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PART 1 London, 1851 The comment was not made to her face. This was, Margaret Fenwick had come to understand, the particular structure of this variety of cruelty: it required a third party and a degree of proximity that produced deniability. The subject was close enough to hear. The speaker was far enough to claim…

PART 1 The dress had been exiled to the back of the wardrobe for two years. Nora Ashton knew exactly why she’d kept it. Not sentiment — the dress inspired nothing even approaching sentiment — but the specific satisfaction of having something that was genuinely, comprehensively wrong. Brown-gray wool. A silhouette suggesting someone had run…

PART 1 The morning Cecily Ashton became a duchess, it rained. She sat at the writing desk in her father’s study with the marriage register open before her and listened to the rain against the tall windows and thought: this is the correct decision. She had been telling herself this for four days, since the…

PART 1 The whispers began before she reached the top of the staircase. This was, Cecily Marsh had learned over twenty-three years of being herself, the usual order of things. Not the words themselves — she couldn’t hear the words from the landing, and she had stopped trying to hear them some time ago —…

PART 1 The thing about falling is that it happens in three stages. First the moment before, when you still don’t know. Then the moment itself. Then everything after, which is the longest part by far, and the part no one ever talks about. Mirabel Ashton had been at Stage One for approximately three years…

PART 1 He had been back to Aldermere exactly twice in four years. Once for the roof — a structural survey in March of the second year, when his estate manager had written to say the east wing was developing a problem that required the duke’s physical presence to authorize the repair costs. He had…

PART 1 The ring lay between them on a square of dark velvet. It was a heavy thing — old gold, square-cut sapphire, the kind of ring that had been in a family long enough to have opinions. The velvet was the color of dried blood. The light coming through the tall windows of Mercastle…

PART 1 The candles had been burning for forty-seven minutes. Petra Voss knew the number precisely because she had been counting the drips of wax from the nearest candelabra since the twentieth minute, when counting became the only alternative to thinking. The chapel of St. Marguerite’s seated two hundred and sixty. Every seat was occupied….

PART 1 The dare began, as most catastrophic things do, with champagne and a woman named Arabella. Cecily Marsh had been in London exactly nine days when Arabella Voss decided her education was incomplete. “You cannot spend the entire season hovering near the potted palms,” Arabella said, pressing a flute of champagne into Cecily’s hand…