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Something in his face eased into satisfaction, pleased with itself. “I knew it. The moment I saw you, I thought I could not possibly be mistaken, and I was not.”

“Might we speak somewhere less public?” Leonora asked, feeling her heart beat an unusual rhythm.

He inclined his head and led her a short distance toward the window, out of easy hearing of the shop girl but near enough to the other two women that propriety remained technically intact.

Leonora followed him with her pulse climbing. Here, finally, after years of half-answers and dead ends, was a man who spoke of her mother with plain certainty, like he’d actually known her, rather than the careful vagueness she had grown used to from everyone else. She wanted to ask him everything at once. She made herself ask only one thing first.

“How did you know my mother?”

He inhaled sharply. “We grew up a few miles apart from each other, in the country, and were friends for a good many years before either of us had any business being in London society at all.” His voice settled into something easier, more at home. “We rode together as children. Got into no small amount of trouble, the two of us, before anyone decided we were old enough to be separated and made respectable. She had a laugh that carried across an entire field, I remember. I do not think I ever heard her laugh quietly in her life.” He paused, and the corner of his eyebrows caved in. “It was a sad thing, to learn she had passed. When it happened, I understand it came on quickly, an illness of some kind, though I was not given many particulars beyond that.”

The words did not arrive gently. They arrived the way cold water arrives, all at once and entirely without mercy, stealing the breath before the mind had any chance to brace for it.

“I am sorry,” Leonora said, her voice not quite her own. “Lord Brighton, did you say she is dead?”

“She is, yes. Some years past now.” He studied her face, and whatever he saw there made his own expression falter. “Forgive me, I had assumed you knew. Have I overstepped, raising it so plainly?”

She swallowed, hard, and made herself arrange her features into something that resembled composure rather than the thing actually sitting in her chest. “No. No, forgive me, I was only reminded of it rather suddenly. Of course I know. She passed away all those years ago. I had simply not expected to hear it spoken of so directly, by someone who knew her.”

Lord Brighton shook his head. “That was thoughtless of me.”

“It was kind of you, actually, to tell me at all.” She held his gaze, and the effort of it cost her so much, it became a little difficult to breathe. “Thank you for the information, Lord Brighton. Might I call on you, if there is anything further you recall?”

“Of course. Always.” Something warmed in his face again. “My doors are open to the daughter of one of my oldest friends, Miss Ashcroft. I am only sorry I did not recognize you for who you were the moment I saw you at the Camden ball. We ought to keep in touch, you and I.”

She nodded, because she did not trust her voice with anything further, and he bowed once more and left the shop with the same ease he had entered it.

“My dear child.” Marian was at her side almost before the door had shut behind him, her face creased with a concern that had none of its usual briskness left in it. “You look as though you have seen a ghost.”

Leonora opened her mouth, uncertain what she meant to say, and found Lady Byron’s eyes already on her. There was a softness in her face she had not seen there before. She had heard every word spoken by that window. Leonora did not need to be told so twice.

“I am quite well,” Leonora managed. “Only tired, I think, as I said earlier. Might I have the rest of the day to myself, Your Grace? I should like to go home, if you do not mind terribly. I will return tomorrow.”

“Of course, of course.” Marian reached out and pressed Leonora’s hand between both of her own. “After everything, you need… you need to take your time. You did say you were tired, and I ought to have listened the first time instead of dragging you about a shop all morning. Go home. Rest. The cats and I shall manage without you until tomorrow.”

They left the shop together, and Leonora, stepping down from the doorway, caught her foot on the edge of the step and stumbled, her hand flying out for something that was not there.

Lady Byron caught her elbow before she could fall properly, steadying her with a grip considerably stronger than her slight frame suggested she possessed. “I knew a day like this would come, sooner or later,” she said quietly, not unkindly, as she guided Leonora the rest of the way to the carriage. “Look at you now.”

“Lady Byron, I –”

Leonora opened her mouth to say she was perfectly fine, the same thing she had already said twice this morning, and found she could not quite make the words come out a third time. Her chin dropped. The tears came without any warning she could point to, no building pressure behind her eyes, simply there all at once, and she pressed the back of her hand against her mouth as though that might slow them.

Lady Byron did not reach for her, which Leonora was grateful for, since being touched just now would likely have undone her entirely. She simply sat across from her and let the carriage rattle on, offering nothing beyond her presence and a handkerchief produced without comment from her reticule.

“I kept thinking I would feel it,” Leonora said eventually, once she trusted her voice again. “If it ever happened. I thought there would be some sign. Some moment where I simply knew, the way people claim to know these things about family.” She twisted the handkerchief between her fingers. “There was nothing. I was standing in a shop arguing about the color of a hem, and she had already been gone for years, and I had no idea.”

“You could not have known. That is not a failure on your part.”

“I searched for two years. Two years, and in the end a man I don’t even know is the one who tells me, in the middle of a shop.”

“That is not your failing either. It is simply where the truth happened to find you. These things rarely arrange themselves conveniently.” Lady Byron’s voice was quiet. “Did you think to ask him anything further? Where she is buried, or when precisely it happened?”

“I did not think of any of it until we were already in the carriage. I only stood there and… thanked him.” Leonora pressed the handkerchief against her eyes. “I do not know what is wrong with me, that I could not even manage to ask the right questions.”

“Nothing is wrong with you. You had just been told your mother was dead. No one asks the right questions in that moment, and I should not trust a person who could.”

“Do you believe what he told me?” Leonora considered the question properly, turning George’s face over in her memory. “I do not know what I believe about anything anymore.”