Another exclusive excerpt!

 Good Morning! As we spring ahead an hour and creep closer to warm weather and sunshine at last, I thought I'd share with you another excerpt from A DEADLY SHADE OF NIGHT. Enjoy!

*

Viennese Fingers and a Fit of the Female Hysterics.

“My good man, there has been a murder. At least one. A great deception has taken place and evil is afoot. Someone is coming to harm. Perhaps we are already too late. Oh, and my name is Euphemia, Lady Carew. I am not sure of the order in which you need to know it all, so I throw it all aloft and see what lands first.”

She commanded the young constable’s attention further, by reaching over his desk and slamming shut the book he’d been reading.

“Alas, I fear that all will smash upon the floor since your hands appear too slow and slight to catch any of it.” She looked the skinny chap up and down, feeling more than mildly disappointed.

Sadly, young men these days were not what they used to be. No wonder she’d run out of lovers and lost the will to find a new one.

He had jumped a little when she shut his book. Now he drew back and stared at her for a moment, as if she was some sort of exotic, poisonous spider that had got loose from an exhibition. Although it was still daylight out, the police station was poorly serviced by inadequate and grimy windows, so the gas bracket above his head was already lit, lending a somewhat flat, yellowy, waxy and surreal aura to his appearance.

“Now, who is in charge of this dismal place?” She briskly rapped her gloved knuckles on the desk to rouse him further from this stupor. “I insist you take me to them at once.”

“In charge?” He finally stirred himself and swallowed. “That would be Detective Inspector Deverell, ma’am. But he be out at present. Went to Harrogate.”

“Why on earth would he want to go all that way when he is needed here?”

“I don’t know, ma’am. He keeps his business to himself. Could be that he went to drink the spa waters. They do say as ‘tis right beneficial to the health.”

“Why? What’s amiss with him?”

“Errr hmmm.” The fellow’s brow wrinkled. “Not sure I know where to start with that one,” he mumbled.

 “Has he not enough villains to keep him busy in York?” she exclaimed. “Are we to be overrun by robbers and rogues with nobody here to manage the business, but you? I hope your detective does not return to find corpses strewn about the streets and every bank vault emptied, while you sit here with your tea and biscuits!”

“I can take a report for thee, ma’am.” His fingers crept across the desk for a small leather-bound notebook.

“This is all most inconvenient, but I suppose I have no choice,” she murmured to herself. “The underling will have to—” Suddenly overcome by a fit of coughing, she searched desperately for a handkerchief and, in so doing, dropped the contents of her reticule onto the police station floor. Her empty gin flask spun away across the stone, and she watched it go, the hollow clanging echo transformed into the sound of Old Pip’s shovel, striking against something buried in the earth. She looked down at her fallen possessions. The ground, for a moment, had gone soft beneath her feet— she could feel her heels sinking in and an apple rolled by her foot. But now the floor was stone again.

With another cough stifled, she managed to wheeze, “After all this time, I hardly know where to begin my story. How much of it is true; how much of it is in my mind.” She paused. “I’ve never told any of it before to somebody who understands fluent English, you see. I didn’t want to be dragged back into the lunatic asylum. I fled England in the first place to escape that fate.”

The young man behind the desk had opened his notebook and readied his pen, but now he put them aside, sidled out from behind the desk and stooped to retrieve her fallen articles, one by one, from the floor. When she would not take them from his hands, being too overcome with her thoughts, he set them on the desk, lining them up with care. He glanced at her between each rescue, with a very slight frown of admonishment, as if she was a child who had thrown her toys across the nursery floor and he was the long-suffering, underpaid nanny.

She gazed at the sad parade of her most-treasured possessions: a pearl-handled comb missing some teeth, a black velvet choker with a silver heart and a broken clasp, and a palm-sized mirror— all that were once her mother’s. There was also a small vial of French perfume; face powder; honey lip balm; matches; a length of frayed ribbon with roses printed upon it; Welford mint pastilles; her cigarette case, and the silver gin flask. Like the contents of a magpie’s nest. No handkerchief. What the devil had she done with her handkerchief? It was trimmed with good lace too and embroidered with silk initials.

