Chapter One
All in the Family

London, January 1758 The Society for Appreciation of the English Beefsteak, A Gentlemen's Club

To the best of Lord John Grey's knowledge, stepmothers as depicted in fiction tended to be venal, evil, cunning, homicidal, and occasionally cannibalistic. Stepfathers, by contrast, seemed negligible, if not completely innocuous.

"Squire Allworthy, do you think?" he said to his brother. "Or Claudius?"

Hal stood restlessly twirling the club's terrestrial globe, looking elegant, urbane, and thoroughly indigestible. He left off performing this activity, and gave Grey a look of incomprehension.

"What?"

"Stepfathers," Grey explained. "There seem remarkably few of them among the pages of novels, by contrast to the maternal variety. I merely wondered where Mother's new acquisition might fall, along the spectrum of character."

Hal's nostrils flared. His own reading tended to be confined to Tacitus and the more detailed Greek and Roman

histories of military endeavor. The practice of reading novels he regarded as a form of moral weakness; forgivable, and in fact, quite understandable in their mother, who was, after all, a woman. That his younger brother should share in this vice was somewhat less acceptable.

However, he merely said, "Claudius? From Hamlet? Surely not, John, unless you happen to know something about Mother that I do not."

Grey was reasonably sure that he knew a number of things about their mother that Hal did not, but this was neither the time nor place to mention them.

"Can you think of any other examples? Notable stepfathers of history, perhaps?"

Hal pursed his lips, frowning a bit in thought. Absently, he touched the watch pocket at his waist.

Grey touched his own watch pocket, where the gold and crystal of his chiming timepiece--the twin of Hal's--made a reassuring weight.

"He's not late yet."

Hal gave him a sideways look, not a smile--Hal was not in a mood that would permit such an expression--but tinged with humor, nonetheless.

"He is at least a soldier."

In Grey's experience, membership in the brotherhood of the blade did not necessarily impute punctuality--their friend Harry Quarry was a colonel and habitually late--but he nodded equably. Hal was sufficiently on edge already. Grey didn't want to start a foolish argument that might color the imminent meeting with their mother's intended third husband.

"It could be worse, I suppose," Hal said, returning to his moody examination of the globe. "At least he's not a bloody merchant. Or a tradesman." His voice dripped loathing at the thought.

In fact, General Sir George Stanley was a knight, granted that distinction by reason of service of arms, rather than birth. His family had dealt in trade, though in the reasonably respectable venues of banking and shipping. Benedicta Grey, however, was a duchess. Or had been.

So far reasonably calm in the face of his mother's impending nuptials, Grey felt a sudden drop of the stomach, a visceral reaction to the realization that his mother would no longer be a Grey, but would become Lady Stanley--someone quite foreign. This was, of course, ridiculous. At the same time, he found himself suddenly in greater sympathy with Hal.

The watch in his pocket began to chime noon. Hal's timepiece sounded no more than half a second later, and the brothers smiled at each other, hands on their...