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"You had an earlier letter?"

The steward lowered his eyes. "Yes, my lord. I was instructed to establish the writer's credentials before raising hopes which might prove false."

Albrecht nearly demanded the name of the person who had given such an instruction. Instead he looked at the portrait above the mantelpiece. Minna's painted eyes shone with youthful impatience. She had been eighteen when she vanished; the painted girl could not know that her brother would grow grey waiting for news that never came.

"Send for my wife," he said. "And bring every letter. No more decisions about my sister are to be made without my knowledge."

Adelheid found him before the portrait, the documents spread across his desk.

She had practiced gentleness for so many years that it came to her face without conscious effort. She listened as he described the English claim. She touched his shoulder. She asked questions with admirable calm.

"A daughter?" she said at last. "The woman is said to have left a daughter?"

"Yes. Elizabeth Bennet. Twenty years old. She lives with Lord and Lady Matlock in London."

"And Wilhelmine herself?"

"Dead in 1799. She had nearly ten years of happiness, Adelheid. A husband who loved her. A little girl."

He spoke with such grateful anguish that Adelheid felt a sharp, unreasonable anger. This supposed daughter had not even been proved genuine, yet Albrecht was already prepared to grant her a place in the sacred country of his grief.

"It may be a mistake," she said. "Or worse. Families have been deceived by tokens less persuasive than a locket."

"Of course. We must establish the facts. But I remember that locket. Mother kept the miniature secret until Minna's birthday. Friedrich teased her that she would never remove it, and she answered that he might be certain she would not lend it to him."

Albrecht laughed at the old memory, then pressed a hand across his eyes. Adelheid, who had held him through his first terrible grief, recognized how close he was to tears.

"I shall help you discover the truth," she said. "You know I wish only to spare you another disappointment."

"I know." He reached for her hand. "You have borne so much of my sorrow. I do not know how I should have endured it without you."

The praise struck her with the force of an accusation. She withdrew her fingers under the pretence of straightening the papers.

At dinner their son, Wilhelm, noticed that his father had left a dish scarcely touched. Their daughter, Sophie, was occupied with a letter from an aunt; young Wilhelmine, named in memory of the vanished princess, watched the elders more closely than either supposed.

"Has something happened?" Sophie asked.

Albrecht glanced at Adelheid. She gave the smallest nod, knowing that silence would only sharpen curiosity.

"We have received news that your aunt Minna may have survived the accident," he said. "She appears to have married in England. There is a daughter."

Astonishment passed around the table. Wilhelm began asking how a name could be proved after so many years. Sophie wished to know whether the daughter spoke German. Young Wilhelmine put down her spoon.

"Then she would be my cousin?"

"If the account is true, yes."

"I have always wished to have a cousin near my own age," she said. "Would she be frightened to meet us?"

Albrecht smiled. "I cannot say, my dear. But I hope she will not be."

Adelheid forced herself to eat. Her children were already making a place in their imaginations for a woman who might be their ruin. She looked at Wilhelm, who bore the fine features of his father, and remembered how carefully she had once counted the years before Friedrich might marry. The future she had secured now sat innocently at her table, entirely ignorant of its price.

That night she searched the old keys in a drawer of her dressing room. Among them was one to a small cabinet containing letters she had not opened for years. The leather packet inside smelled faintly of dust and dried lavender. She did not untie it. She knew every line of the letters it contained, and there was no comfort to be found in reading them again.

Minna had lived.

That single fact was worse than she had ever imagined. Adelheid had accepted the disappearance as a tragedy she could regret and yet never undo. If Minna lived to 1799, she had possessed ten years in which the memory of Friedrich's last evening might have returned. A husband might have urged her to speak. A daughter might have heard a broken account, too young to understand it then and old enough now to assemble the pieces.