The constable now tried to ease the empty reticule from her hands, but she resisted, turning it inside out in search of her missing item.

“Damn and blast,” she muttered. “I gave it to Anxious Fanny, didn’t I?”

“I don’t know, ma’am. Did thee? Mayhap thee ought to sit down? Shall I fetch a chair?”

She hardly listened. “I know that something is not right, you see, young man. It is the something that eludes me.” She batted his fingers away. “Something I saw today, after the funeral. Or was it something I didn’t see?”

“After the funeral, ma’am?” He moved back around his desk now, still eyeing the row of shiny trinkets and then her garments, with suspicion. Rich green velvet, trimmed with gold braid and frog clasps, with an underlayer of rhubarb silk ruffles, was, of course, most definitely not mourning attire. And then there was her extravagantly feathered hat, with not a black veil in sight.

“The funeral of Alma Clemmons,” she explained, thinking he ought to know that name.

But his expression showed no sign of recognition. “That’s the murder victim, is it?” He began to write in his book, frowning earnestly.

 “Alma? A victim? I could cheerfully have done it myself, if that was the case.” She gave a lusty laugh. “I am, after all, a thoroughly bad lot, so they say.” Suddenly dizzy, she clutched the desk. Oh, she wished her flask wasn’t empty. She shook it to be sure. “Alma? No. She succumbed after a long illness. Finally succumbed. Yes, that’s what they called it.”

The constable paused his pen above the inkpot. “But you said there’s been a murder, ma’am.”

She pressed fingers to her brow, where crow’s wings drummed against her skull. “The victim for whom I speak has no voice of her own. Her jaw was severed by the blow of an axe. She needs to be found. I saw her in my dream.”

“A dream, ma’am?”

She swayed, feeling sick. She hadn’t eaten today. Not a bite, but for a mint pastille. Her feet were so light she didn’t see how they could stay down on the floor.

“I think you ought to sit down, ma’am.”

“And I think you ought to be quiet,” she snapped, “and let me get my thoughts in order.”

Slowly she returned the items to her reticule, considering each one for a moment as she held it in her palm. How strange it was, she thought, that these were the few pieces she carried with her and felt so lost without— the necessities of her life. A lot could be told about a person from what they carried— how much and how little they kept near. What remained in them, with them and on them. Like wrinkles, freckles. And scars.

“I lived there long away and far ago, you see.” She shook her flask again, just to be sure, and hiccupped. “I never really left the place. Or a small part of me is still there. In the cupboard.”

“In the cupboard?” The young man frowned and scratched his brow. “What cupboard is that then?”

“That’s where the body is. It opened the cupboard and saw me, and I saw it.”

Another fellow now joined the younger man at the front desk and, with a copious amount of chest thrusting, introduced himself as Sergeant Moffat. “What seems to be the matter, ma’am?”

“The lady doesn’t know, sir,” the constable muttered. He shot a quick glance at her empty flask— the last piece of life to be stuffed back in her reticule— and then he said, in a softer tone, “Mayhap, thee be under the weather, ma’am. Ought to come back later. When thee be feeling better like.”

She drew herself up taller and swallowed another hiccup. “I do not care for your tone, young man. Nor do I appreciate the insinuation.”

“I had an auntie fond of the gin. After she’d had a good belly-full, she always accused folk of wanting her dead and buried. Threw a punch once at my uncle over the Christmas goose.”

“I am not inebriated. How dare you suggest—?”

“I smell the gin, ma’am,” he whispered, “despite the mint.”

Sergeant Moffat exhaled a weary huff. “Shouldn’t waste police time, ma’am. Now, off thee goes and I daresay tomorrow all this’ll be forgot.”

When he tried to grasp her elbow, she pulled away, hot with fury. “Listen to me, imbeciles! You fail to understand. There has been a murder. I saw it happen.”

“Did you indeed? And what is your name, madam?”

She sighed. “As I told you, my name is Lady Carew.” She jabbed her finger toward the constable’s little book. “Write that down. Carew.”

The sergeant was squinting at her, his moustache twitching and nostrils flaring. “And where did this supposed murder take place?”

“The house they called Furthermore on Whitherward Fell.”

