'Tend to his every part in the bath, dear reader, fondle his manly shapes, linger where he seems to most enjoy your touch.'  Elizabeth Dunaway, Unbridled Embraces;

or Fifty Proven Techniques for an Intimate Marriage, 1852

"From now on, Blakestone, you'll just have to watch her like a bloody hawk."

"Of course, Lord Aberdeen." Ross Carrington, the first Earl of Blakestone, was finding it difficult to conceal a snort at the prime minister's unnecessary warning. "However, if I watch her any more closely, I'm liable to cause an international incident. We can't risk that."

And Ross had deflected too many of those lately for his luck to hold much longer.

"Fine, Blakestone, but just don't let her get the upper hand in the situation."

"I won't, Aberdeen," Ross said, "no matter how outrageous her royal demands." Ross turned pointedly from the tall windows that overlooked the wide expanse of Whitehall and its bustling mid-day traffic to look at Drew, a life-long friend who surely understood the royal mind like none other.  The man had married one two years ago. 

Drew leaned back in his chair and laughed in that maddeningly contented, happily married way that had overtaken him. "She's not the least bit shy about asking for the impossible-"

"Exactly what I'm afraid of, Wexford," Lord Clarendon added, dropping into a chair. He picked up a troop report and fanned his wilted face. "We can't bend to her."

"Nor is she at all shy about putting us in one untenable position after another." The First Lord of the Admiralty launched himself out of his chair.  Aberdeen threw up his hands. "Never stopping to consider the cost of her conceit to anyone around her."

"Completely irresponsible," sputtered Lord Weldon.

"Mollycoddled at every turn!" Clarendon shook his fist toward the ceiling.

"Gentlemen, please!" Ross said through his clenching jaw. "Anyone would believe that we were gossiping about a beautiful woman instead of thrashing over the wiles of Mother Russia and her scheming tsar, Nicholas."

"Now, there's a pity we're not, Blakestone." Lord Aberdeen grunted, scratching at his steely grey temple. "At least with a beautiful woman we could dazzle her speechless with a bauble or two. That bastard Nicholas wants the whole of the Ottoman Empire all to himself."

"Careful, Aberdeen," Jared said with a slow grin from the sprawling comfort of his chair. "If you value your life and your fortune, you'll never let my Kate hear you be so flip about a woman."

"Or my Caro," Drew added. "I learned the hard way that an angry ex-princess can be just as deadly as one with a glittering crown and an

empire of her own."

"You'd best take heed, Aberdeen," Ross said, feeling singularly distracted by a curious noise drifting through the window. A clattering

rumble from the direction of Trafalgar Square, though he couldn't quite place the exact nature of the sound.

"No need for your kind warnings, gentlemen," Aberdeen said, "I've partnered both ladies in whist and now refuse to play against them."

Deadlier than the male, Ross was going to say. But he now found himself intrigued by the rising sounds in the street. He pulled aside the

sheering drapes and, feeling like a lunatic, leaned partially out the

window.

What the devil?

A cluster of people had formed up into a parade of some sort at the upper end of Whitehall. Now they were beginning to walk south toward the

Admiralty.

Five abreast, six lines, a limp banner lagging between two of the marchers. And a half-dozen signs being jabbed into the air. None of the

words readable yet.

Utterly amazing!

Because the mob consisted entirely of women.

"I just don't know what's wrong with these young ladies of today," Lord Weldon said in a voice as rattling as the tremors in his hands. "Seem to

have grown minds of their own. No respect for an old man's opinion."

"All the fault of permissive fathers, I say." The Lord Admiral clacked the bowl of his pipe against the fireplace grate. "Give a young woman an

inch and she takes the whole of the street and half the curb."

Indeed, all of Whitehall. Ross nearly laughed outloud as the carefully lettered signage came into sharp focus from the street below.

Women's Rights!

Liberty! Equality! Sorority!

And in the vanguard, one sign was being thrust repeatedly into the air like a galvanizing call to arms, the most preposterous sentiment of the lot:

Votes for Women!

Not only preposterous, but carried by the most enchanting woman Ross had ever seen.

