever he married would be more than just a temporary tool for this operation, to be handsomely rewarded and set aside. She would be his duchess, which implied he'd have to continue living with her, long after this tiresome skirmish between the English and the French was finally concluded. It had the potential to be a nightmare, given that Mycroft's mother favored sensible women and Harry favored women who could appear sensible, which meant one who survived both of their selection processes would have to be a manipulator and actress of the first order.

That could be useful, interesting even, for Mycroft had always admired a worthy sparring partner, and women with sharp edges were interesting. Finding one with a mercenary streak might even mean she'd release him to his own pursuits after their work was done: her to her own interests and Mycroft to his.

But that was only the most transactional of definitions for marriage, and a template Mycroft was cross with, since it had forced him into this ludicrous position. If even one of his highly placed operatives was on friendly terms with his wife, this entire charade could have been neatly avoided. As it was, he was sitting at his desk at half-three in the morning eyeing his very fine port and stuck on the inescapable truth that whichever woman he married would also be the mother of his children.

And whenever Mycroft thought of children, mostly he thought of Phoebe, and how she looked in Georgiana's arms, in Georgiana's constant thrall. He didn't blame her, since Mycroft himself could hardly look at anything else when Phoebe's mother was in the room.

He and Sherlock had been raised with distant affection in the way of all their peers, through a series of nannies and tutors and then by way of letters after they'd been sent to school. Or, if you were Sherlock, sent to school and then sent home and then sent to another school and then sent home again where your mother and father awaited you at the estate to rain down a hellish fire of weeping and bellowing. More than the switch, Sherlock feared the carrying-on. Mycroft, having discovered the world was being run poorly at six and finally old enough to do something about it by sixteen, had no time for any such tantrums, and was thus left alone at university to cultivate his interests and begin accumulating owed favors.

In contrast, seeing Georgiana's manner of child rearing was a source of constant fascination. Phoebe was never far from her, forever being pulled in for a hug or a kiss, so Georgiana could card her fingers through Phoebe's dark hair or so Phoebe could run her tiny hands along her mother's face, eternally fascinated. So far as Mycroft could tell, Phoebe didn't have a nanny, and being sent away to the nursery, apart from her mother, was the worst sort of punishment, and not in the ordinary course of business at all.

"I know it seems strange," Georgiana had admitted one day in Sherlock's sitting room while Phoebe entertained herself with a doll in the corner, "But it's the way I was raised — at my father's knee — it's the way all of us were raised."

Mycroft had arched a brow at that. "Us?" he asked.

"Well, commoners, I suppose," Georgiana had replied, cheerful, rosy-cheeked in the late summer light, and Mycroft had remembered the particular patterning of whitework on the sleeves of her muslin gown because he was mindlessly greedy of her, to have any piece of her his own to keep.

Over the years he'd accumulated volumes on her, kept it all close to his heart. She liked the citrus bite of lemon ice and was wholly unafraid of him, of Sherlock, despite the weight of their titles and Sherlock's particularly sharp words. Georgiana was fond of dogs and ambivalent toward cats. Georgiana was only a mediocre dancer, but had quite the most singularly beautiful smile Mycroft had ever seen. She'd learned how to pick locks and pockets during her extremely questionable childhood haunting the office of the Bow Street Runners, and had broken her collarbone as a child in a fall from a tree. She liked the pale pink color of blooming peonies and hated bracelets. She was the very nearest thing Mycroft had to a friend and Sherlock to a sister.

"You are nothing like a commoner," Mycroft had said, and barely managed to withhold, And it has nothing to do with your marrying Clarendon, either.

So what he needed, Mycroft concluded with deep irritation, was a woman who was clever, cunning, brave enough to take on such an assignment, and who he would care for and want to care for his children as well.

"In short," Mycroft said, bitter, into the watery flood of morning light in his study now, dawn creeping into the London sky, "I need to marry an exact copy of Georgiana Clarendon."

At his door, there was a scratching noise, followed by his butler peering inside and asking, grim and unamused, "Sir, will you be taking breakfast in your study, then?"

"Yes," Mycroft said, deciding in favor of fatalism and self-pity for today. "Yes, I will, and please bring it to me in the form of port and cake."

There was a long silence before Higgens sighed, aggrieved. "As you wish, sir."

"And Higgens?" Mycroft went on, with the steel-cored discipline that had kept him from murdering his younger brother all these years. "Send for my mother."