He rolled his eyes and huffed. Under his breath he grumbled, “Not another one.” Then he raised his voice to her as if she might be hard of hearing. “Alright, dearie. Off you go then.”

“But do you not require details?”

“Ever since that story were in the newspaper, diggin’ up that old murder, we’ve had all the local lunatics and drunkards in, tellin’ us they know who did it. Their Uncle Bob’s chimney sweep’s cousin, or their sister’s dog. Or even that they did it.”

 “I am not a lunatic!”

The two men behind the desk exchanged looks.

“Alma and my husband thought I was, but I am not,” she continued, trying to explain. “After the divorce from Sir Edgerton Carew, I fled these shores and put it all behind me, for I was warned that if I made trouble, steps would be taken to put me away forever and I had spent long enough locked away in a cupboard.” Effie waved her arms, like a bird desperate to take flight. “So off I went to the heat and the sunlight and the forgetting.” Then she clasped both hands to her bosom. “But coming back here today, for Alma’s funeral, I realized that I have been gutless, weak and selfish. Now it is time.” She thumped her fist on the desk, swept up in a passion. “Time to settle all scores. Whatever is done to me as a result.” Taking a step back, she straightened her hat and her shoulders. “So there. Now ask of me what you will. I suppose I must be questioned. This once I shall forgive the impertinence.”

They were both staring with their mouths open, until Sergeant Moffat recovered enough to ask. “Alma? Who’s Alma?”

The younger man whispered, “The lady what’s dead, sir.” He looked down at his notebook. “Alma Lemons.”

“Clemmons, for pity’s sake! Two ‘m’s.” She stopped, her attention seized by the plate of shortbread fingers, with their ends dipped in chocolate, sitting on a plate beside his notebook. “Oh,” she muttered, fanning her face with a glove. “I feel quite faint.”

The constable followed her gaze. “They’re called Viennese fingers, ma’am. From Miss Greenwood’s shop. They’re a special favorite o’ mine. Would you…?”

She took one before he could finish and bit into it with some satisfaction.

The sergeant’s face rumpled with annoyance and his moustache trembled indignantly as he muttered about crumbs all over the desk. “We’re here to uphold the law, Constable Wilmot, not feed vagrants off the street. This ain’t the sailor’s rest or a soup-kitchen.”

But with her energy partially restored by that delicious, buttery, crumbly biscuit, Effie continued, “Now, do follow along! I know that something happened in that house. You must go there and search the place for a missing Polly.” She paused to select another shortbread finger. “Then there was today, at the funeral. Something occurred to me today. Something there was quite wrong, but I do not know yet what it was. Oh, I wish my head would stop spinning! I have travelled a long way, of course, and had nothing to eat. ‘Tis no surprise I feel weak.”

Receiving an unsubtle nudge and another eyeroll from his comrade, the constable put down his pen yet again and closed his notebook. “I reckon thee ought to sit down and take a bit o’ supper. Come the mornin’ and a clear ‘ead—"

“I am not drunk,” she replied tightly. “Nor am I a madwoman.”

The sergeant gave a snort of amusement and swiftly moved the plate of biscuits out of her reach. “Well, thee would say that, wouldn’t thee?”

“I beg your pardon?”

He spoke carefully, making big ‘o’s with his lips. “A mad wench wouldn’t go around confessing to madness, o’ course. That would make her sane. But if she be mad, the more she says she en’t so, the more she is so.”

“What makes you an expert in the matter?”

He chuckled. “I know I ain’t mad.”

She leaned across his desk. “You would say that, wouldn’t you?”

That wiped the humor from his face. “And us men don’t suffer from hystericals.”

“Hystericals?”

“Aye. All het up and twisted about. Fainty and whatnot. ‘Tis a fit of the female hystericals.”

“Oh, I can show you hysterical, you bumptious little man.”

“Look, your ladyship, we’re very busy here.”

“Do you imagine that I am not? Yet I put myself out and delayed my return to London just to speak with your detective fellow.”

“I reckon ‘tis a doctor needed here, ma’am, not a detective.”

“Is that what you reckon, insolent fellow?”

