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Do this for us and I’ll make certain your name is cleared with Pendleton and the others.’
                  ‘They probably wouldn’t believe you.’  Moraven shrugged carelessly.  ‘It hardly matters after so long – but if Renard is the one I’ll be pleased to do as you ask.  He betrayed us in Spain and ten or more men met their deaths because of him.  I owe him for that.’
                  ‘Good man.  I knew you wouldn’t let us down.’
                  Moraven smiled grimly.  ‘If the man who was terrorising nuns and children was the man who had betrayed his comrades, he would be killing two birds with one stone.
                  He’d been following a lead when he came to Paris three weeks earlier, but some discreet inquiries about the Comte Devallier had met with a brick wall.  As soon as the name was mentioned, faces went blank and people avoided his eyes, even crossing the road rather than be seen talking to him.  It seemed that just the name was sufficient to throw fear into his informers.
                  However, if Devallier and Renard were the same man, and he had every reason to believe it so, he might just have stumbled on a clue.  A man like Renard wouldn’t take kindly to children being stolen away from him, especially if the nuns were taking in all those they could find on the streets.  In time he was going to try taking them back – and in doing so might just reveal his hand.
                  Of course, the added bonus of a beautiful woman made the quest all the more interesting.  Something about Constance Hatherstone made him suspect that she had not always been in service.  She said her father had been a language teacher but he was also a gambler.  The question was, who was he before his gambling brought him to such a position – and who was the girl’s mother.  The reason she’d been so easily accepted as the comtesse was because she was clearly a lady.  The story she’d told him was only a part of her mystery and he found he was intrigued.
                  Smiling and despite his determination not to sleep, he found himself drifting away.
     
     
    Constance lay wakeful for a while but then she too slept.  It was morning when Heloise brought a tray of hot chocolate and bread rolls with honey into her room.  Constance sat up as the old woman put the tray across her lap.
                  ‘He’s here in the house,’ Heloise said.  ‘Nearly frightened the life out of me – it’s the man who came to the door when you went out last night, madame.  He says you know he’s here?’
                  ‘He refused to leave,’ Constance said, stifling a yawn.  ‘I stole his purse and he made me tell him why.’
                  ‘God have mercy!’  Heloise crossed herself.  ‘Isn’t it bad enough that you risk being unmasked as an impostor night after night?  Have you run mad that you stole a man’s purse?  And such a man!  You foolish girl.  You will ruin yourself and for what – a pack of children who will go back to the streets the moment the nuns turn their backs.’
                  ‘You don’t mean that,’ Constance said.  ‘If you’d seen little Lucille when she first came to us…she was so thin and ill.  She would have died if the nuns had not nursed her.’
                  ‘That’s all well and good,’ Heloise grumbled.  ‘But if you start stealing purses you will end with a rope about your neck.’
                  ‘Yes, I know.  It was wrong and foolish of me.  I shall not do it again.’
                  ‘What does this man want of you?  He won’t let you take his purse for nothing – a man like that always wants payment.  Did he spend the night in your bed?’
                  ‘No!’  Constance was angry.  ‘You should know I would never do such a