Free A Lily Among Thorns by Rose Lerner

minutes into the meal, and he was
already
telling that story about escaping through the gates of Paris in ’93 dressed as an old hag, with the de Tourneys hidden under the cabbages.
    “Wherever did you get that stunning gown?” Lady Blakeney asked Serena in her charmingly accented English. “The clarity of the color is remarkable. It is as bright as those waistcoats my husband ordered from Hathaway’s Fine Tailoring!”
    “As a matter of fact,” Serena said, “it
is
from Hathaway’s. It was designed for me by Mr. Solomon Hathaway himself.” She wondered what they would say if she told them he had fitted it, too.
    Lord Alvanley, celebrated wit and dandy, smiled maliciously. “I say, Dewington, I believe she’s speaking of your nephew!”
    “You’ve boasted often enough of having designed a gown for the Siren yourself,” Dewington snapped. Lady Dewington elbowed him.
    Alvanley had the grace to look abashed. He threw Serena an apprehensive glance. She gritted her teeth. She remembered that gown. It hadn’t been very comfortable, but the dandy had offered her fifty pounds to wear it. He still owed her the money.
    “He makes up the dyes, don’t he?” asked Sir Percy. “Talented fellow, for a shopkeeper—oh, sorry, your nevvy, of course, Dewington.”
    “Well, a young man must sow his wild oats somehow,” Dewington said without conviction.
    “There!” said Lady Blakeney. “Did I not say it was from Hathaway’s?”
    Sir Percy beamed proudly. “So you did, m’dear. Demmed clever woman, my wife. Cleverest woman in Europe, don’t you know. Star of the
Comédie Française.
I had to fight my way into her greenroom.” No one had called Lady Blakeney the cleverest woman in Europe in at
least
fifteen years. Serena had her private suspicions that those who had, even then, had not been Europe’s brightest lights.
    Lady Blakeney gave a trilling laugh. “Oh, that was
years
ago! We are not so young as we were, Sir Percy.”
    Sir Percy glowered. “I’m still young enough to show those Frogs a thing or two about British ingenuity! I say, Your Highness, have you spoken to Varney about sending me to France as I asked? I speak French like a native, you know.”
    Serena did not stare. She didn’t laugh. She didn’t picture Sir Percy—all foppish, red-faced, middle-aged six feet of him, who got out of breath walking from the dining room to his carriage—as an agent of the Crown in Napoleon’s Paris. She found, though—and it was an unsettling sensation—that she could not wait to tell Solomon all about it.
    “Varney likes to hire his own agents,” Prinny said placidly. “He has some excellent French speakers already. I told him you were a deuced clever fellow, but he said your exploits as the Scarlet Pimpernel were too celebrated to allow you the proper incognito.”
    “Indeed, Sir Percy,” Lady Blakeney scolded, “I have told you! I spent my youth worrying you would lose your head, but now we are older I wish we might simply be comfortable.”
    “My wife worries too much,” Sir Percy said jovially. “Why, once I was forced to feign my own death to throw off that little Chauvelin, and I vow she nearly—”
    Lady Blakeney hit him smartly with her fan. “I do not find that story
amusant
, Sir Percy!”
    “But you would not have made such a regal little widow if you had known, m’dear—” Sir Percy’s eyes narrowed. “I say, who the devil is that?” He spoke in the same jovial tones, and gestured languidly in the direction of the kitchens, but Serena suddenly felt a little less sure that Sir Percy had never been a force to be reckoned with. She turned to look.
    It was René, who had always managed to avoid Sir Percy in the past. Serena did not step protectively between them; she was bitterly ashamed that she still wanted to. “That is monseigneur du Sacreval, my former business partner. Do you know him, Sir Percy?”
    But Sir Percy was shaking his head and leaning back in his chair. “Not in the