Damnation, she was a lush bite of brazen womanhood. He could see the shape of her clearly, though not the fullness of her face.

Unabashedly golden hair, slashed with pale copper, uncovered and piled in an unruly knot at the back of her head. Bits of curls floated outward

at her temples with the impetuous force of her spirited forward stride.  All that glittering pride held high, her chin perfectly shaped, tipped

toward the world she so obviously resented.

Her splendid bosom was a perfect prow for leading her flamboyant female armada through the shoals of carriages, wagons and horses, that now had to steam their way around them.

"Out of the road, you bloody lunatics!" bellowed a ruddy-faced driver from atop the bench of a wagon load of baled wool.

Though the furious man shook his fist at the leader as his wagon wobbled past, the extraordinary woman offered no reaction. Unless one happened to notice the subtle smile of triumph that perched upon her dazzlingly moist lips.

Or the sunlight that grazed the tips of her hair as she spun gracefully on her heel to face the stalwart troops behind her.

"Women of Britain Unite!" she shouted, thrusting her sign skyward, rousing her followers to a melodious roar.

"Women Unite! Women Unite!" The chant became raucous as the women

stabbed at the air with their signs and their fists. "Unite! Unite! Unite!"

"What the devil's going on out there, Blakestone?" Aberdeen asked from across the room.

"Sounds like the beginning of a bloody riot." Drew was chuckling even before he joined Ross at the window. "Ah, the fair sex at war."

"Terrifying, isn't is?" Ross said, glad that he'd been born a male in these modern times, because deep in his heart he felt a niggling guilt

at the plight of women.

The quashed spirit wanting to be free.

The hidden pride of righteousness.

A heart oppressed and yearning for justice.

"Bloody hell, Jared, isn't that old Tosser Maxton's wife?" Drew gestured out the window at a youngish woman just passing beneath them. "There. In that huge green hat."

Jared joined them at the next bank of windows. "Can't tell, Drew. All I can see is the hat. And one hat looks pretty much like the next to me."

But Ross had definitely recognized the woman as Tosser's wife. "And if I'm not mistaken, gentlemen, the woman beside her is Colonel

Broadhurst's mother."

"Good Lord," Clarendon said with a snort as he gingerly peered over the sill. "Have they all gone mad?"

By now, every man in the room was leaning out the bank of wide opened window panes, first grumbling at the interruption, then blustering at

the outrageous sight of two dozen women marching down Whitehall in a show of all-out rebellion against the men whose pale, ripe faces he

could see in the windows of the buildings across the street.

"What's all this?" Aberdeen bellowed as though from the floor of the commons.

"A protest of some sort, it seems, my lord prime minster." Ross still couldn't take his eyes off the woman who was leading them all. Her

shapely stride so vibrant, her shoulders thrown back in pride.

And so damn sure of herself, he could only stare and wonder who she was.

And wish for her to turn and look up at him, to share the fierceness of her gaze. Just a fleeting glance would serve his curiosity, would bank

the flame that was licking at his loins.

He had a mad wish to know the color of her eyes, the depth of her spirit.

"Do you suppose these women have anything to do with that new ladies club on King Street?"

"Ladies club?" Ross laughed at Drew's outrageous sense of humor and then stopped as he realized that the man was serious. "What ladies club?"

Drew turned toward Jared for confirmation. "It's called the. . . What is it, Jared?"

"The Abigail Adams," Jared said with a bewildered frown and a shake of his head. "Named, I suppose, for the wife of John Adams, who was the

second pres-"

"-the second president of the United States. Yes, yes, I know who the woman was, Jared. What I want to know is why?"

"Why Abigail Adams?" Drew shrugged and sighed. "Don't ask me."

"I mean why a ladies club particularly?" Flaunting their revolutionary notions right under the noses of every man in London. Spoiling for an

unwinnable fight.

Impatient for no earthly reason, Ross leaned out the window to take another look at the ragtag parade and its wily leader. But they were

disappearing around the gentle bend in Whitehall. And his heart dipped, slowed from an acceleration he'd not noticed until now.

