Free City of Secrets by Elisabeth Kidd

the prince’s party from a runaway horse, the prince offered him a position in his household as a reward. Grant took it.
    As his mother, the queen, grew older and less inclined to have any contact with her subjects, the now middle-aged prince released his frustrations over the long wait to inherit his throne in even more hectic rounds of social and ceremonial activities. Grant found himself serving as a kind of advance guard, going ahead of the royal party to look over the accommodations, the dinner menu, the sleeping arrangements, and the entertainment scheduled for the prince. Later, as the prince attempted to put in place the household he would need when he finally did become king, Grant’s job evolved into securing the prince’s safety, as well as his comfort, on his travels.
    Three years into his service Grant suggested setting up the detective agency as a cover for such activities. No one was more surprised than he was himself when the agency flourished on its own merits. The prince joked about it in private, but he knew as well as Grant did that the prince came before any case the agency took on, however fascinating.
    Which was why, when chance brought Madeleine Malcolm to his office, Grant did not tell the prince about it. He was still convinced that there was more to her search for her husband than she had told him, but he had even less evidence to support that theory, only the instinct that Madeleine Malcolm would prove yet another complication in the plot that had begun with the murder of the earl of Southington’s valet.
    Grant had followed the trail of that mysterious stranger in the pub, but like an underground stream that surfaces only in hidden places, it was elusive and unrewarding. He had more success in tracking down the valet, who had been truthful in his references at least to his French origins, and along whose trail that mysterious underground stream would occasionally surface. Grant had followed it to Paris and found enough evidence there to report back to the prince the danger of a plot against him.
    That had been his first error. The prince did not believe in plots; more specifically, he did not believe that vague threats should interrupt his pleasures. He told Grant to do whatever he could that did not interfere with his usual duties, but not to become obsessed by it. If the plot was that tentative, he said, it was unlikely that anything would come of it.
    “No, no!” the prince protested now, when Alice Keppel wondered aloud how detectives “shadowed” their suspects without being seen. Did Mr. Grant adopt disguises? “I beg you will not tell us anything, dear boy! It is bad enough, my sweet, that he sees anarchists with pistols behind every bush, without his telling us that he spends his spare time memorizing their likenesses and vital statistics, so as to be sure to recognize them in the street.”
    Sir Ernest, who had been surveying the track through his glasses, remarked just then that some anarchists did not trouble to hide themselves away from polite society. “There is Peter Kropotkin himself, playing the boulevardier with a stunning creature who I hope for your sake, sir, does not represent the next generation of anarchists.”
    Curious, Devin raised his own glasses in the direction Sir Ernest was looking, stifled a curse, and disappeared out the back of the enclosure without so much as begging anyone’s pardon. Mrs. Keppel looked after him astonished, but the prince only smiled and said, “Duty, presumably, calls.”
     
    #
     
    “Where are we going?” Madeleine Malcolm asked, when Devin steered her in the direction of the striped tent that housed the prince’s supply of claret and the baskets of food for his “simple little picnic,” as Mrs. Keppel had blithely called it.
    “It will be private in here,” he said. “We can talk undisturbed.”
    He held the flap open for her and followed her into a spacious area that looked as much like an office as a storage facility.