He walked up Swallow Street, trying to make sense of a murder investigation that seemed to be going in three different directions at once. The next logical step would be to speak to Marie-Thérèse, the Duchesse d’Angoulême, herself. But the daughter of the last crowned King of France was currently living at Hartwell House, in Buckinghamshire, nearly forty miles to the northwest of London. Under normal circumstances, he would have driven out there without a second thought. But a journey of that length presented logistical problems for a man whose wife was heavily pregnant with their first child. After careful calculations, he decided that if he left London at dawn, driving his own curricle but with hired teams changed at twelve- to fourteen-mile intervals, he could make it there and back by early afternoon. He altered his direction and turned toward the livery stables in Boyle Street. “Six teams?” said the livery stable’s owner, a gnarled little Irishman named O’Malley who’d made quite a name for himself as a jockey some decades before.
