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The name settled into the small office like a stone dropped into still water, and for a long moment Phillipa found she could not entirely account for the chill that went through her at the sound of it.

“Michael Dornet,” she repeated, slowly, as though testing the shape of it in her own mouth.

“Yes, Your Grace. Does the name mean something to you?”

“No,” said Phillipa, and found, somewhat to her own surprise, that this was entirely true, and yet the unease did not lessen for the honesty of the answer. “No, I have never heard it before in my life. I could not tell you why it troubles me so, except that a man who watches children through a fence and will not leave his card, and then produces his name only when pressed for it, is not, I think, a man calling about a donation.”

“No, Your Grace. I did not think so either.”

“You were right not to let him near the children unaccompanied. I want that rule kept absolutely, Mrs. Fairley, whatever excuse he offers for wanting a moment alone with any one of them. If he comes a fourth time, I want him shown to the front room and kept there, and I want word sent to Brawnhite House at once, by the fastest boy you have, whatever hour it is.” Phillipa’s voice had gone quiet and very steady, the particular steadiness she had learned, over a childhood of difficult drawing rooms, to summon whenever the ground beneath her felt less solid than she would have liked. “I do not say this to frighten you. I say it because I would rather be overly cautious about a man who means nothing at all than insufficiently cautious about one who means a great deal.”

“You think he means the children some harm.”

“I’m not sure about it, but I don’t have a good feeling.”

She thought, fleetingly and for no reason she could entirely trace, of Gregory’s face the evening she had first mentioned an unnamed visitor to him.

She put the thought aside for later, because there was, in the meantime, a great deal else in front of her that would not wait.

The orphanage’s growth in the last two months had been, by any measure, remarkable, and Phillipa spent the better part of the following hour touring its particulars with Mrs. Fairley at her side, seeing with her own eyes exactly how far the roof of prosperity now stretched, and exactly how far it still fell short.

The main house was transformed almost beyond recognition from the crooked, cold building she had first walked into more than a year ago. The roof no longer leaked. The kitchen produced meals that did not have to be stretched thin with water and prayer. There were proper beds now, in place of the makeshift pallets that had once covered the dormitory floors three and four to a room, and a physician who came twice weekly rather than only when a child was already past the point where ordinary medicine could help.

But success, Phillipa was discovering, carried its own particular burdens, and the burden here was numbers.

“We have taken in eleven new children since Michaelmas, Your Grace,” Mrs. Fairley said, leading her through what had once been a storage room and was now, by dint of considerable ingenuity and several borrowed cots, a second boys’ dormitory. “Word has gone round, you understand. Every parish charity within twenty miles knows that St. Anthony’s can feed a child properly now, and keep him warm, and see a doctor when he is sick, and so when their own houses are overfull, or their own funds run short, it is here they send the overflow. I do not begrudge them it. I am glad we can take them in. But I confess I do not know where we shall put the next dozen, should they come, nor how we shall stretch the larder to feed them, generous as your donations have been.”

“How many might come, do you think, if the pattern continues?”

“There is no true telling, Your Grace. But I have heard, from a matron I know at a house in Southwark, that they are down to two meals a day for the older children and three to a bed for the young ones, and no roof at all over half the attic since the autumn storms. If that house closes its doors, as I fear it may before spring, every child in it will need somewhere to go, and there are not so very many somewheres left in London that will have them.” Mrs. Fairley’s voice had gone tight with an old, familiar helplessness, the particular exhaustion of a woman who had spent her whole working life doing more with less and had only lately learned what it felt like to have enough, and to fear losing it again. “I do not say this to trouble you further, Your Grace, not after everything you have already done. Only that the need has not shrunk, for all that St. Anthony’s itself has grown so much stronger. If anything, I think it has only made plainer how very much more need there is, beyond these walls, that we cannot yet touch.”

Phillipa stood a moment in the doorway of the crowded little dormitory, looking at the neat row of borrowed cots, at a boy of perhaps eight mending a torn shirt sleeve with the careful, unhurried stitches of a child who had learned early that clothes were not easily replaced, at two younger boys sharing a single primer over by the window, heads bent together in earnest, whispered argument over a word neither of them could quite make out.

She thought of the ballroom at Brawnhite House, glittering and vast, currently standing empty save for dust sheets and the occasional startled footman sent to air it.

She thought of three hundred wealthy, idle people, in silks and jewels worth more than this entire dormitory’s yearly upkeep, all of them capable, every single one, of writing a bank draft that would not so much as dent their fortunes and would change the whole shape of a child’s winter.

She thought of Gregory’s voice in the garden, weeks ago now, asking her plainly what she wanted, and waiting, patient as a tree, for her to remember that she was allowed an answer.

And then, all at once, with the particular sudden completeness of an idea that has been assembling itself quietly in the back of one’s mind for some while before finally announcing itself, it arrived.

“Mrs. Fairley,” she said, rather more abruptly than she had intended, already turning toward the door, her mind racing three steps ahead of her feet. “I must go. I am so sorry to leave in the middle of the tour, but I have had the most extraordinary notion, and I find I cannot wait even an hour to see whether it might be made to work.”

“Your Grace?” Mrs. Fairley hurried after her, bewildered, as Phillipa collected her gloves and bonnet from the office with the brisk efficiency of a woman who has suddenly remembered somewhere she is urgently required to be. “Is anything the matter?”

“Nothing is the matter. Quite the opposite, I hope.” Phillipa paused at the door only long enough to press Mrs. Fairley’s hand, warmly, between both of her own. “I cannot promise anything yet, and I would rather not say more until I know whether it can truly be done. But if I am right, Mrs. Fairley, I think St. Anthony’s may not be the only house in London that need worry about the winter after all. I think, if it is managed properly, we might do something for every crowded, cold, forgotten house within reach of this city.”

She was in the carriage and rattling back toward Mayfair before Mrs. Fairley had entirely finished blinking after her, her mind already crowded with silver and candlelight, with an orchestra and three hundred glittering guests who had never once, in Phillipa’s considerable experience of them, refused a fashionable cause dressed up prettily enough to be worth the telling of it afterward at other people’s dinner tables.

She thought of Mr. Dornet, briefly, and of the strange, watchful way he had looked at the children through the fence, and told herself, firmly, that she would raise the matter with Gregory that very evening, without fail, and not let it slip away from her a second time as she had the first.

But for now, for the length of the carriage ride at least, it was the ball that filled the whole of her thoughts.

She was through the front door and calling for her husband before Drummons had so much as finished taking her bonnet.

“Come.”

Gregory called it without looking up, still turning the same column of figures over in his mind rather than on the page in front of him, and it was several seconds before he registered that the knock which had prompted the word had been fast, and light, and had come twice in quick succession, quite unlike the measured knock of Drummons or the brisker one his secretary favored.