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Had she truly seen her mother standing there in the flesh, or had her desperate, exhausted mind finally snapped, conjuring a phantom out of thin air just to torment her?

She didn’t know, and as she stared into the empty shadows, the terrifying silence offered no answers at all.

CHAPTER NINE

“Iam afraid I cannot help you, miss.”

The jeweller said it before Leonora had even finished explaining, without so much as glancing up from the tray of loose stones he was sorting by candlelight, and she understood at once that this was a sentence he delivered to a great many people who walked through his door hoping for a miracle. She could hardly fault him for it. A man who spent his days fielding claims of long lost family fortunes and forgotten heirlooms had likely developed the same reflex a physician develops toward patients who insist they are perfectly well moments before collapsing.

“You have not looked at what I have brought you,” she said, setting the small box on the counter between them with rather more force than strictly necessary.

“I do not need to look, miss. I can tell you plainly that whatever family legend has sent you to my door, I have heard its cousin at least a dozen times this year alone, and in every instance the piece in question turned out to be paste, or brass dressed up as silver, or a piece so common that half the ton owns its twin.” He continued sorting his stones. “I am not in the business of dashing hopes for sport, but I have learned it saves everyone considerable grief if I do it early rather than late.”

“How admirably efficient of you to have decided the value of my property without troubling yourself to examine it,” Leonora said.

That, finally, earned her a glance. He looked at her properly for the first time since she had entered, taking in her glare and the furrow of her eyebrows she made no effort to hide, and something in his expression shifted from weariness into the more cautious calculation of a man reassessing an opponent he had underestimated.

“Very well.” He set down the loupe with a small, put upon sigh. “Open it, then, My Lady. Since you are so determined I should look.”

Leonora opened the box.

The jeweller’s hand stilled over his tray of stones. He leaned forward, slowly, the candlelight catching the silver leaves and the single deep sapphire at their center, and for a long moment he said nothing at all, which struck Leonora as considerably more promising than anything he might have said instead.

“May I?” he asked, and when she nodded, he lifted the necklace from its bed carefully. He turned it beneath the lamp, studying the clasp, the tarnish along the vine work, the cut of the sapphire, and Leonora watched his face for any flicker of recognition the way she had learned, over the course of a great many disappointing afternoons, to read the smallest change in a stranger’s expression before they had found the words for it themselves.

“I believe that I have seen this piece before,” he said finally.

Leonora’s fingers curled against the edge of the counter. “You are certain?”

“Not entirely,” he mumbled. “But I have handled a great many sapphires in my life and remembers perhaps three of them clearly. This is one of the three.” He set it down with obvious reluctance. “If I recall correctly, there was a woman, years back now. She came in off the street looking as though she had walked the whole way from Cheapside in the rain, her hem soaked through, her gloves worn through at the fingertips. She had this very necklace, or one so precisely like it that I would stake my trade on the two being the same piece, and she wished to sell it.”

“Did not buy it?” Leonora’s eyes widened.

“I did not. It was far too suspicious. A piece of this quality does not generally arrive in the hands of a woman dressed as she was, and a man in my trade who buys first and asks questions after does not remain long in business, and I am no such man. Naturally, I assumed it stolen. I told her so, and not gently, I am sorry to say, and she left without another word.”

Leonora’s stomach had gone cold and tight, and she made herself breathe slowly before she spoke again. “You never saw this woman again?”

“I did, actually. I think that is why I remember this piece. That is the peculiar part of it.” He looked up properly now, and something in his weathered face had softened. “A few years on. Well dressed, that time. Fine bonnet, good gloves, a carriage waiting outside with a crest on the door I did not recognise. She looked, if you will forgive the word, like quality. Like she had never known a wet hem in her life. It was odd.”

“Did she have the necklace with her?”

“No. She asked only after a clasp for a bracelet, nothing of consequence, and I would have thought no more of the visit at all if I had not recognised her face the moment she smiled at the girl minding the door. It is not a face one forgets easily, not after the way our first meeting ended.”

“Did she give a name?”

The man paused to think, then shook his head. “She did not, and I did not ask. It was not my place by then, and I had already lost whatever claim I might have had to being owed one.”

Leonora thanked him with considerably more composure than she actually possessed, tucked the box back into her reticule, and stepped out into a strip of grey London daylight that did nothing whatsoever to improve her disposition.

Her mother had been poor enough once to be turned away from a jeweller’s counter, and prosperous enough, not so very long after, to arrive in a carriage bearing a crest. Somewhere between those two women, the ragged one and the fine one, an entire history was hiding, and Leonora was no closer to it now than she had been an hour ago.

She was still turning the shopkeeper’s words over, walking rather faster than was strictly ladylike, when she collided directly with a wall of expensive wool that had, until that precise moment, been a person.

“Do try to watch where you are going,” said a voice she had come, in the space of a very few days, to recognize with an ease she found faintly insulting to her own good sense.

She looked up. The Duke of Glenhaven regarded her with an expression that managed to be both amused and entirely too observant at once.

Leonora ran her hand over her dress, clearing her throat. “You might extend the same courtesy, Your Grace, given that you are considerably larger than I am and rather harder to avoid on a public street.”