Jane Fawkener looked up from the little blue book in her hands at the two solemn gentlemen seated opposite her in the office of her father's bank. The book's title in ornate gilt script must be a joke, a cruel joke. Surely, she had not journeyed a quarter of the way around the globe for news of her father only to receive the little blue volume.

She found it difficult to breathe, some pressure squeezing her chest, not just the unfamiliar stays. She had come to the bank straight from the Foreign Office where Lord Chartwell, the official in charge of the near East, had shared with her a letter her father had written to his cousin Teddy Walhouse. Chartwell had no letter for her. She had known better than to expect one from her father through such a compromised channel, but from her father's bankers, his most private and secure means of communication, she had expected a letter of her own. Not a book, and certainly not this book.

She turned the worn little volume over in her hands. "Marry? My father wants me to marry?" She tried to keep her voice steady.

Both men nodded with grave and awkward sympathy. She was unaccustomed to pale English faces, but she did not detect in either man any of the signs of duplicity or avarice her father had trained her to recognize, nor any of the indifference with which Lord Chartwell had met her inquiries earlier.

George Hammersley, the older gentleman, had blunt, sober features and black hair peppered with gray, while his son Frank had a youthful, open face in which the same features were softened and refined, but contracted by just a pinch of pain in the expression. The younger man leaned heavily on a cane whenever he stood.

She wondered what they made of her. She did not recognize herself in her borrowed mourning clothes. Before her ship docked, a pair of well-intentioned lady missionaries who had been in Greece to bring translations of the Bible to the warring factions there, had taken her aside and helped her to dress for her arrival in London. Today she wore her first stays, laced tight under three layers of petticoats, and a heavy black gown of a dull, stiff fabric. Her usual clothes, her loose pants and bright tunics, lay folded in her trunk.

George Hammersley cleared his throat. "Miss Fawkener, an entail of this sort is very common in England to keep an estate within a family, but your father's will does authorize us to provide two hundred pounds for your use until such time as you ... marry."

Jane regarded the book in her hands. It could not be all that remained of her father. She could understand why he had not written to her through the Foreign Office, but she could not fathom why he had not sent her a direct message through his bankers. With what composure she could muster, she refrained from flinging the little book on the glowing fire in the grate. It surely deserved all the curses of Arabia.

May you crumble into dust finer than the smallest grains of sand in the desert, may weary asses and camels grind you underfoot, and may the four winds blow the specks of you to the ends of the earth.

Silently, she sent the curse into the fire-warmed air of the office, and wished it up the chimney flue and out into the sky. Her father was missing somewhere along the vast mysterious network of trade and intrigue from the Mediterranean to the Himalayas. The British Foreign Office, which had swooped her up from her father's house in Halab and hustled her onto a ship in Koron Harbor, now refused to help her discover his fate. Instead they promised to bestow upon her father a knighthood and a piece of shining silver that meant nothing. He would be Sir George Fawkener, deceased. Lord Chartwell had turned from her to the paperwork on his desk as if he had already forgotten the existence of her father and expected her to do the same.

But it was impossible to forget one had a father, that he had taught her Greek and Arabic and taken her with him everywhere, that he had been endlessly funny and energetic and reckless and brave, that he'd had crinkles around his clever blue eyes, did magic tricks with his big hands, and filled his pockets with almonds and pistachios.

She had been delayed at the dock while some customs matter was resolved, and while someone apparently searched her trunk. Her father's previous letters remained in her possession, but she recognized from the alteration in the ribbon with which they were tied, that the bundle had been opened. Someone in London was spying on her.

In those circumstances she had felt an unreasonable burst of hope a few moments earlier when the Hammersley's produced a brown-paper package from her father. Whatever he sent through them had escaped the scrutiny of his enemies. But all hope of a personal message from him had died when she unwrapped the little book. Her father had washed his hands of her. Her head felt like mush while her heart felt squeezed in her chest. She stared down at the little book lying on the voluminous folds of her black skirts.

A moment of dizziness overcame her. She was not at sea, not bobbing and dipping in an unsettled way over vast gray waters, but in the grip of an odd uneasiness that had started the moment she stepped off the ship.

The cursed book remained clutched in her hand. She was far from any desert where camels might trample it underfoot. She flipped it open, looking for a message, a word in her father's looping scrawl, but there was no inscription, no hint of his intention. There was, however, a map, folded inside the front cover, along the interior edge of the book's binding. She opened its folds, a map of London in watercolor pale greens, pinks, and browns with the great blue ribbon of the river, the Thames, snaking through it.

She straightened her spine. The map meant there was more to his message than the unexpected advice to marry. His bankers might believe him dead. The Foreign Office might believe it, but Jane refused to believe he was dead without confirmation. After all, he had only gone on one of the trips he had been making for the British government for nine years. He'd always come back before. She just had to figure out what he meant by leaving her the little guide. It had to be one of her father's games, a game she could learn to play.

She closed the book. When she looked up, the motion again triggered that feeling that she was at sea with her chair pitching under her like a rowboat in rough swells.

Frank Hammersley watched her face. "Miss Fawkener, the Foreign Office is sending a protocol officer to take charge of you, but as we are a little ahead of our time, may I bring you a restorative? A glass of wine, perhaps?"

She lifted a hand to refuse the wine, wishing she could refuse the Foreign Office functionary as well. A flock of questions stirred in her head, but the two earnest gentlemen across from her did not look the least bit ready to answer them. They both jumped at a light knock on the office door.

A striking young woman, with a merry face framed by glossy black ringlets, and figure that announced her to be with child, stopped abruptly midstride, looking abashed for interrupting.

"Oh, I beg your pardon. I didn't realize you two were with a client."

"Come in, Violet, my dear." The elder Mr. Hammersley hurried to her side as if she might escape. "You may be able to help us if Miss Fawkener is willing to share her circumstances with you. Miss, Fawkener, my daughter, Lady Violet Blackstone."

Smiling,...