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Mrs. Saunders was taking her time leaving—a person didn’t become an effective housekeeper without being at least a little nosy—so what choice did Diantha have but to ask, “Do you still take your tea with three sugars and a generous splash of milk, Mr. Hill?”

Mrs. Saunders finally left as Diantha poured. Mr. Hill took several leisurely slurps before saying, “Thea was always talking about how clever you were. I assume you grasp the meaning of my recitation of your letter.”

“I’m not sure I do,” Diantha said, though of course that wasn’t true. His meaning was blackmail, but she wanted him to spell it out. Perhaps she held out some faint hope that hearing his own vile plans aloud might inspire shame.

“You will marry me, or I will make the contents of this letter public.”

There it was, and with no shame whatsoever. “No one is named in that letter,” she tried, knowing the point was weak.

“You are named. You signed it. You, Miss Diantha Brown, companion to the Dowager Countess of Harcourt—whose husband was very much alive in the summer of 1808.”

Dread, heavy and acid, was spreading through Diantha’s gut.

She wanted to ask again why he had set his sights on her. But perhaps it wasn’t so mysterious. Perhaps he couldn’t get anyone else. Barbury was a very small place. It was possible that, two wives in, everyone knew him for the blackguard he was. Blackmail may be all he had, a sort of macabre reverse dowry.

“You are a single, respectable woman. I am in want of a wife.” He downed his tea in several more slurps, clattered his empty cup into its saucer, and stood. “I shall return in six months’ time, at which point you will accompany me to Barbury for the reading of the banns, or I shall ruin the reputation of your beloved Lady Harcourt—and all the rest of them.”

Mr. Hill wasn’t gone thirty seconds before Mrs. Saunders appeared under pretext of collecting the tea things, though typically she would have dispatched a maid for such a job.

“Who was that?” she inquired with a studied casualness.

“That,” Diantha said, “was my only living relation.”

She braced herself for an expression of shock, and it came, though Mrs. Saunders was nothing if not in control of the outward display of sentiment. Instead of a gasp, she exhaled slightly more vehemently than usual, almost as if she were whistling—though Mrs. Saunders would never do anything so vulgar as whistle.

Being a lady’s companion was a curious thing. It required one to have no relations of means, but also to come from a respectable family.

Diantha wasn’t dim. She understood that respectability and means were not the same thing. She understood—intimately, viscerally—the concept of genteel poverty. It was just that it had always struck her as a maddening paradox. She had secured her position as companion to the Countess of Harcourt by virtue of Diantha’s mother, the daughter of a baronet, having been a childhood friend of the lady. Barbury, where Diantha had grown up, wasn’t too far from Mollybrook, the Harcourt country estate.

“That was my only living relation by marriage,” Diantha clarified. “Mr. Hill was my late sister’s husband. He was for a time my guardian.”

“How nice. I hope he is well.”

I hope he is well meant What did he want?

Diantha considered her options. She could take the housekeeper into her confidence. Mrs. Saunders was clever, and, Diantha suspected, a veritable font of secrets, as effective housekeepers tended to be. Perhaps she would be able to think of a way out of this dilemma.

But no. She would keep her own counsel for now. Six months was a long time. Surely she could discover a remedy. At the very least, she ought to undertake a financial inventory. Perhaps she could accelerate her plans to retire. Or lower her standards. She had lived in poverty before, and she supposed she could do it again if it came to it, though her entire modus operandi since she left her sister’s house had been to amass enough money so that she never had to return to a life of deprivation. Some people said money couldn’t buy happiness, but those people had never been poor. Anyway, it wasn’t happiness, precisely, that Diantha had been saving for. It was independence. True independence. A life that no one could take from her, gamble away, or otherwise threaten.

“His lordship would like to see you,” Mrs. Saunders said. “He asks will you come to him in his office when it is quite convenient?”

Diantha blinked, a little taken aback. It was not unusual for Lord Harcourt to summon her. They were allied in caring for his mother. She couldn’t help but fear, though, that this particular summons, coming at this particular time, did not bode well.

Had he found out, somehow, about her spectacular lapse in judgment? Had he encountered Mr. Hill on the latter’s way out? Perhaps Mr. Hill had reconsidered his stance on letting things be for six months.

For the first time in all this, shame flooded in. She thought she had taken care with the wording of that letter. She hadn’t named names.

It hadn’t been enough.

Of course it hadn’t. She should have foreseen this outcome. Or if not this specific result, she should at least have taken heed of what a bad actor Mr. Hill was. How could she have committed those words to paper and posted said paper to his house? She would have liked to attribute her actions to the carelessness of youth, but Diantha had never been careless. She’d never had that luxury.

Well, if Lord Harcourt knew about her transgression, there was nothing for it but to bear the consequences. She deserved them.

“Miss Brown.” Lord Harcourt stood upon her entrance. The two of them had a curious relationship. In many ways, they were in the trenches together, had been for years. They collaborated in soothing the dowager in her worst moments, when she was deep in the grip of her troubled mind and physically lashing out. They savored the small victories when she enjoyed moments of lucidity or displayed flashes of her still-present sense of humor. They possessed a shared understanding, one that can only be conferred by experience, of the burden of caretaking. It went beyond fellow feeling: Lord Harcourt often solicited Miss Brown’s opinion on his mother’s decline, or consulted her about what the doctors said.

All this meant that they had, in some ways, grown close.

Yet there remained an air of formality about the way Lord Harcourt treated Diantha. He stood when she entered a room. He never used her Christian name. This was another paradox of life as a companion. She was deeply embedded in the family. She knew them. She knew their secrets—in the case of the dowager, she knew a very big one. Yet she was not one of them. They paid her wages. She slept in a modest room adjacent to Lady Harcourt’s.