The silence this time was even longer, but when Higgens said, "Yes, your grace," and "The port and cake will be with you very shortly," it was with immense pity.

***

In the morning, Phoebe was a vision of shining good health, and Georgiana rewarded her for it with a bevy of adoring kisses. Breakfast was porridge and planning, and by the time Phoebe was finished distributing her porridge over most of her dress, Georgiana was finished with all of her planning.

"Right then, my darling, come along," Georgiana declared to Phoebe, changed her into an unsoiled dress, and marched the pair of them over to Bloomsbury, where Sherlock answered the door in a state: hair awry in four directions, a streak of mud on his cheek, clutching a piece of some kind of root, and swaying on his feet.

"Oh," he said, "no."

"I am calling in my favors, Sherlock," Georgiana informed him, ushering Phoebe into the hall — where she promptly took off shrieking with joy for the kitchen garden — and maneuvered herself into the house, adding, "I require a husband."

Sherlock made a horrified sound. "I am not marrying you."

Rolling her eyes, Georgiana went immediately for the stack of cards and invitations overflowing the hall table, sorting out all the ones long overdue and ignored.

"And I would never want to marry you," Georgiana told him charitably, discarding a few notes inviting Sherlock to intimate dinners — why would anyone want Sherlock at an intimate dinner? — and country house parties — or a country house party? — in favor of the season's most well-attended events. "I just want to marry someone."

Sherlock's new sound of horror was only slightly less horrified. "Setting aside the issue of marriage being the summary surrender of personal liberty — if you are intent on it why are you here?"

"Because you are you going to acquire me an invitation for a ball where I will locate someone to be married to," Georgiana told him, and held up an invitation, asking, "Lord and Lady Rawlins' musical?"

"Only if you're attending for dramatics," Sherlock returned. "Lady Rawlins is exceptionally stupid but there's no way she's not going to realize the opera singer they've likely arranged for the guests' entertainment is for her husband's as well."

Georgiana was reluctantly impressed; she honestly hadn't thought Rawlins had it in him. Setting that invitation aside, she leafed past a half-dozen others — only about half of London society had been lured back to the city, but all of them were eager to be the opening salvo in the Season — before reaching one for a masquerade ball, which Sherlock categorically refused on the grounds of his dignity.

"It's clear you're going to press gang me into helping you no matter what, but I refuse to make a fool of myself unnecessarily," he told her, shaking his root and scrubbing uselessly at the mud on his face only to get it — for his sleeve was coated in the stuff — all over his hair.

"Yes, clearly it's me that's eroding your sense of respectability," Georgiana allowed, and frowned as she asked, "So you don't want to be married?"

Flushing, Sherlock opened his mouth.

"To anybody," Georgiana clarified, lips twitching with laughter. "Not me."

"To anybody," Sherlock confirmed, impatient. "I see no profit in it."

"It's matrimony, Sherlock, not a business," she replied, keenly aware of the hypocrisy of such a statement. But then again, Sherlock had the dual benefits of his sex and his heritage and thus the luxury of marrying whomever he liked. "Then you don't mind? Being alone all the time?"

Sullen, Sherlock said, "I am never alone. You or my brother are forever underfoot, or endless streams of patients."

"I warned you about opening a practice," Georgiana said, because even now Sherlock seemed forever baffled that his opening a medical practice had actually drawn patients, when in reality he'd only intended to have a forum to show off his experiments.

"And anyway," he went on, ignoring her, "you're not married now, and you seem perfectly happy."

"It's different between women and men," she told him, distracted. Country house party, dinner, dinner, tea, salon, Georgiana found, before coming to a card with heavy stock and beautiful lettering. She held it up for Sherlock's inspection. "The Verkerks? A ball?"

Sherlock wrinkled his nose, but was otherwise silent, and Georgiana read that for the acquiescence it was.

"Splendid," Georgiana decided, noted the details of the event, and pressed the card into Sherlock's chest with a firm hand and an even firmer tone, saying, "This one, then, to start."

Sputtering, Sherlock said, "You're not even invited!"

"Sherlock, your brother is the Duke of Sussex, and until he has a son of his own, you are his heir," Georgiana reminded him, thoroughly without pity after a lifetime of fetching Sherlock out of brothels and barring him from haunting the prison and sneaking around graveyards long after hours. She would happily force him to perform a hundred favors for her without a single blemish on her conscience. "If you ask the Verkerks to add me to the guest list — they will."

