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PART 1 The chaise longue was four feet long. Cecily Marsh, aged nineteen, now by the authority of the Church of England and a great deal of paperwork the Duchess of Hartwell, noted this with a precision she had not possessed six hours ago when she was merely a girl from Gloucestershire standing at an…

PART 1 The resolution came to Emmeline Barrow on the last night of December, at precisely the moment when everything went quietly, irrevocably wrong. She was sitting at the far end of the dinner table at Clarendon Park, listening to her brother Henry tell a story about a horse, and she had just — with…

PART 1 The execution order was already signed when he arrived. Lord Commissioner Edmond Vail had signed it himself three days ago, in the study of Merton Hall, without reading the physician’s report all the way through. The woman had confessed. The room had been locked. The evidence was plain. He had signed, sealed, and…

PART 1 Clara Ashford had a system. Every ball, every assembly, every glittering event to which her position as the daughter of Viscount Ashford required her attendance — she had a system for all of them. She arrived early enough to map the room. She identified the columns, the window embrasures, the slightly recessed doorways,…

PART 1 The morning Liam Cruz arrived on the island of Dalisay, every girl in Barangay Maliwanag was at her window. He did not arrive quietly. He arrived in the back of a tricycle with three oversized suitcases and earphones in, staring at his phone with the expression of someone who has been told they…

PART 1 They said the Duke of Ashmore was dying. They said it with relish — over teacups, across dining tables, in the particular undertone of people who find another’s decline entertaining. They said the marks on his skin were spreading. They said the physicians had given up. They said servants did not stay long…

PART 1 The night Helena Voss finally ran out of things to sacrifice, it was raining. She was standing at the window of their borrowed drawing room — the Ashworth townhouse, lent for the season by a cousin who had gone abroad and left it smelling of camphor and neglect — watching her two younger…

PART 1 Eleanor Marsh arrived in London at the worst possible time. Not the season — the season was fine, the streets alive with carriages and fashionable traffic, the sky doing its best impression of cooperation. What was wrong was the timing of her appearance at the Ravensworth Assembly, which occurred approximately three minutes after…

PART 1 She heard it through the library wall. That was the detail that stayed with Nora Ashwell afterward — not the words themselves, devastating as they were, but the mundane physical fact of thin plaster and cold air. She had been on her side of the wall, reaching for a volume on the upper…

PART 1 The cathedral was full before she arrived. This was how it always went with the Hartwell family — everything was public, everything was attended, everything was witnessed by every person who mattered and several who did not. Elise Hartwell had been raised to understand that her life was, in a meaningful sense, not…