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Susanna sank back into her chair and closed her eyes. She would speak to her solicitors, and without delay. Every transaction, every small disbursement, every line that carried her name would be examined and examined again until she was satisfied there was nothing irregular anywhere within it.

He would have understood, she thought, and the memory softened her mouth for a moment. He was so very generous in everything.

She held to that thought, leaning her head back and drawing a long, slow breath that did nothing to loosen the knot the gentleman had left behind him. She would have to act, and soon, if she was to keep any hint of scandal from the door.

She made to rise. And paused.

A frown gathered upon her brow, and with it came a fresh and colder concern — one that had nothing to do with her own accounts.

She turned the gentleman’s words over once more, and this time it was not the debts that held her. It was the ease of the thing. To press a false sum into one account was the work of a clever clerk. To do it into hers, and into his, and (he had said it plainly) into a good many of their acquaintance besides, without any of them the wiser, required something else entirely.

It required a man each of them had, in turn, trusted with their own affairs. Who had known which of them examined their accounts and which did not, which trusted and which counted, where a figure might be slipped in and lie quiet. It was not her money he had taken so much as her confidence — the private knowledge of them all — and not hers alone.

How much, she thought, with a slow, sinking clarity, did this man come to know of us all?

She sat down again.

For there was the other matter, sharper than the first. The gentleman who had come to warn her was known to the fellow they had both sought to aid — well known to him. If that fellow should learn not only that his work had been discovered, but that it was this gentleman who had discovered it —

Susanna’s hands tightened upon the arms of her chair.

A man who could reach so quietly into so many houses could reach, surely, into one more. And a man who had gone to such lengths to keep himself hidden would not thank the person who had dragged him into the light. He would not forgive it. He would answer it.

“I must take great care,” she murmured to the empty room, her brow drawn now with concentration and with dread in equal measure. “And so must he. We shall both of us have to be very careful indeed.”

Chapter One

It had been many years since Harriet, Lady Colbourne, had last been in London.

She leaned toward the carriage window and searched the streets for anything she knew. Shop doors opened and closed. Servants scurried this way and that. Carriages and hackneys rattled over damp cobbles under a warm and ordinary summer sky. It was a perfectly unremarkable afternoon. And yet with every turn of the wheels, the knot in Harriet’s stomach drew a little tighter, until she could think of nothing but what waited at the end of the drive.

The carriage slowed, then stopped outside the solicitor’s office. Harriet waited for the footman, and when the door opened she did not move at once. Warm air reached in to find her, pressing against her face as though it meant to draw her out whether she willed it or not.

No need for hesitation, she told herself firmly. The sooner you go in, the sooner you will know what all this trouble is about.

She gathered her skirts, stepped down to the pavement, and steadied herself a moment before she went to the door. Over her shoulder she instructed the driver to wait. Then she pulled the brass handle and stepped inside.

“Lady Colbourne.” A gentleman with graying hair and kind eyes came toward her at once, recognizing her, she supposed, from the crest upon the carriage. “Mr. Arthur Braithwaite, at your service.” He bowed. “I am grateful to you for coming, particularly when you have had to travel from your estate.”

“I reside now in a smaller house, not my late husband’s estate.” The correction came out more plainly than she had meant it to. “My husband’s brother holds the title.”

“Of course. Of course.” Mr. Braithwaite bowed again, and nodded, and went on nodding as though everything she said delighted him. “It must be very difficult for you, and I am sorry that this matter makes it more trying still. Please.” He gestured to an open door. “If you will step through, I can explain the difficulty.”

She stepped inside. The air met her with the scent of ink and old leather, and the quiet order of it steadied her before she had chosen to be steadied. A young clerk had risen from a desk to her right, his head bowed over his papers in what she supposed was meant for respect. Harriet had never cared for deference, and gave him a brief smile.

“Pray, do not let my presence keep you from your work.”

The young man glanced at her, nodded, and sat. Mr. Braithwaite resumed his own seat, setting down a small stack of ledgers and folded documents, and Harriet drew off her gloves and set them to one side.

It was, she thought, a foreign country: this room, these papers, this careful man and his ledgers. Her husband had lived in such rooms, or their like. Edward had sat with receipts and columns and figures every evening of their brief marriage and had managed all their affairs with the same quiet, unshowy competence he brought to everything.

She had never asked to see them. She had never thought to. It had been enough to look in on him at his desk before she retired, to see his fair head bent over the work and know that the work was in good hands.

Now she wished, with a sudden fierceness that surprised her, that she had asked. That she had made him show her a single ledger. That she had learned even the shape of the thing, so that she might sit here and understand one word in three, instead of waiting to be told, like a child, what was being decided about her own life.

“Allow me to begin,” Mr. Braithwaite said, clearing his throat, “by offering my sincere condolences on the loss of your husband. It is near eighteen months now, I understand, but I am sure you feel his absence keenly still.”

“I do.” She said nothing more, having no wish to lay her grief upon a stranger’s desk beside his ledgers. She and Edward had not been in love. They had been more nearly the dearest of friends — but a friend was not a small thing to lose, and he had been the steadiest friend she had ever had. To have him taken from the world a single year into their life together, and taken so senselessly, still struck her at odd hours like a stair missed in the dark.