Somewhere in between his 15th birthday and his 20th, Sherlock had gone from being guilelessly curious about all things to developing a peculiar and strange prudishness. Georgiana had a private theory involving Mycroft, Sherlock, a prostitute, and a financial transaction that rewarded aggressiveness, but she wasn't sure she wanted confirmation on what had surely been an unmitigated disaster.

Instead of well mannered cooperation, Sherlock asked, "How is it different? For women and men, not being married?"

"Men need wives to be happy," Georgiana said, with the confidence of past experience.

"And women don't need husbands for happiness?" Sherlock queried.

"I find husbands are most often the root cause of unhappiness in wives," Georgiana answered, smiling crookedly. "Being a widow is actually quite liberating."

"Surely Mycroft would have had Clarendon killed if he made you unhappy," Sherlock said, as if it were indisputable fact and not an exaggeration at all. "Do you not miss him?"

Georgiana considered. She did miss Thomas, ached for the daughter he would never see growing up and the friend she'd lost when he'd passed. She'd loved him the way you care for someone given into your care, someone who cared for you, but she'd never felt for him the way he'd burned for her: with a humbling tenderness, bewildering intensity. She'd married him because it had pleased her father so to see her well-settled, and because when she'd asked Mycroft if she ought to, he'd looked at her with wise, gray eyes and told her yes.

"Yes," she admitted. "But not the way you think."

She missed the certainty of her life with him, the way everything had been soft-edged and easy with Thomas. Georgiana hadn't stayed up long nights worrying herself sick over money, over Phoebe, over the vast and formless future that was coming for her, nipping at her heels. But she didn't miss the sense of nagging, frustrating obligation, the way she'd always carried her guilt like a lodestone for not loving him the way he deserved — the way he loved her.

Sherlock held up a quelling hand. "Stop," he instructed. "No more. I can tell you're about to embark on a discussion of emotions, which will likely be tiring."

She would be upset with him except she was used to him, and there was something comforting to know that Sherlock was uninterested — that their conversations would forever avoid the subjects Georgiana so desperately wanted to ignore.

And anyway, at that moment, Phoebe appeared in the hall, waving frantically for Georgiana's attention and crying, "Mummy, Mummy, Dr. Holmes has a snake!"

Georgiana's face must have betrayed her alarm, because Sherlock said:

"It's in a cage."

"It's sticking its tongue out at me!" Phoebe went on. "Can I take it out?"

"No," Sherlock and Georgiana yelled together, and started for the garden in tandem.

***

Eugenia Holmes roared into London like a late winter storm, bringing with her two carriages of luggage, two French lady's maids, a number of grooms and valets, and so much effusive, embarrassing joy that Mycroft managed only two minutes of rueful affection before settling immediately into regret.

"Don't make that face at me, Mycroft," she scolded brightly, as Mycroft's valet presented her with jacket after jacket and was summarily dismissed by a careless wave of Eugenia's hand. "You sent for me, after all, meaning no matter how much you sulk, you recognize the wisdom of my marital advice."

They were staged in the family drawing room on the second floor, in the orange light of late afternoon, the detritus of tea scattered across all the flat surfaces of the room, a flurry of discarded invitations blanketing the rug. The room was all rich royal blues and dark cherry woods, the walls lined with paintings of the ocean, with Turner's Fisherman at Sea roiling and green-glazed, the moon hanging a pendant in the sky, mounted over the fireplace, flames flickering golden on the frame.

"It's true, Mother," he allowed, clutching at brandy number three for the day, brandy number unknown since he'd sent for his mother four days previous. The study was the comforting reassurance of work, but the drawing room was — had been a haven. Mycroft didn't think he'd ever be able to retreat here again. "It is only my wisdom in sending for you at all that I question now."

Eugenia plucked up another cucumber sandwich and said to the valet, "For that, Harris, please go find a jacket in a color other than blue or black."

Fairly vibrating with excitement, Harris breathed, "Oh, I've dreamed of this day, my lady."

Setting his tumbler down with a warning click, Mycroft said, "Harris, if I arrive at the Verkerk's ball dressed as a common dandy, you will find yourself hoping to be in Sherlock's service."

Torn, Harris looked between Mycroft and Eugenia, until Eugenia mercifully said, "For goodness sake, Harris — just bring him a green jacket."

"Dark green," Mycroft added.