“Ma’am, there’s no occasion to get all aerated,” said the young constable, trying his best to intervene peaceably.

“I shall be as aerated as I wish. Now, listen to me! A murder has been committed in that house.” She took a struggling breath, one hand pressed to her bosom. “It was not a figment of my imagination. Not this time.”

The sergeant exhaled a tight huff and folded his arms. “Go home and sleep it off, ma’am. Come back on the morrow, when thee be sober. If thee still thinks there’s been a murder then. Otherwise, we’ll be obliged to put thee in’t cell for the night, and that’s no place for a lady like thee’sen.”

She licked her dry lips and hugged her reticule, wishing again that her flask was still full, for she was going to need a strong drink to get through this. “I was the one left with life,” she muttered. “And what good have I done with it? Old Pip was right to remind me.”

Sergeant Moffat shook his head. “Go home, ma’am. Constable Wilmot will hail you a Hansom cab.”

Her legs felt very weak now, as if they’d run a fair distance in heavy boots to get where they were and her lungs burned with a fierce fire. As did her head.

Go home? She had none. She had nothing but the contents of her reticule and a tattered steamer trunk of belongings being held for her at the train station. For all her finery and bold manners, Lady Carew was a dried leaf, blown by the winds of autumn. And Effie, underneath it all, was a little girl lost and alone.

A lady like thee’sen, the sergeant had said.

But what was a lady like herself? Was there such a thing? Alma had told her she was a monster; an “elemental creature”.

“As if there could ever be another like you,” her grandmother had sneered once. “The Almighty would have thrown away the mould in shame when he saw his mistake! There was only ever one of you, girl. One was more than enough.”

She felt the strike of a hard, stinging cane across her palm and she jolted out of her memories, drawing a quick, tortured breath. Those rather lovely, chocolate-dipped shortbread fingers, she feared, had only very briefly helped, but they had not been enough to fill the aching void inside her.

Euphemia, dizzy again and breathless, turned away.

Was it any wonder she felt so ill, after the day she’d just endured and the ghosts she was forced to encounter? The guilt?

Gin could only blunt the edges for so long and so far.

No more blind eye. No more cowardice and hiding in hot, sunny places. She had not known what she meant to do when she came home. But now she was here, she would see it through to the bitter end, even if that end was her own. Something had drawn her here. Something waiting in the dark to be set free.

“God help me,” she gasped softly, “I will not leave that part of me behind there again. I will find it and be whole.” Perhaps then, whatever it was that waited for her to come back, would stop haunting her with terrible dreams.

With one hand she reached for the wall to keep herself from falling. But there was nothing. Darkness closed in.

The cupboard door under the stairs banged shut and she heard the rusty bolt, disguised as a caterpillar in the intricately carved wall paneling, screaming as it slid back into place...

READ MORE ABOUT THE MYSTERIES TACKLED BY DETECTIVE INSPECTOR DEVERELL IN THE BESPOKE SERIES:

BESPOKE

A LOVELINESS OF LADYBIRDS

A DEADLY SHADE OF NIGHT

And more to come!

(Image: 'Portrait of a lady in a feathered hat', by James Sant c. 1860 and 'Tea Leaves' by William Paxton c. 1909)

Release Day!!

 I’m celebrating with lots of exclamation points!!!!!

 Today is the day! A DEADLY SHADE OF NIGHT is officially released.

Join Detective Inspector Deverell and Miss Lucy Greenwood as they embark on quite a tangled adventure, in an attempt to solve a handful of mysteries all at once. 

And will they ever make it to the altar?

This is the third book in the Bespoke series, and although it’s not necessary that you read the first two books to enjoy this one, I hope you will want to read them all! BESPOKE (book I) is currently available at a very special price to help you get acquainted with Lucy and her Deverell, if you aren’t already.

So make a cup of tea, shake a martini, or pour a glass of wine; then curl up with your book, or e-reader, and escape to 623 pages of adventure and entertainment. No mask is required and you won’t even have to leave your chair. How can anything be better than that?

I hope you enjoy the latest installment in this series and I can promise you that there are more to come for Lucy and Tolly! 

 Thank you, thank you, thank you for reading.

