Jaikie had recovered his bodily vigour, but never in his life had he felt so nervous. The thought of Alison shut up in Mastrovin’s den gnawed like a physical pain. The desperate seriousness of his mission made his heart like lead. It was the kind of thing he had not been trained to cope with; he would do his best, but he had only the slenderest hope. The figure of the Countess Araminta grew more formidable the more he thought about her. Alison at Tarta had called her the Blood-red Rook—that had been Lady Roylance’s name for her—and had drawn her in colours which suggested a cross between a vampire and a were-wolf. Wild, exotic, melodramatic and reckless—that had been the impression left on his mind. And women were good judges of each other. He could deal with a male foreigner like Ashie wh