Harris did, but sullenly, favoring Mycroft with an endless number of baleful looks, as if he'd taken up employment with the Duke of Sussex for the sartorial opportunities and then been betrayed.

"Stop glowering at that poor boy and listen, Mycroft," his mother instructed, and went on, "Now, on the subject of the young lady."

Wincing, Mycroft asked, "Young?"

Mycroft's history of interactions with girls freshly out of the schoolroom mostly involved him being impatient and bored and their being terrified and near-mute for fear of insult, their mother's hovering nearby with stars of hope gleaming in their eyes. To say he wasn't impressed by one-dimensional charms of youth was putting it lightly.

"Young, dear," Eugenia insisted. "More years to produce an heir."

"Which, of course, is a key indicator of a good spy," Mycroft said sarcastically, and tried not to think about the bleak misery of finding a milksop miss in his bed and at his breakfast table every day for the rest of his life. Of endless conversations about weather and fashion and seeing Georgiana for tea in Sherlock's sitting room with the miles-long distance of propriety between them. And one day, she would marry again, and Mycroft knew the way he'd known the first time — cold and aching — that he would be happy for her, as much as he could.

Rapping his knuckles with a fan she'd produced from nowhere, his mother said, "I am trying to identify a girl worthy of being your duchess. You are the one looking for a spy."

It spoke volumes about his mother's character that her eldest son, the heir to the family lineage, had disclosed he was marrying to facilitate espionage, and her response had been to go into raptures and begin creating lists of the most fertile families in the ton. If Eugenia Philomena Holmes had her way, this whole ugly business with spying and the French would just be a minor distraction before Mycroft's future wife began producing grandchildren for her to spoil at a rate of seventeen a year.

"As we have discussed, Mother," Mycroft sighed, explaining again, "ideally, we are looking for someone who would succeed in both endeavors."

Eugenia made a noise wholly inappropriate for a dowager duchess. "Yes, while we're asking for miracles, let's also hope that the universe produces a woman for Sherlock this Season."

Mycroft choked on his tea.

Looking archly satisfied, Eugenia went on:

"Returning to the subject of your young lady — " she produced a piece of tattered letter paper, clearly well-consulted already " — I've compiled a list of this year's passable debutants and several acceptable widows. You'll only need to select from that."

It was with great wariness that Mycroft examined the list of twenty-odd names, each with "helpful" annotations alongside.

Miss Florence White was an accomplished violinist but unfortunate looking, Eugenia had observed, but probably still preferable to the unquestionably beautiful, but shockingly stupid Miss Julia Haversham, who had famously tipped over into a pond last Season with no discernible outside intervention. Mycroft sighed at the inclusion of Miss Theresa Verlander (whose father Mycroft had under near constant surveillance as a soft target for any French spy assets possessed of large breasts) and Miss Regina Rookwood, whose snobbery surpassed her breeding by several country miles.

Then Mycroft got to the widows.

"Mother," he hissed, scandalized.

She blinked at him angelically. "What, my darling?"

Mycroft held up the paper. "Mrs. Garrick is barely in half-mourning."

"Mr. Garrick was a dull brute and she's glad to be rid of him," Eugenia said with confidence. "I could tell by the way she was dabbing her eyes at the funeral."

Glowering, he said, "No."

"Fine, fine," his mother said, too easily, and asked, "What about Mrs. Charles then? Or Mary Power? She has the most lovely singing voice."

Mrs. Power had also once burst into tears because her florists sent her yellow roses instead of yellow-pink roses, and then taken to her fainting couch for an entire evening, according to a man in Mycroft's employ. A former infantryman who had earned a pronounced limp as a result of seeing to his own field dressing before charging into the heat of battle again, he'd begged without dignity to be released from the Powers' service within three months.

"I'm not certain that the particular stresses of being my wife or engaging in espionage would benefit from her particular delicacy," Mycroft said in a considerable exercise of his limited diplomacy in such matters.

"True, she's so fragile, the poor darling," Eugenia mused, and bringing her teacup — Russian porcelain, gilded, the saucer shaped like an opened peony bloom — to her mouth, she asked too innocently, "So? Who is it, then?"

Dear God, Mrs. Cresham was on the list, Mycroft realized with open horror, distracted as he asked, "Who what?"

"Who is it you've already set your sights on," his mother repeated.

Gritting his teeth against the image of Mrs. Cresham's lazy eye, heavy breathing, and wandering hands, Mycroft said, "No one."