"Modern women." The very elderly Lord Weldon tsked and shook his head as he toddled back toward his chair and sat down. "What's the world coming to, I wonder?"

"And what do you suppose the betting book at this club looks like, Jared?" Drew leaned back against the windowsill. "Has it a needlework

cover, I wonder, dripping with pale roses and leaping fawns?"

"More's the point, Drew," Jared said, obviously toying with the older men in the room, unconcerned himself, for his own wife was as

independent minded as the summer wind, "what do you suppose the women find to bet on? When Mrs. Hume will deliver Mr. Hume of a son and heir?"

"Or how long it will take for their eccles cakes to properly rise." "That's just the kind of trouble I need, gentlemen," Aberdeen said,

gesturing toward the street as he returned to the table.

"Meaning what, Aberdeen?" Ross asked, one eye still on the traffic in Whitehall, reluctant to turn from the window completely for what he

might miss below. "Upper class women forming a ladies club and marching on Westminster in broad daylight, demanding we free them from the prison of their husbands, who just happen to be members of the Lords."

"And members of the Huntsman," Drew added.

Jared joined into the fray. "And Boodles and the Carlton and Traveler's."

"You see what I mean, lads. Add women marching in the street to rumors of a war with Russia splattered across every newspaper and discussed in every parlor across the kingdom and that gives me a head ache." Aberdeen gripped the ladder back of his chair with spidery hands as shaky as his hold on the coalition of his government. "Trouble on every front, domestic and foreign."

A man in conflict with himself and a world on the brink of a far-reaching war.

"If it's any consolation, Aberdeen" -Ross handed the man a fleet position chart- "we can lay the blame almost entirely on the Emperor Napoleon. He stirs up a hornet's nest in the Bosporus, taunts Nicholas into a frenzy by moving his fleet ever closer to the Black Sea. Then

coddles the Sultan of Turkey when she screams bloody murder every time Russia herself threatens to over run her territories."

Ross could see it all coming, an international avalanche roaring downhill, day by day. One he could only hope wouldn't overtake them all.

"Though Nicholas is far from innocent in this." Drew leaned back against the windowsill. "He continues to believe that we agree with him, that the Ottoman Empire is doomed and ought to be partitioned off and gifted to each of the Great Powers. With Russia keeping the lion's share for

herself and year-round access to a warm-water port."

Because the tsar had a long memory, of a casual discussion he'd had with Aberdeen himself on the subject. An unofficial, off-handed agreement

that Ross had no intention of bringing up to the prime minister.

"Yes, well-" Aberdeen snorted and waved his hand at nothing. "Nicholas is in for a rude awakening. He's always taken Franz Joseph's support as

unshakable. But with the Russians now sitting on the Danube and hinting of trouble in the Balkans, the Austrians have every right to be

suspicious."

"Gentlemen, according what I saw of the Russian fleet and the French, and the mood on the streets of Constantinople, if nothing changes we are

but months from a war that might well spread across the entire world."

Ross heard a noise across the street and lost his train of thought. He glanced out the window in time to see a detachment of Metropolitan

Police streaming out of Scotland Yard. A dozen officers, followed by three paddy wagons.

And they were heading south on Whitehall.

Surely they weren't going to intercept the harmless parade of women and attempt to disperse them.

A sickly feeling knocked around in his gut, tumbling with the realization that their beautiful leader wasn't the type to disperse without a fight to the finish.

Not that it was any of his business what happened to the woman or her compatriots.

"Ross's recent charts of the various fleets show belligerent movements on the part of all parties, an increased concentration since only three

months ago."

Ross reeled his thoughts back into the meeting. Aberdeen was bent over the maps that Ross had just yesterday brought from his most recent

scouting mission into Europe. Six months of spying and diplomacy.

And not a whiff of peace to be found anywhere, certainly not here in London. Only trouble and more trouble. With the Times crying for war

against Russia.

"So in the meantime," Clarendon said, with a stubborn cross of his arm, "England is forced to sit in place, with Russia perched on the Danube,

threatening Austria, ready to over run Turkey, and all of us waiting for Emperor Franz Josef to instruct his foreign minister to make the next move."

