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      For Martha, Mary and Anne, and for all who sailed with us

       around Spitsbergen on the Professor Molchanov.

       Thank you for an inspirational voyage!

      With a host of furious fancies

       Whereof I am commander,

       With a burning spear and a horse of air,

       To the wilderness I wander.

       By a knight of ghostes and shadowes

       I summon’d am to tourney

       Ten leagues beyond the wild world’s end.

       Methinks it is no journey.

      —From Tom O’Bedlam’s Song, anonymous, circa 1600

       Chapter 1

      Definition: A Grasswidow (or Grass-widow, grass widow) is a wife whose husband will return after a limited period of time away, usually after a voyage. The “grass” refers to the mattress which used to be filled with grass. The “widow” is left back on the grass/mattress. It might express the idea that the abandoned lover has been “put out to grass.” The term is applied “with a shade of malignancy,” a tantalisingly opaque comment.

       London-May 1811

      HE WAS LATE. Eighteen months late.

      Alex Grant paused on the steps of Lady Joanna Ware’s London town house in Half Moon Street. If he had expected to see any signs of mourning then he was sorely disappointed. No black drapes shuttered the windows and the presence of a large silver knocker on the door indicated that visitors were welcome. Lady Joanna, it seemed, had already thrown off her widow’s weeds a bare twelve months after word of her husband’s death must have reached her.

      Alex raised the silver knocker and the front door opened smoothly, silently. A butler, saturnine in black, stood in the aperture. It was well before the acceptable hour for calling. The butler somehow managed to convey this information-and his disapproval-with the mere twitch of an eyebrow.

      “Good morning, my lord. How may I help you?”

      My lord. The man did not know him and yet had managed to place his social standing with some accuracy. It was impressive. It was exactly what Alex would have expected from the butler of so prominent and celebrated a society hostess as Lady Joanna Ware. The greeting was also less than welcoming, warning him, perhaps, that Lady Joanna was not accessible to any old member of the hoi polloi who sought her company.

      “I would like to see Lady Joanna, if you please,” Alex said.

      It was not strictly true. He had very little desire to see Lady Joanna Ware; only a strict sense of duty, the obligation owed to his dead colleague, had prompted him to come and pay his respects to the widow. And seeing the lack of mourning, barely an acknowledgment that she had lost so eminent and respected a husband as David Ware, had made Alex’s hackles rise and his wish to renew his acquaintance with Lady Joanna dwindle still further.

      The butler, too well trained to keeping him standing on the step like a tradesman, had stepped back to allow him access to the hall, although his expression still showed considerable doubt. The black-and-white marble-and-stone checkerboard floor stretched elegantly to a curving stair. Two liveried footmen, identical twins, Alex observed, over six feet tall, stood like statues on either side of a doorway. And from the room behind them carried the sound of a raised feminine voice that

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