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He crossed the room and took her hand. "It will trouble me if it brings you pain. It will not change why I asked you to marry me."

"I am still only Elizabeth."

"You were never 'only' anything to me."

Her eyes filled once more, but she smiled. Lady Matlock kissed her forehead, and Darcy bowed over her hand before taking his leave. When Saye offered to escort her upstairs, Elizabeth was glad of his steady arm.

In her bedchamber, Elizabeth laid the locket upon the dressing table and opened it once more. The portrait had not changed. It was still the dark-haired woman in pearls whom Minna had shown her as a little girl. Yet now the face had a name, and perhaps a family. Elizabeth traced the worn edge of the gold and remembered her mother saying that an unanswered question must not prevent her from being happy.

She was happy. She had the Matlocks and Georgiana and Darcy, who loved her without wealth or rank. Nothing discovered tonight could alter that. But the question her mother had carried into marriage and motherhood might at last have an answer.

Later that night, after the guests had departed, Lady Matlock found Elizabeth standing at her bedchamber window with the locket caught between her fingers. Her face was composed, but she had forgotten to put on the shawl she invariably sought when the room grew cool.

The countess brought it herself. She laid it over Elizabeth's shoulders and waited until Elizabeth spoke.

"I had meant to ask that lady whether she knew my mother's laugh," Elizabeth said. "There were so many questions, and all I could manage was to show her a piece of jewellery."

Lady Matlock did not tell her that there would be other opportunities. She remembered all too well that some opportunities did not return. "Then write the questions down," she said. "We shall send them, one by one, to anyone who might know."

Elizabeth looked at her. "You are not disappointed? If what she says is true, my mother was not who we believed."

"I knew your mother as the woman you remembered, who made you brave enough to argue in two languages. That has not altered."

Elizabeth rested her forehead briefly against the countess's shoulder. Lady Matlock lifted a hand to her hair, then lowered it when Elizabeth straightened. She had no wish to hold her daughter so tightly that the girl could not walk toward the truth when she was ready.

When the room was empty, Elizabeth sat with the locket open in her hand. She tried to imagine Friedrich and Albrecht as little boys teasing their sister, and Minna as the cherished youngest child of a household she had forgotten. She wondered whether she resembled her mother when she laughed, whether Albrecht had Minna's eyes, whether the garden of Falkenried contained a tree she might have climbed as readily as the one at Longbourn.

Beyond the window London settled into the dark. Somewhere across the sea, Minna's brother might still keep a likeness of the sister he believed lost. Elizabeth opened her notebook and carefully wrote his name beside her mother's, leaving space below for whatever else she might learn.

She fastened the locket about her neck and whispered, in the language Minna had given her, "Gute Nacht, Mama."

Then she closed the curtains and went to bed, with a hundred questions waiting for the morning.

ACT III • THE FAMILY MINNA LOST

CHAPTER 18

The Missing Princess

The morning after Countess von Altenfeld recognized the locket, Elizabeth discovered that she possessed an unsuspected talent for waking before daylight and accomplishing nothing at all.

She had opened the little case upon her dressing table so often that its hinge began to protest. Princess Dorothea looked back at her from the miniature with the same composed expression she had worn when Elizabeth was eight, when she was fourteen, when she was sixteen and wished her mother were there to tell her how to be brave. Only now the face had a name. A grandmother. A woman who might once have placed the locket round a child's neck and never imagined that the child would carry it beyond the borders of her country.

A knock came at her door. Elizabeth closed the case before answering, although she could not have said why.

"I have brought you an accomplice," Richard announced from the corridor. "Mother objects to my calling her a gaoler."

Lady Matlock entered carrying a tray, with Richard behind her bearing two books and an expression of exaggerated injury.

"You have not eaten," Lady Matlock said. "And I refuse to allow an interesting question to put you beyond breakfast."

"I had intended to eat," Elizabeth said. "Eventually."

"My dear, eventually is the natural enemy of breakfast. Richard, set those books down and go away."

"Am I not permitted to ask after my sister?"

"You have asked after her three times in ten minutes," the countess said. "She knows you love her. Find your father."