If you would like to win a copy of A DEADLY SHADE OF NIGHT, please check out my author page on Facebook for some competition opportunities this weekend!

 

Jayne.

(Images: Katie's letter by Haynes King, 1897 and my photo)

Exclusive Excerpt from A Deadly Shade of Night

 Today I'm sharing with you an excerpt from A DEADLY SHADE OF NIGHT (A Bespoke Novel III).

Enjoy!

* * *

Detective Inspector Ptolemy Deverell did not pursue dangerous women. Unless, of course, it was part of his duty and his job. When it came to his personal life, he left such questionable sport— and subsequent headaches— to the other males in his family. They seemed to enjoy it, bless ‘em. He would much rather read a book by the fire, go sailing, or enjoy his own garden, from a bench beneath an ancient, shady tree, with a tankard of beer in hand. Almost anything that he could do alone, actually.

As a consequence of this “eccentric” behavior, there were some in his rather notorious family who considered him to be the most tedious and humdrum fellow that ever breathed. His brothers had gone so far as to suggest he was a foundling. He was definitely, so they teased, old before his time and a “bit of a let-down” for anybody anticipating the usual Deverell mischief and mayhem.

During a parlor game at one family Christmas gathering, he was voted the Deverell “most likely to become a monk.” He was a man of moderate habits and mild manners. He had never ridden a horse across a beach wearing only a wet shirt and breeches. He had never thrown a woman over his shoulder or stormed about, slamming doors and cracking whips. He hardly ever sulked and brooded. At least, nobody noticed if he did.

In short, he was hardly romantic hero material.

And then along came Miss Lucy Greenwood, who had swept into his life wearing tiny, tempting, raspberry buttons; an audacious demeanor; a droll smile, and with the air around her sweetly evocative of cake.

Naturally, she did not wear only the buttons. They were attached to a perfectly respectable dress. But the very fact that this requires confirmation should tell you something of their effect upon the luckless detective.

Today he had entered her kitchen resolved not to look at her buttons at all, for this was no time to be distracted by the details— as was his habit. He must not think of opening any buttons today; he was closing them. Firmly and decisively. To do it properly, he needed his wits, steady hands, and all his words about him.

But despite these intentions and before he could speak at all, he was undone.

Turning to him with arm outstretched, raising her spoon and one slender eyebrow with the same eager anticipation, she said, “Mind you don’t burn your tongue.”

Just like that, in the blink of an eye, the moistening of a taste bud and the breath of a yearning sigh, the goodbye that he had gone there to say was forgotten; the train ticket in his overcoat pocket abandoned to its dark, linty depths. Because he couldn’t leave. He knew, in that moment, for better or worse, that he never would abandon her. He might even ride a horse through the surf one day, getting his shirt and breeches soaking wet and stained with salt in the process, just for her.

Alas, here before him stood the agent of his downfall; the cause of a few sleepless nights and just as many daylight fancies.

Detective Inspector Deverell had faced a plethora of viciously armed and brutally determined villains during the course of his career, but they had nothing on Miss Greenwood wielding a spoonful of jam. It might as well have been a ten-ton weight with which to clobber him about the head and render him insensible.

Mother Nature, like a watchmaker in a mischievous mood when she made Miss Lucy Greenwood, had tucked a secret message into her creation: a little parcel of instructions with a diagram of his mind and body burned upon it. Consequently, this woman took one look at Ptolemy Deverell— “Tolly” to his closest friends— and immediately saw every crack in his armor, every soft spot in his being; all those things he spent his days concealing from the world at large.

She seemed to know all the tricks: everything to cheer him out of a glum mood, no matter how determined he was to be in one. For example, he never knew he had a sweet tooth, until he sampled one of the delightful creations from her kitchen. His only weakness, prior to that, was for jam— a partiality he had never mentioned to anybody— and the way that sticky, sugary aroma invoked memories of schoolboy yearning, hunger pangs, treats and comforts. A single teaspoon of jam was the reminder of a happy childhood home and unspoken affection; all those things that did not need to be said, they simply were. And Miss Greenwood’s raspberry jam was in a class of its own: nectar of the gods.

