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“There is something she believed you would do, Miss Trent. I can put it no better than that.” Something like warmth crossed the solicitor’s dry face, there and gone. “In eleven years of keeping her instructions, I never once found a careless line in them. I do not expect to begin now.”

At the window, the gentleman made a low sound that was not quite a laugh. “Conditions,” he said, to no one at all. “Of course there are.”

Braithwaite drew a sealed letter from beneath the page and held it across the desk. “This she asked me to give you upon the reading. For your eyes.”

Viola took it. Her name stood upon the front in a long, flowing hand. Her fingers would not be still, and she pressed the letter to her chest as if it might hold her together.

“The first of her instructions to me,” Braithwaite said, with a small nod at the letter. “By her own order — before all else, this.”

A chair scraped. The gentleman had taken a half-step from the window, and stopped, his hand closing once at his side before going still.

“Mr. Braithwaite.” His voice was low and even, and cold enough to raise the hair on Viola’s arms. “A word with you. Not now — when you are at leisure.” He spared Viola a single glance, hard and unsmiling, that said more plainly than any words that he counted her account far from settled.

It was no courtesy, but something nearer to a promise.

Then he bowed to no one in particular and left, the door closing behind him with a quiet, deliberate care that was somehow worse than if he had slammed it.

Viola did not remember leaving the office. She was aware only of the sudden brilliance of the sun as they stepped into the street, the warm press of the summer air against her face. She stopped, swaying, and Hannah’s arm came at once about her waist.

“Viola. Are you quite well?”

“I cannot take it in.” A raw breath escaped her. “Why would she do such a thing? And that gentleman — ” She closed her eyes. “He looked at me as if I had taken it from his very hands.”

“Then let us not stand in the street for him to see it.” Hannah steered her towards the carriage. “Come. The letter may tell you more than the solicitor would.”

Inside, the door shut upon the clamour of the street, Viola broke the seal at last. The paper whispered as she unfolded it, and she read it aloud, her voice unsteady.

“‘Miss Trent. You must trust that I have acted with purpose and intention. You will be surrounded by those who do not understand; bear their scrutiny with courage and determination.’” Her brow drew together. “‘Kindness has been far from your family. It is my hope that this gift offers you some of what you have lacked, and brings about a change in a great many things.’”

That was all. No name, no reason, no word of why she, of all the young women in England, had been singled out. Viola read it twice more in silence, then folded it with great care, afraid the paper might tear.

“You hoped for more,” Hannah said softly.

“Of course I did.” Tears stood in Viola’s eyes. “I have been given a fortune, and one of the finest houses in London, and I do not understand a word of why.” She turned her face to the window. “And there is a gentleman, some lord, I never learned which, who believes every part of it was stolen from him.”

Hannah said nothing for a moment. “And there is the other thing,” she said. “The conditions.”

Viola looked back at her.

“You heard the solicitor as well as I did. Released by stages, upon conditions of her own setting, sealed away in his keeping.” Hannah tapped one gloved finger against her knee, working at it the way she worked at everything, as a knot to be undone. “Viola — a woman does not trouble to set conditions on a gift unless she expects something of the person receiving it. Whatever Lady Warrington wanted of you, she wanted it after her death, which means she could not simply ask. So she built the asking into the gift itself.” She looked at the folded letter in Viola’s hands. “That is not an ending you are holding, dearest. I begin to think it is an instruction.”

“An instruction to do what?”

“I have not the smallest idea.” Hannah sat back. “But I suspect that when you come upon it, you will know it — and I suspect she was sure of the same.”

Hannah said nothing. There was nothing to say. The carriage carried them on through the crowded streets, and Viola’s thoughts turned and turned without rest.

She had been lifted up in the world. She did not doubt it. But she thought of the cold blue eyes of the man at the window, a man whose name she had not even been given, and she wondered how many more would look at her so before this business was done.

CHAPTER 3

Julian did not move.

The solicitor’s words passed through him and out the other side, leaving a strange numbness in their wake. Stoneleigh House, given whole and entirely to a girl he had not laid eyes upon until a quarter-hour before. For a long moment his heart seemed to forget its work. He kept his gaze on the ribboned spines of Braithwaite’s shelves and did not let his face move at all.

Across the small office, Miss Trent had gone white.

He had expected — what, precisely? A schemer. A bold, knowing creature who would meet his eye with quiet triumph. Instead the young woman sat with her gloved hands pressed flat in her lap, staring at the solicitor as if he had spoken in a tongue she did not know, and when she said that cannot be right her voice had cracked upon it. Either she was the finest actress in England, or she was as astonished as he. To his great irritation, Julian could not decide which.