PART 1 Clara Sterling learned two things in the eight years after her father died: how to disappear inside a room full of people, and how to read a column of figures well enough to catch a lie hiding inside it. Her father had taught her the second skill without meaning to. Before his death…
PART 1 Love does not die in a fiery explosion of betrayal. Usually, it dies of exhaustion. For Christine Ashford, the exhaustion arrived on a damp Tuesday in November, at a crowded ball in the Duke of Devonshire’s London townhouse. The air was thick with hot beeswax and wilted freesia and the sour, close smell…
PART 1 The cruelest thing a person can do isn’t to strike you. It’s to stage a joke at your expense — arranged with such care that it strips away whatever scrap of dignity you still cling to. Rain beat against the flimsy glass of the hired hack, smearing the bright greens of the countryside…
PART 1 The candle in the corridor guttered as a hand closed hard around Isolda Marchant’s wrist and pulled her into the shadows behind a marble pillar. She gasped, her heart slamming against her ribs, and looked up into the cold, satisfied smile of Lord Edric Vain. “You will listen to me,” he said, his…
PART 1 The rain came sideways that November, the kind that found every seam in a coat and stayed there. It smelled of wet wool and cold smoke, and underneath it, the lye soap that never quite left Nell Faroh’s hands no matter how hard she scrubbed them raw against her apron each night. She…
PART 1 Somerset mud had a peculiar way of clinging to everything it touched. It caked the wheels of the rented carriage, splattered against the mahogany doors, and seeped through the floorboards until the chill settled into bone. Inside, the air was the opposite — stifling, thick with cheap lavender water and nervous sweat. Lady…
PART 1 The mud of London had a specific quality in November. Thick, greasy, smelling of coal smoke and rotting cabbage. Eleanor Hastings — Lana to the handful of people who still bothered to know her — stared down at the hem of her dark blue pelisse, watching the dampness creep upward, ruining the wool….
PART 1 Grief, Beatrice had learned over three months, was not a weeping fit behind a locked door. It was a muscle. And hers had been flexed so hard, for so long, that she feared it might finally snap her jaw in two. The Pembroke House ballroom was a furnace of beeswax candles and crushed…
PART 1 The frost came early to Ashborne that year, but nothing in the house was colder than her mother’s voice. “You will not embarrass this family any longer.” Victoria Hail stood in the drawing room she had been raised in, watching her father refuse to meet her eyes. Three years of marriage. Three years…
PART 1 The invitation arrived on a Wednesday, in the Duke’s own handwriting, and that alone was enough to make Eleanor go still before she broke the seal. Four years of marriage. Four years, and the Duke of Ashford had spoken to his wife almost exclusively through his secretary — notes about household expenditure, a…
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