The Purloined Heart (The Tyburn Trilogy) Read Online Free

room was deserted, save for the footman stationed at the sideboard. Maddie selected poached eggs on toast accompanied by cold ham; collected the newspapers and chose a chair. Sir Owen believed in being well-informed. She could peruse the Morning Chronicle, the leading Whig daily, much of its content supplied by journalists labeled as radicals; the Examiner, which had published a diatribe against the Prince Regent that resulted in the writer, Leigh Hunt, and the editor, his brother John, being sentenced to two years in gaol; the Morning Post , a Tory publication ever since Prinny took a share in the paper under the terms of a libel settlement several years past; or The Times, which to its credit refrained from slandering anyone not in public or political life.
    Maddie knew a great deal about Tories and Whigs, due to Sir Owen, who was the former and prone to make his unflattering opinion of the latter known.
    The city parks, from all accounts, were a-bustle with preparations for the Great Fair. The Examiner reported that five hundred men had been set to work to produce the ‘most brilliant fireworks ever seen in this country.’ The Morning Post promised spectacles of unparalleled splendor. Lamenting ‘Alas! To what are we sinking?’ the Times —  amid ominous references to debauchery, drunkenness, and abominations —  condemned the gingerbread stalls, the facilities for selling ale and gin, and the scanty precautions against the intrusion of a violent mob.
    In a change of pace, the wife of a certain butcher had delivered her twenty-sixth child.
    At last Maddie found a description of the Burlington House masquerade. Princess Caroline, perhaps due to her husband’s efforts, hadn’t numbered among the guests; Caro Lamb had drunk more than was prudent and persuaded a Guards officer to strip off his scarlet cloak. There was no mention of a hostile encounter between an Egyptian pharaoh and an English king.
    Maddie shoved aside her eggs and toast and ham. Maybe she had imagined the whole thing, result of those six glasses of iced champagne. Maybe she hadn’t seen murder, or at least mayhem, committed; hadn’t been pursued by a pharaoh and rescued by a handsome rogue —  she assumed he was handsome; he certainly possessed a splendid jaw and chin —  who charmed her so thoroughly that she quite forgot the pharaoh, and kissed her so well she barely recalled her own name.

Chapter Four
     
     
    There are certainly not so many men of large fortune in the world as there are pretty women who deserve them.  —Jane Austen
     
     
    “As I recall my mythology,” said Lord Saxe, “Diana turned Acteon into a stag. Result of him seeing her naked, I believe.”
    “It was Artemis, not Diana,” interjected the third occupant of the study. Both Kane and Angel looked at the Foreign Secretary, Viscount Castlereagh. “Artemis was bathing in the woods when Acteon happened upon her. Naturally, he stopped and stared. She punished this impudence by forbidding him to speak. When he heard his hunting party approaching, Acteon called out to them and as a result was changed into a stag, at which point his hounds set on him and tore him to pieces. Now may we please return to the business at hand?” The Burlington House bal masque was a matter of interest at No. 16 St. James’s Square.
    “One of Diana’s nymphs, sworn to chastity.” Angel had put aside his satin and lace in favor of fawn-colored inexpressibles, brown coat, gleaming Hessian boots. “I am fortunate to have survived. As are you both fortunate, for otherwise I would have been unable to answer your so-urgent summons today.”
    Lord Castlereagh was not prone to amusement, an unsurprising circumstance given the various difficulties that beset him. Instrumental in negotiating the quadruple alliance between the United Kingdom, Austria, Russia and Prussia against marauding France, he was now responsible for preventing the Grand Coalition from falling apart as result of internal