Chapter One

London, 1814

Many years ago, as a curly-headed youth on grand tour,
he had fallen madly in love with beauty and so had stopped
in Florence to take drafting lessons from a bonafide Italian
master. Starry-eyed and romantical, he had followed the
light-winged muses south to the Bay of Sorrento, where he
had first heard the ancient Italian proverb "Revenge is a
dish best served cold." He was an old man now, without illusions,
cold and canny as a scheming pope. Beauty had
betrayed him, but decades later, oddly enough, here on this
gray English day, the Sicilian proverb held true.

A neat, slight-framed man, James Breckinridge, the earl
of Coldfell, gripped the ivory head of his walking stick in
gnarled fingers that ached with the needling April rain. He
permitted his footman to assist him down from his luxurious
black town coach while another held an umbrella
over him.

The slumbrous quiet in this place was like a church, but
for the pattering of the rain. He turned slowly, looked past
the servants' blanked faces, past the jagged wrought-iron
fence, into St. George's Burying Ground on the Uxbridge
Road, just north of Hyde Park. Three weeks ago, he had
buried his young bride here. Under a chilly gray drizzle,
where the hill curved green, her marble monument rose
like an angry needle to the smoke-colored sky. Beneath it,
just where Coldfell had expected to find him, stood the
tall, powerful, brooding silhouette of a man; wind-blown
and lost, the wide shoulders slumped as the gusty rain
blew his black greatcoat around him.

Hawkscliffe.

Coldfell's mouth flattened into a thin lin