The words had tumbled out almost before she could stop them. The moment they did, she realised she'd been rather more transparent than she'd intended, and her cheeks flushed a shade warmer still.
"I'm sorry — I didn't really mean anything by it, I just..."
"Hmm..."
Russell considered this for a moment, with the air of a philosopher wrestling gravely with some great unsolved problem of the age.
"Since Your Highness puts it that way, I find I can't think of a single reason to refuse."
Louise blinked, caught off guard — and then a light kindled in her eyes.
A moment later, she heard Russell's voice again:
"Since sleep won't come, Your Highness — shall we go for a walk?"
"...?"
The girl bundled in the duvet blinked again, clearly not having anticipated this particular turn of events.
"Go for... a walk?"
"Not far at all — just within Buckingham Palace, the places you usually visit. What do you say?" Russell smiled. "As it happens, this is my first time here."
"But..." The suggestion had plainly caught Louise's interest, though she kept up a show of hesitation. "What if someone sees us... what then?"
Her voice was small, and there was worry in it — but beneath the worry, something far more telling: the barely-suppressed thrill of someone who very much wanted to say yes.
A quiet laugh came from Russell's direction, slightly muffled by the mask, yet somehow all the more distinct for it.
"Your Highness — if I couldn't manage a simple moonlit stroll with a lady without getting caught, what right would I have to call myself Phantom Thief Moriarty?"
He extended his hand in an elegant gesture of invitation.
"So — would you care to accompany this rather presumptuous intruder, and let him show you the sights of a place you know by heart, but perhaps have never seen at midnight?"
The girl's heart hammered against her ribs.
Her better judgement told her to refuse. Everything that had happened tonight was already more than enough — she had seen the idol she'd been dreaming of, and not a soul had been disturbed. That was sufficient.
But... was it really?
The tide of feeling rose and swept that small, sensible voice clean away.
She looked at that black-gloved hand reaching toward her, hesitated for one last moment — and then, at last, placed her own small hand gently into it.
Russell's fingers were long and sure, and even through the glove she could feel something unmistakable — a warm, unhurried certainty that brooked no argument.
He did not take the door.
He led her back across the room to the tall floor-to-ceiling window. With one hand he pressed lightly on the frame, and the window slid open in perfect silence, widening into the night.
The evening breeze swept in at once, carrying with it the fragrance of roses from the garden below, stirring Louise's golden hair and the hem of her silk nightgown.
"It may be a little cold," Russell said, and reached with his free hand to lift a thick cashmere shawl from the nearby stand, draping it around her shoulders with quiet care.
Then, before Louise had a moment to react, she felt the floor drop away beneath her — she had been swept clean off her feet, gathered up in his arms.
"Oh —!"
She let out a startled little cry and, on pure instinct, flung both arms around his neck.
"Forgive the impertinence, Your Highness." Russell's voice was close, touched with an apologetic smile. "The stairs are too slow, and far too easy to be spotted on. We'll take a faster route."
He carried her to the sill, stepped up lightly, and leapt.
The sudden weightlessness made Louise squeeze her eyes shut on instinct. But the plummeting terror she had braced for never came. Instead, they traced a long, graceful arc through the air — like a feather drifting on the dark — and landed softly on the lawn of the garden below.
Only when she felt the give of grass beneath her feet did Louise dare to open her eyes, slowly.
She found herself standing in her favourite rose garden.
All the vivid, busy life of the daytime had been stripped away by moonlight, leaving only a still, silver-grey world of silhouettes and shadow. The air was cool and clean, threaded through with the mingled scents of earth and blossoms.
She knew this place entirely — and yet, right now, it felt like somewhere she had never been before.
"This is... the rose garden," Louise said softly, almost to herself.
"I'm not familiar with it, I'm afraid — so from here, I may have to trouble Your Highness to serve as my guide." There was a gentle, encouraging note in Russell's voice. "Do you think you can manage?"
"I — yes, I can!"
The girl gave a firm, resolute nod — as though the force of it might lend her some extra courage.
She stepped forward, and took up the role in earnest.
"This way — I know a path that almost no one uses. It leads to the greenhouse." She pointed to a narrow lane winding through the heart of the rose garden, laid with pale white pebbles that curved in the moonlight and disappeared into the deep shadows of the trees ahead.
"Then I leave myself entirely in Your Highness's capable hands."
Russell fell into step just behind her, deliberately half a pace back, ceding the lead to her completely.
Louise walked ahead. At first she carried herself with a certain careful stiffness, spine very straight.
But the novelty of it worked on her quickly, and the nervousness began to dissolve.
No lady's maid trailing behind her. No guards keeping watch. None of those suffocating layers of court protocol she had been born into.
This was the first time she had ever walked so freely through a place she had always called home.
She could hear, with perfect clarity, the soft crunch of her own light footsteps on the pebbles — and beneath that, the steady, unhurried cadence of Russell's footfall, so at ease in the dark that it seemed almost part of the night itself.
"Roses at night are so different from roses in the day."
She paused beside a full bloom, speaking the thought aloud before she quite meant to.
The petals that were so vivid and pink in the sunshine had lost every trace of colour under the moon; only silver and grey remained, as though a faint frost had settled over them.
"Yes," came Russell's voice from beside her. "Moonlight takes away the colour — but it makes the fragrance purer. Some things become clearer when you close your eyes and feel them instead of looking at them."
Louise paused at that. Then, taking her cue from him, she closed her eyes.
Sure enough — the moment her sight was gone, the rose fragrance seemed to deepen and multiply all at once, wrapping around her and filling her lungs. It was a sensation wholly unlike anything she had known before.
They followed the path to its end and arrived before the vast glass greenhouse.
In the daytime, this place was perpetual spring — warm and bright, filled with rare and curious blooms gathered from every corner of the world. But at this hour it crouched in the darkness like a great crystal beast, lightless within, its glass dome catching only the faint and distant glimmer of stars.
"We can't go in," Louise said, a note of genuine regret in her voice. "The door is locked from the outside — and there's an alarm inside."
"Your Highness is aware, I'm sure, that for me there is no such thing as a locked door." Russell smiled.
Louise caught his meaning at once — but after a moment's thought, she shook her head.
"Let's not cause any more trouble for the others than we already have. Shall we go somewhere else, Mr. Moriarty?"
"Of course," Russell said agreeably. "Whatever you wish."
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