PART 1 Eleanor Vane had been keeping a list since her second season. Not a list of prospects, as her mother would have preferred. Not a list of eligible gentlemen with their incomes and estates and family connections helpfully catalogued. Eleanor’s list was something else entirely: a record of things people said when they thought…
PART 1 The servants of Caldwell House had one rule above all others. Do not look at the Duke’s face. Not the butler, not the footmen, not the maids who changed his linens and swept his hearths. They kept their eyes angled down or away, trained to the floor, to the wall, to whatever point…
PART 1 The carriage passed at exactly half past eight. Clara Voss knew this because she had been watching for it, and because she had learned, in the months since the announcement, to time her mornings around it. The Earl of Aldenmoor kept predictable hours. His carriage left Aldenmoor House each day at half past…
PART 1 There were two kinds of Sundays at Ashford Park. Before Sundays, and after Sundays. Before was the kind where the piano in the east drawing room was played by someone — her mother, before she got sick, and then her father, who was not as good as her mother but who played with…
PART 1 England, 1807. The Duke of Ashmore had not intended to attend the Whitmore dinner. He had not intended to attend anything in particular during what was supposed to be a brief return to London — a matter of three weeks at most, related to parliamentary business that could not be conducted from his…
PART 1 England, 1803. The morning before her wedding, Vera Ashton packed her own trunks. Not because no one offered to help — her mother hovered at the doorway with an expression between grief and triumph, and the household maid had been loitering with intent since breakfast. Vera packed them herself because it gave her…
PART 1 England, 1811. The rumors arrived before he did. That was always the way with Julian Calder, the fourth Duke of Raven’s Cross — the stories reached the room first, arranged themselves into a particular shape, and by the time he walked through the door, everyone present had already decided what he was. Nora…
PART 1 England, 1816. The Duke of Ashbourne had arrived late to Lady Harworth’s spring ball deliberately. He had learned, in the fourteen months since he had done what he had done to Eliza Ashfield, that arriving late to any gathering allowed him to assess the room before its inhabitants could assess him. You could…
PART 1 England, 1808. The letter arrived on a Thursday. Cecily Vane had been standing at the library window of Dunmore Park when the footman brought it in, watching the September rain turn the rose garden into something the estate painters would later call romantic and she privately called melancholy. She recognized her father’s handwriting…
PART 1 The child was watching from behind the third pillar. Eleanor Vane had been hiding there for eleven minutes when the carriage stopped on the gravel drive of Ashworth Park. She could see the wheels from the gap between stone and holly hedge, the horse’s breath making small clouds in the October air, and…
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