Lady Killer by Michele Jaffe Page A

shouted into his room. “Corin, who put this bloody hound in my bed?”
    “It’s not a hound, sir, it is a retriever,” Corin corrected in the tone of an authority. “And a very fine specimen; if I might commend my own self in selecting him.” He moved to the bedside, holding out a bowl filled with steaming brown liquid, which Miles grabbed and gulped down. “He crawled in by himself when I went out this morning. Although it doesn’t speak too well for his intelligence, I think he likes you.”
    As if to prove the truth of this statement, the puppy climbed up on Miles’s bare chest and began licking his nose. Setting down the now empty bowl, Miles lifted him off gently and put him back on the bed, where the dog set to work on his fingers. “Would it bother you terribly to explain what the hell he is doing here,” he asked finally, but not as gruffly as he would have liked.
    “He is to be a gift from you to Lady Mariana. Unless you want to keep him. I can find another. It seems that puppies are not much in demand today.”
    “I do not want to keep him,” Miles said with only partial finality as the ball of fur nibbled playfully on his pointer finger. “I would bore him to death. And I think one will be enough in the household.”
    “You might reconsider. It’s so rare to find someone who will put up with you.” Corin answered the look of death Miles sent his way with an innocent smile. Then the smile faded and he added in a more serious voice, “Besides, another one of your guard dogs was killed last night and we still can’t figure out how.”
    Miles’s jaw clenched—that was the fourth one in two weeks—and his eye flitted to the wall behind Corin. To his left was the large clock that led to his attic offices and which showed the correct time. And to his right, on the mantelpiece of the fireplace, stood another clock, the duplicate of the one in the other room. This one’s hands pointed at three.
    Corin noted the direction of his master’s gaze. “That is why I woke you. Something has come up.”
    Miles was out of bed and half-dressed by the time Corin had the clock open. He finished dressing as they ascended, and was tying the last of the laces on his leggings when they reached the landing just below the roof. Without pausing, he followed Corin through an inconspicuous door into a large room, that, despite the absence of windows, was filled with light flooding in from the opaque glass panes that made up its ceiling. Those who had heard of the extraordinary knot-garden Viscount Dearbourn had installed on his roof to please his new mistress three years ago little guessed that the birds its plants attracted were carrier pigeons winging messages across England, or that many of the shrubs were elaborate fakes, below which lay a nerve center far more delicate and far reaching than any set of roots.
    Eight desks were occupied by young men, all of them in the yellow and gold livery of the Dearbourns. They were dressed as footmen, but the papers over which they were poring were not instructions for the running of the household. They were instructions for the preservation of a kingdom. England.
    This was the realm of one of the most trusted of Queen Elizabeth’s advisors. His official title was Lord High Commissioner for Security of the Kingdom but he was referred to by the few who knew of his existence only as “Three”—and then only in whispers.
    The naval victory over the Spanish armada was widely credited to Sir Francis Drake, vice admiral of the navy, and Lawrence Pickering, the hero, but both of them, and everyone at the highest levels of government, knew the real credit belonged to Three. It was Lawrence Pickering who sailed the H.M.S. Phoenix, but it was Three who mapped its course, Three who organized the deployment of the English forces, Three who—by spreading the word that England was five times stronger than she really was and vulnerable in two places that she really wasn’t—managed to