"It's very good your work at the War Office is behind the scenes, because you're a terrible liar," Eugenia said, setting her cup and saucer down with an elegant click against the rosewood and fussing with the blue silk drape of her gown over her knees. "Come now: I'm not so young anymore. Would you truly deny me the right to a daughter-in-law?"

Eugenia was still striking in her fifties, dark auburn hair laced through with silver now. But she held herself with the same grace that had carried her through her many duties, responsibilities, and private heartbreaks as the Duchess of Sussex, and that she'd tried to imbue in her sons. She seemed to Mycroft eternal the way the luminous portraits in the great hall were: ageless and forever poised to say something witty.

"I'm reasonably sure you'll outlive me," Mycroft teased.

"Which will be completely pointless if you refuse to provide me an heir to play with," his mother said firmly, and folding her hands in her lap. "You've never been a coy child — "

"Child," he muttered.

" — and I can only imagine what's caused you to turn so now," Eugenia continued. "You can either tell me now, or I can suss it out on my own."

Mycroft rolled his eyes and reached for his teacup.

"I see," his mother said, and then turned toward the door of the room, calling out gaily, "Harris! I've changed my mind — bring the powder blue jacket after all!"

***

Dororthea Verkerk's events were always lavish and always clever. Marriages and engagements were brokered and broken in the card rooms and on the balconies. Reliable as a clock, there was always a to-do in the orangerie: some years it was a duel, others it was a tryst — which often still led to a duel. No matter what the theme or who the guests, Dorothea's balls were never dull and so generously catered almost everybody was drunk long before dinner was served.

Which, Georgiana thought fuzzily, was a blessing, really.

The moment she'd arrived in the Verkerk's ballroom, the second and third sons of all the great families of the ton had swarmed her, rekindling acquaintances she'd barely cultivated before. They'd requested first and second dances and offered to fetch her lemonade and ratafia until her head had been hurting from the chorus of polished accents and she'd made her excuses for the lady's retiring room only to find the gossip and gabbing even more punishing there.

Georgiana blamed the Holmeses. Nothing was so fascinating as a woman with the friendship of two of the ton's most inscrutable men.

She knew she ought to be flattered, but after almost two years of being more or less absent from society, she felt alien in a way she hadn't since she was eighteen years old, crossing the threshold of Mycroft's house in London on Thomas's arm, trembling in a yellow silk dress.

She was too aware of everything: a lock of hair coming unpinned, the plunging neckline of her gown — a season out of fashion, at least — the too-delicate embroidered dancing slippers she was wearing, the deep flush she could feel spreading from her cheeks down the column of her throat, flaring across her collarbone.

And so she'd found herself here, hidden away near a towering ficus plant overwhelmed with bunting, standing shoulder to shoulder with Sherlock Holmes getting progressively drunker.

"They're still staring at you," Sherlock observed.

"Maybe they're staring at you," Georgiana muttered, clutching at her cup.

An invitation to a Verkerk ball could make or break a debutante's season, and a purposeful exclusion from the guest list could destroy a family's reputation, so it was always a crush, with people coming into town from as far as Yorkshire to make the Season's inaugural event. Naturally, Sherlock had been invited six years running and ignored it. He would have ignored it this year, too, except Dorothea had blackmailed Sherlock into attendance in exchange for extending an invitation to Georgiana. He'd complained loudly and pettily for hours.

Dorothea had selected a dutifully patriotic country idyll theme for her ball this year, with great boughs and masses of plantlife moved into the corners of the room and an artificial pond dotted with flowers and wreathed by greenery. The quartet of musicians were staged in an ivy-covered gazebo in a corner, and the long tables of food and drink were strewn with petals and fresh green leaves. Somewhere out there, Georgiana imagined a head gardener was in a state at the denuded dirt pile that used to be his life's work.

"Oh, surely there are some staring at me," Sherlock conceded, having matched her cup for cup of rum punch and possessed of zero ability to hold his drink, "but primarily they are staring at you — possibly because you arrived with me, but definitely, more than sixty percent of the people looking at us are looking at you, specifically."

Georgiana took away his punch. "You're not to have any more of this."

Except he was right, of course: they were staring.