None of this had he ever expressed to her. Yet, there she stood, today of all days, tendering a spoonful of that precious comestible, to stop him in his tracks and make him stay.

Before he even managed to tell her that he was leaving.

“Whatever is the matter?” she inquired, her spoon halfway withdrawn. “Upon my word! You look like a man about to be knocked down by a charging herd of amorously-inclined dairy shorthorns, and quite stuck to the spot. It’s only jam.”

Only jam.

And now he was in a bit of one himself.

Miss Greenwood was a formidable force, against which he stood no chance whatsoever. In her eyes, an obstacle was merely a challenge from which to learn; a wall, something to be climbed so that she might enjoy the view from a better vantage point, and a great distance between two objects, nothing more than the opportunity to travel between them, in as reckless, exuberant and shocking a manner as possible.

Heedless of his attempts at discouragement, she steadily and fearlessly teased her way under his solemn shell, her mission helped, naturally, by that little packet of information sewn under her skin: a Tolly Deverell Owner’s Manual.

“Miss Greenwood…Lucy.” He stared at her lips, which were as lushly pink, tender and tempting to his taste-buds as the bowl of raspberries that had just tumbled into one of her bubbling pots. “We have known each other now for some months. A year, in fact.”

Her mouth was slightly pursed, eyes bright and curious. In the heat of her kitchen, a routinely wayward coil of hair— the color of burnt sugar and in the shape of a question mark— wafted loose against her nape and collar. “Which, I suppose, since you’re a man and I’m a woman, means you claim the right to take charge and chastise me.”

“Chastise you?” He frowned. “Why? What have you done now?”

“Aha! You will not catch me out, Detective!” She gave an arch smile. “I shall not be caught confessing all my misdemeanors and, in so doing, not only remind you of a few you might have forgotten, but inadvertently draw your attention to those of which you are not yet aware. Doubtless you keep each one neatly labeled and stored away in those little rosewood drawers of your tidy mind. I must have an entire category of wickedness to myself in that cabinet by now. Can you possibly have room yet for more?”

He set down his hat, only to pick it up, fumble with it for a moment, and then put it down again. But he chose the wrong spot for its rest, and her eyes flared when she saw his hat trespassing upon the precious surface of her worktable. At once he swept it up and dusted off the sugar. Thoughtless! He was distracted, of course, and a bag of nerves. Which was not like him at all. On a tight breath, he muttered, “It occurred to me that it might be …I wondered whether…if you could find yourself favorably disposed toward…if you might be prevailed upon—”

“I am never prevailed upon, if I can help it. Sounds painful. Look, Deverell, I’ve got three sponge cakes and a dozen meringues to make. Those egg whites won’t whisk themselves.” She tasted the jam for herself, nodded, and set her spoon on the table. “We’re not characters in a Jane Austen novel, you and I.”

Indeed, he thought, morose. Life was considerably more complex for them. More murder, mystery and marmalade than courtship, candlelit cotillions and carriage rides.

“I enjoy a good romance as much as anybody, but I am not idly meandering my way through a drawing room in search of an untended, defenseless pianoforte and a politely long-suffering audience,” she added with a wry smile. “It’s a sad state of affairs when a stiffly whipped egg white is the only thing between me and the workhouse, but that’s real life for this modern heroine, so please do get on with it. If you did not come to point out my many and varied sins against propriety, yet again, the reason for this curious visit in the middle of the night continues to elude me.”

Sometimes he thought she could talk for England.

“Just be still a moment, Lucy. I shall not distract you for long.” But a tiny piece of his brain, yet retaining some good sense, urged caution. He should consider the pros and cons from all angles. It was not like him to rush into anything. They called him “The Tortoise” and not without good reason.

She, however, was devil-may-care in almost everything she did, from her passion for mail-ordered, impractically lacy Parisian underthings— according to the postmaster’s wife and local gossips— to her plan of opening a sumptuously decorated cake shop and tea room here, on a street traditionally reserved for discreet clubs that welcomed gentlemen only. For at least three hundred years, Charles Place in the ancient city of York had been the preserve of staid tailors, bootmakers and barbers, who strictly serviced masculine sartorial needs only, and of tobacconists, who cultivated a thick cumulus of cigar smoke to keep ladies away. But Lucy had invaded that manly enclave and created within it a chocolate mahogany and strawberry crème, damask shrine to the sweet tooth and gossip.

