• explicit sexual activity: FMC & MMC have multiple, consensual sexual encounters

• grief due to husband’s death: FMC was widowed a year prior at the Battle of Waterloo and is grieving her husband at the beginning of the story

• grief due to parents’ deaths: shortly before the beginning of the story, both of FMC’s parents die (mother to consumption, father to an unspecified heart ailment)

• PTSD from traumatic bereavement: FMC’s PTSD includes nightmares (described on page) and panic attacks (several of which occur on page but are not depicted in detail)

• discovery of past scars during intimate scenes: during their first sexual encounter, FMC explores scars the MMC acquired as a soldier in the Peninsular War

• legal sex work: multiple non-sexual scenes take place in a legal Parisian brothel, and the owner of the brothel, a French spymistress, is a major supporting character

• gambling: MMC plays cards at a gambling hell while undercover

• sex club: while undercover, FMC and MMC attend a club catering to sexual liaisons and end up in a sexualized situation

• discussions about sexual trafficking: FMC fears that her adult sister has been sexually trafficked (and it is never specified on page what the truth is even once her sister is located); FMC, MMC, and other supporting characters have brief, abstract discussions related to sexual trafficking

• on-page discussion about sexual coercion: an antagonist discusses sexually coercive behavior with MMC while MMC is undercover

• possible infertility: FMC has brief conversation with a supporting character about not having conceived during her first marriage

• pregnancy: FMC realizes during the last quarter of the book that she is pregnant with a much-wanted child