She could just imagine the conversations. Mrs. Lydia Stockton bemoaning the state of Georgiana's hair, while the Honorable Miss Julianna Slater asking too-delicate questions about what might Georgiana be doing here again? After spending so long cloistered away in her house and mingling with commoners? And of course there was Lord Frederick Baker, whose considerable wealth seemed such poor compensation for his shockingly boorish manners, and who had spent the greater part of the evening leering at Georgiana from a distant corner. Glumly, Georgiana inspected her dance card, where he'd written his name in for the first dance of the evening and a subsequent waltz. Given the choice between taking Baker as a husband or letting her daughter grow up in splendid rural poverty, Georgiana was sorely tempted to begin searching for ivy-covered cottages.

"I thought you were doing this to find a new husband," Sherlock said, stealing a passing cup of punch from the hands of Lord Edward Spellman, who could be found prodigiously soused five minutes into any event, as he passed.

Georgiana stole the cup from Sherlock. "I am doing this to find a new husband."

"Explain how hiding in a corner with me is assisting in this endeavor," Sherlock asked reasonably, reaching for Lord Spellman's cup again as Georgiana held it away from him. A few yards a way, Lord Spellman was telling Dorothea Verkerk (loudly) about the great emotional conflagration of the musical at the Rawlins' home earlier that week, and how three pot plants, a music stand, and a crystal punchbowl had been casualties.

Spitefully, Georgiana sipped at Lord Edward's cup, at which point she realized he'd doctored it with his own private supply of what tasted like pirate's grog and promptly began gagging.

"Serves you right," Sherlock told her bloodlessly, and added, "Prepare yourself: another man approaches."

Georgiana was still red-faced as she looked up to see Clarence Tippery, the second son of the Viscount of Rotherhithe, on the approach. He was so beautiful young debutants were known for tripping over offending rocks and over other people and into the Serpentine when he was out and about on Rotten Row. Poor Miss Julia Haversham was still carrying the stigma from her accidental tumble. Beaming as he was now, Georgiana had to blink away the stars in her eyes as she looked into his: lapis lazuli colored and set in a handsome face with a strong chin and gorgeous smile.

"Mrs. Clarendon!" he declared, favoring her with an elegant leg, and said to Sherlock, "Mr. Holmes — good evening."

"Good evening, Mr. Tippery," Georgiana said, dipping into a curtsy as Sherlock said:

"Good eve — oh."

In front of them, Tippery froze. "What?" he demanded, instantly bringing his hands up to his left side.

Georgiana sighed. Tippery was also the stupidest man she'd ever met and the easiest target of Sherlock's more mean-spirited jokes.

"Mr. Tippery, my medical training compels me to ask: have you had any pain recently?" Sherlock asked earnestly. "In, say, your left side? Near your hip?"

Tippery's hands slid down a few inches until they were near his hip as he said, "Yes!"

"Ignore him, Mr. Tippery," Georgiana tried, because the last time she'd witnessed this sort of thing, it had concluded with Sherlock convincing Tippery the only way to cure himself of Leicherstaten — a German illness that rotted the left buttock, specifically — was to swim naked in the Thames during the coldest winter. "You know Mr. Holmes is infamous for his jokes."

Tippery gave her a deeply, crushingly condescending smile. "Oh, Mrs. Clarendon, I appreciate that, but Mr. Holmes is a man of great humor but he would never jest about a man's health, would he?"

Georgiana grit her teeth. "Mr. Tippery, truly — "

"There there, Mrs. Clarendon," Tippery said to her, fondly dismissive, and turned back to Sherlock, adding, "She's darling isn't she?"

Seeing red, Georgiana said to Sherlock, "Perhaps he's right, Mr. Holmes. What was it you were telling me about tunneling tapeworms earlier this evening?"

"They can attack at any time, drill holes into the bones," Sherlock said to Tippery seriously. "It usually starts in the joints, soft entry points — " Sherlock lowering his voice to a confidential whisper " — but they almost always move on to, well, areas not fit for discussion in the presence of a lady."

Tippery's face had gone from pale to a ghastly green. "A cure, Holmes! You must give me a cure — a tonic — some kind of treatment!"

Sherlock gave him a list. It involved the dung of a white dog and the red hair of a maid.

Chanting the list to himself, Tippery mumbled a panicked, "Excuse me — dung, white dog — I must take my leave — red hair, red hair," and steamed through the packed ballroom for an entryway, clutching his side the entire time.

They were silent a moment in the otherwise raucous noise of the ball before Sherlock said pointedly, "You're welcome."

Georgiana sighed and gave Sherlock the remainder of Lord Spellman's punch.

"Fine," she grumbled, "thank you."

***

There were many things Mycroft enjoyed, objectively, about the Verkerks.