Ross prodded himself away from the window and moved back to the table,

"Buol has been talking about bringing the parties together in Vienna to work out a truce."

"Another one?"

"I know it's a very long chance, Clarendon," Ross said, wondering how the devil he'd suddenly been dropped into the middle of a diplomatic

mission, when his expertise lay firmly, and by his own design, in the military. Where he didn't have to look on the morass of politics up

close. "But it's my assignment to see that the conference in Vienna happens, and that war is averted. At all costs."

Ross reached for the map in the center of the table, having to favor the familiar ache in his left shoulder. A painful break that reminded him

daily of his near-fatal miscalculation a year ago.

"Good, then you're off to St. Petersburg again, Blakestone?" "God, I hope not, Aberdeen," Ross said, willing to do most anything to

postpone another visit to that nest of insanity, "I'm going to start off with a dinner party tonight at the Austrian Embassy."

And hopefully empty his brain of the exotic, thoroughly rousing images of the rebellious woman in the street.

And a dangerous wave of unsuitable questions that he shouldn't be asking.

Completely nonsensical questions like: what does a woman of such obvious free will choose to wear under her sensible fashions?

Surely not whalebone and canvas to straighten her posture, but lace and fine linen, because she's proud enough for a half-dozen women.

And does she dash the sleekness of her nape with pale English rosewater?

Or would he find a tantalizing hint of cinnabar lingering there and across her shoulders, trailing downward, between her breasts?

Not that he planned to find out. He would be far too busy in the next few months trying to avert a war to chase after a stunning woman, no

matter the beauty of the prize.

No matter the force of the temptation.

But the mere speculation had heated the room, steaming at his collar, deepening his breathing.

And making him thankful when the meeting finally ended and he could step out into the cooling evening air with his two compatriots.

"I don't know about Drew, Ross, but I doubt that I'll have time to see either of you at the Huntsman tonight. Kate and I leave early tomorrow

morning for a week at Hawkesly Hall."

As always, Jared was tugging at the bit to return to his London townhouse and his equally impatient wife. Hardly the usual kind of

husband who had been married four years and had a passel of children waiting for them in the west country.

"Caro and I are attending the theatre tonight with a pack of Swedish royalty." Drew rolled his eyes and shrugged fondly. "My favorite kind of

outing, as you well know."

Ross couldn't help but chuckle at Drew's ironic situation. A man who had detested the aristocracy, willingly married himself into a royal pantomime.

Caro was that kind of a woman. The sort that a man would give his life for.

And the entirety of his heart.

If he ever found the proper time.

Or the proper woman.

"Gad, Drew!" Ross said, purposely scattering the images with a clap of his hand against Drew's shoulder. "For an ex-princess, your wife is

still in tremendous demand by the crowned heads of Europe."

"Like bees to honey." Drew shook his head and hoisting his satchel over his shoulder. "Bees to honey. Shall we say breakfast in the morning at

the Huntsman?"

"Thanks," Ross said, leading them out of the courtyard of the Admiralty, beneath an arch in the white arcade. "With any luck, I'll have something

positive to report from my dinner tonight."

Or just another useless tidbit about the growing Crimean conflict to add to the files in the Factory.

Jared and Drew climbed into the cab that the footman had been holding for them and the vehicle sped north on Whitehall, away from the backed

up traffic that was moving slowly in the other direction.

Ross had stabled his horse at the Admiralty livery and had just turned to head in that direction when he noticed the traffic breaking up and

Scotland Yard's three paddy wagons emerging from the fracas.

Curiosity kept him watching from the curb as the wagons, followed by the swarm of policemen, made a flourishing right turn into the alleyway

across the street.

He might have turned away from the fracas, but for a face peering out of a small, barred window in the rear of the last enclosed wagon.

Damnation! It was her.

His rebel.

And though he could feel the winds of change rise up and surge against him, deeply aware of the shift in the turning of the earth, Ross tossed

aside his good sense and strode across the street toward an unknown fate.

He had regretted few decisions in his life.