In her shop, women gathered behind the artful drapes of velvet and silk to eat cake, sip tea, and share conversation, away from prying male eyes and ears. Although men were permitted on the premises, very few confessed enough interest to step beyond that door and see for themselves what the women got up to. Instead, they feigned haughty disinterest, while privately speculating on the contents of those pink boxes, wrapped in gold ribbon, which their womenfolk came out cradling with as much care as they would hold newborn babies. Not to mention the cause of those broad, cat-in-the-cream smiles upon the ladies’ faces.

To Lucy it was evidently all very amusing. Her eyes gleamed wickedly whenever she spied some befuddled gentleman hurrying by the shop with his head down, his coat collar turned up, and his gaze fixed upon the pavement to avoid her myriad temptations.

Of course, she claimed innocence and entirely benign intentions. But she did enjoy being mysterious.

On her shelves she kept several jars with labels that had been badly smudged or worn away, so that nobody but she knew what they contained. He wouldn’t be surprised if one of them was ‘eye of newt’. Whatever it was she put in her cakes and jam, it had made her a darling of the wives of York, while her outspoken ways caused the husbands some grievous stomach upset.

“I do not try to aggravate the male species,” she had said once. “Nor do I want to be a man. And I do not claim to speak for all womankind, for I know many who are perfectly content. I simply desire the same choices and opportunities as those offered to men, and I believe that’s only fair. I believe we should all have options.”

She was never hesitant to say how she felt about anything. Indeed, Tolly had known her only a year and heard all her opinions on everything from women’s suffrage to how many times a cup of tea might be stirred (three and a half spins of the spoon at most) before it became an insult to her ears and cause for a hard stare. Oh, her hard stares were the very worst!

“Women, contrary to popular opinion, are not children, lapdogs, or hysterics,” she had continued. “We are adults capable of sound reason, a useful exchange of ideas, and thoughtful, well-balanced judgment.”

He had laughed. And then, remembering that she was perfectly serious and he should be listening to her words not simply enjoying her expression— the way her eyes filled with tiny flames that danced in their depths and how her dimples came and went— he had made his own face solemn and said, “Oh, votes for women? I thought you said boats. Boats for women. Little round, pink things with frilly, embroidered sails. And presumably a great many life-preservers and flares. Not to mention an enormous compass to help you navigate, or else you’d all get lost no doubt.”

At that point she had approached him, rather menacingly, with an apple corer in one hand, so he had decided to end the teasing with a, “Good lord, that pie does smell delicious, doesn’t it? You must have the hands of an angel to craft such delights.”

In truth, he had no objection to the idea of votes for women. He feared the ladies were destined for disappointment once they had their say, but they ought to have it, all the same.

Really, men were foolish to think it could be prevented. Women like Miss Greenwood would never stand quietly in a corner and pretend to have no opinion, however more convenient it might be for the men if they did.

He should have steered clear of her from their first encounter, when she took unconcealed delight in the idea of being a murder suspect. That was a warning, if ever he needed one.

Before he met her, he would much rather not be the hero of this story, or any other. All he had ever really wanted was a quiet life. Happy to solve other folk’s problems, it was always his intention to avoid any of his own.

But now it was much too late for all that.

He simply couldn’t help himself, when it came to Lucy Greenwood.

His gaze wandered to a pot of tea, sat brewing nearby, a little kiss of steam visible from its spout. Ought to have a knitted cozy tucked over it, he thought, or the contents would get cold. His mouth felt dry. Yes, he could make good use of a cup right now. With something stronger in it for a little extra courage...

Find out what happens next when A DEADLY SHADE OF NIGHT finally falls on Friday, March 5th. Available now for pre-order.

Happy Reading!

(Images: "Raspberries on a Leaf" by Lilly Martin Spencer c. 1858; Vintage dessert graphic; "A Girl Reading in a Sailing Boat" by Edward Henry Corbould c. 1869)