Dorothea was a gracious hostess and witty drunk, complemented perfectly by her husband, Edward, who was dreadfully charming and wealthy enough that his ludicrous overspending was amusing instead of sad. Most importantly, when the Verkerk's threw a ball, absolutely everyone who was anyone in London poured into their massive home on Grosvenor Square, and it pleased the bureaucrat in Mycroft to see all the players so neatly organized on the chess board.

If his hosts were consummate patriots, then the spectrum grew muddier down from there, until it reached Clarissa Tippery, sister of the ton's handsomest and most useless member and a fairly useless asset for French intelligence for almost a half-decade now. No doubt her utility in that position would begin to strain if she managed to fall in love with someone English this Season, and anyway, Mycroft was actually terribly fond of her, and routinely made certain she had tiny tidbits to pass along to her handlers on the other side of the Channel, as Clarissa was a useful tool to have in play.

But somewhere, and far better disguised in the middle, among the swirling satins and silk dresses there was at least another agent — one far better placed and significantly more dangerous. Any day now Wellington would be rallying his forces to mount an assault from Brussels, and the more Mycroft could choke off of details on the English forces, the better the likelihood of a decisive victory. War was irritating, infuriatingly wasteful, and a distraction from more interesting, better avenues of inquiry.

"You look so intent that I presume there is no way you are looking at the young ladies at all," his mother sighed, arriving suddenly at his side in chocolate-colored silk and a cream wrap.

"Answering that question would only upset you mother," he told her graciously, and scanned the ballroom: Mrs. Power was, indeed, in attendance, and chaperoning Miss Haversham, it seemed. There was also Clarence Tippery, tearing toward the door with terrified purpose, which probably meant he'd imagined some exciting new affliction again. There was also —

"Oh!" Eugenia cried suddenly, sounding delighted.

"What," Mycroft said, feeling faint, "on Earth is Sherlock doing here?"

His mother clutched at his wrist, sounding positively girlish as she whispered, "And he's speaking with a woman."

And as Lord Spellman moved out of the way, Mycroft could see Sherlock was, and that she had beautifully sloping shoulders and soft arms, a dark pile of curls — a single peony tucked in among the strands, blooming snowy white at her nape.

It wasn't until Sherlock said something — eyes darting up into the crowd — and she turned to her side that Mycroft choked on his own air.

His mother sighed happily. "My, she's lovely isn't she, Mycroft?"

"Yes," he murmured, feeling his heart ache inside his chest, "she always has been."

Georgiana was pink with the heat of the room, her eyes inky dark in the low light, the orange glow of the candles ghosting over the wings of her collarbones, the long line of her neck, gilding her face. She was dressed in a sheer white gown with a plunging neckline and silver thread picking out a border of vines and flowers at the hem and neck and on the delicate puffs of her sleeves, a scarlet silk wrap draped draped at her elbows.

His mother leaned into his side, and too keen, asked, "Do you know her, then?"

Mycroft endured a flash of a horrifying future wherein his mother orchestrated a marriage between Sherlock and Georgiana, and having to see the pair of them bickering affectionately at Christmases and Easters and christenings and immediately said, "Yes, and immediately put out of mind of possibility of match there."

"Who is she then?" his mother asked, ignoring him. "I don't know that I've seen her in town before."

That was on purpose, of course.

In truth, Mycroft was an exceptionally gifted liar. Even Sherlock would agree. Except when it came to lying to his mother, and even now, the thought of introducing his mother to Georgiana and seeing the look of utter knowing on Eugenia's face — and the subsequent pity — would have been too much to bear. Steering his mother in the opposite direction or distracting her with whichever latest disaster Sherlock had orchestrated was the far, far easier path to take, and one Mycroft had selected for fifteen years.

His mother's hand on his wrist turned into nails digging into the skin as Georgiana laughed at something Sherlock said, looking terribly pleased with himself.

"Mycroft, you'll introduce me to her at once," she told him, the majestic patience in her voice at violent odds with the way her hand on his wrist had turned into her nails digging into his skin.

"Mother," he said, trying to pry her fingers off of him, "I'm bleeding."

"Is she married?" Eugenia asked callously, but at least she removed her hand.

"Widowed," Mycroft said, trying to rub inconspicuously at his arm. "But — "

She interrupted him with an arm looped through his own, and swatting him impatiently with her fan, said, "Hurry! Over there, immediately!"