Tiernan Ravell came back to the alcove with his coat over one arm and his voice pitched low.
Tiernan: Thaddeus March inspects the Ravell collection tonight.
The name went through the hall like a cold draught. Rosamund kept wiping the oil off her fingers.
Rosamund: Tonight.
Tiernan: In four hours. Before a single piece goes to the gala.
She remembered the man in the charcoal suit who had watched her from across the hall. Her skin had prickled then, and it prickled now.
Tiernan: He verifies everything. If the Ashgroves hid your trust, he will find the seam.
Behind them, the pearls stopped clicking.
Serena: Thaddeus March. In my house.
Tiernan: The Ravell town house, Mrs. Ashgrove. And you will be standing in it.
Yvette had come up beside her mother. Her pretty face had gone the color of old milk.
Yvette: Mother. If he asks about the locket, what do we say?
Serena: We say nothing. We smile and we stand where we are put.
Her hands closed on her evening bag until the clasp bit her palm.
Across the hall, Thaddeus March put on his coat and did not look at the Ashgroves at all.
Thaddeus: Cancel nothing. I want to see that room before the city does.
He had watched a maid file a chipped gear and wake a dead machine, then hand a signed lie back to the man who wrote it.
He did not know her name. He meant to.
The Ashgrove drawing room smelled of hot wax and nerves. Serena walked it end to end and counted her mistakes out loud.
Serena: The report. The locket. The trust. All of it in one room with that man.
Yvette: Kit would have to speak, and Kit is nobody.
Lyle stood at the window with a full glass in his hand and did not drink it.
In the passage, Rosamund worked the tarnish off the stair rail with a tin of polish and a soft cloth.
Nobody had told her to stop.
Lyle found her there. He took the cloth out of her hand and dropped it on the floor.
Lyle: You. You put on a show tonight in front of half the city.
Rosamund: I fixed a machine.
Lyle: You opened your mouth. That is what you did.
His backhand came flat and fast across her mouth. Her head turned, and blood came warm over her tongue.
Lyle: Filth. That is all you are. Filth I let sleep under my roof.
Serena stood in the drawing room doorway with Yvette at her shoulder, and neither of them said a word to stop him.
Lyle: Say it. Say what you are, so the house hears it.
Rosamund: I am the girl your mother took a wage to keep.
His hand closed on her jaw and squeezed until her teeth cut her cheek.
Lyle: If you say one word to March, I will have you in a ward by morning and nobody will ask why.
She believed him. She had believed him before, and he had been right.
He let go and walked away, and the drawing room door shut behind him.
Rosamund picked her cloth up off the floor and went back to the rail.
Her lip was bleeding. She polished.
The blood made a small brown stain on the silver, and she rubbed it out with her thumb.
At the gate, a black car stopped and its engine went quiet.
Thaddeus March stepped out into the lamplight, and every window of the house went still.
The front doors opened, and the Ashgroves bent to him like grass under wind.
Rosamund stood at the foot of the stairs with blood on her mouth and her chin up.
She wanted him to look.