Read Chapter 19: The Brooch's Secret

The house had gone quiet at last, the servants dismissed, the lamps turned low. Cordelia stood in the center of her husband's dressing room, her pulse a dull drum against her ribs, and tried to remember the last time she had been alone in a space that belonged to him. The shaving stand gleamed in the candlelight, its silver fittings winking like invitations.

She had no right to be here. That thought arrived with unwelcome clarity, and she pushed it aside the way one pushes aside a curtain to look at a window one suspects is cracked. She needed to know. Not for the sake of the marriage, and not for pride, but because something in the story had begun to hemorrhage at the edges, and she could not stanch the flow by wringing her hands in the drawing room while men came and went at all hours with messages that made her husband's jaw go tight.

Samuel was waiting downstairs with a pair of hired horses and a mind full of Cornish roads. But she could not leave—not yet. Not with so much unexamined.

The shaving kit was a handsome thing, rosewood and brass, fitted with compartments for straight razors and soap dishes and a little mirror that caught her reflection in fragments. She ran her fingers along the seams, feeling for anything that did not belong. The brush was worn soft at the bristles. The razor had been recently honed. And there, in the bottommost compartment, beneath a folded linen cloth, her fingers brushed against something cold and hard.

An emerald brooch.

She lifted it into the light. The stone was deep and green, cut in a shield shape and set in silver, the clasp old-fashioned and intricate. It was not the sort of thing a man bought for himself. It was not the sort of thing a man kept in his shaving kit, either, unless he wanted it close and hidden.

Cordelia turned it over. The back was plain but for a tiny hinge she had nearly missed. Her breath caught. She pressed the edge of her thumbnail against it, and the brooch opened like a locket, revealing a compartment lined with faded silk.

Inside lay a lock of hair. Blonde, almost white, a child's color or a woman's gone pale with illness. And beneath it, scratched into the silver in a hand that had trembled at the work:

*A. Marlow*

Cordelia's knees gave way. She sank onto the stool before the dressing table, the brooch cradled in her palms as if it might shatter.

A. Marlow.

Amelia Marlow. The woman who was supposed to be dead. The woman whose ransom had bankrupted her husband. The woman whose miniature portrait Cordelia had found in the hidden panel of his study, wrapped in the Dowager's handwriting and a warning about broken vows.

But the miniature had been a child. This lock of hair was from a grown woman, fine and fair and cut close to the root, the way one might clip a keepsake from a bride.

Cordelia's mind turned the pieces over with the careful, terrible precision of a lock turning in a mechanism. Amelia Marlow. Not Amelia Ashworth. The name etched into the brooch was her maiden name, the name she carried before marriage. And if she had been Amelia Marlow, then she had been a Marlowe by birth—Sir Hugh's sister, or his cousin, or his niece. A woman of the very house that now held her husband in debt and threat.

She closed her eyes and saw the veiled figure again—the one Samuel had described, the woman who had been seen at Sir Hugh's townhouse, the one whose face no one could confirm. Cordelia had assumed, when she had first heard of her, that the veiled woman was some agent of the Marlowes, some messenger of Sir Hugh's cruelty. But what if she was Amelia herself? Not a prisoner. Not dead. What if she had been sheltered by Sir Hugh all along, hidden behind a veil because her face was too well known, too dangerous to be seen in London?

But the brooch was here, in her husband's shaving kit, kept close and secret. A man did not hide a married woman's token unless the keeping of it was forbidden.

Cordelia turned the brooch over again, running her thumb along the etched letters. A. Marlow. It was not a gift from a husband to a wife, then. It was a marriage token from before the marriage—a betrothal gift, perhaps, from one Marlowe to another. And if Amelia had been betrothed before she was married, then who had been her intended?

Her husband's brother. The one who had died. The one whose debts had ruined the family.

The realization struck her like a splash of cold water. The story was assembling itself with terrible logic, each piece clicking into place whether she wanted it to or not. Her husband had married Amelia to save his brother. He had paid the ransom to Sir Hugh for a woman who was already his wife, or perhaps not yet his wife, or—

Cordelia pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. The uncertainty was a splinter beneath her skin, working its way deeper with every attempt to pull it free.

She heard footsteps in the corridor.

She did not think. She closed the brooch, slipped it into the pocket of her gown, and rose from the stool just as the door opened. Her husband stood in the frame, still in his evening clothes, his cravat loosened at the throat. His eyes swept the room and found hers with an immediate, unsettling precision.

"You are in my dressing room," he said.

"I was looking for you." The lie arrived easily, smooth as water over stone. "You left the house in such haste earlier that I wished to speak with you before I retired."

"At this hour, in my dressing room, without a candle of your own."

She had left her candle by the door. It was a poor excuse, and they both knew it. But his gaze flickered to the open compartment of the shaving kit, where the linen cloth lay displaced, and something in his face went carefully, deliberately blank.

"You are not a liar by nature, Cordelia," he said. "I have noticed this about you. It makes you poor at it."

The words were not cruel. They were almost gentle, and for that they were worse.

"I found it," she said. No point in pretense now. She drew the brooch from her pocket and held it up, the emerald catching the lamplight. "A. Marlow. Your wife's maiden name. Hidden in your shaving kit like a thief's purse."

He looked at the brooch for a long moment. His face did not change. But his hand, resting on the door frame, curled into a fist and then relaxed again.

"Amelia was my brother's betrothed," he said. "Not mine."

The words landed like stones in still water. Cordelia felt the ripple pass through her, widening.

"Your brother—"

"Is dead. Has been for three years. He gambled away the family fortune and then his life, in that order." Her husband stepped into the room and closed the door behind him, sealing them in the small, candlelit space. "I married Amelia to save her from the scandal. The debts were his, but the disgrace would have fallen on her. She was a Marlowe by name and a pawn by circumstance, and I thought—" He stopped. Swallowed. "I thought I could protect her from the worst of it."

"And the ransom? Sir Hugh—"

"Was her brother. And her jailer, in a manner of speaking. When I married her, the debt became mine. When I could not pay it, he took her. I paid what I had. It was not enough." He looked at the brooch in Cordelia's hand, and for the first time she saw something crack behind his careful facade. "She died of a fever at his estate in Cornwall. A year after the wedding. I did not see her buried. He did not allow it."

The room was very quiet. Cordelia could hear her own heartbeat, slow and heavy, like something being dragged across a floor.

"The veiled woman," she said. "Samuel saw a veiled woman at Sir Hugh's house. He assumed it was an agent. But if Amelia is dead—"

"Then the veiled woman is someone else."

They stood there, the truth of it passing between them like a live wire. Sir Hugh had a woman hidden in his London house. A woman veiled, kept secret, protected or imprisoned—Cordelia could not yet tell which.

And now she knew that her husband had told her something no one else had ever been trusted to know.

He held out his hand. "The brooch," he said. "Please."

Cordelia looked down at it. The lock of hair glinted within, pale as winter light.

"What was it?" she asked. "A betrothal gift?"

"My brother's," he said. "He gave it to her before he ruined everything. She gave it back to me the night I married her. She said it belonged to the man who had loved her truly, and that love had died with him." He paused. "I kept it to remember what I had failed to save."

Cordelia closed her fingers around the brooch and held it to her chest.

"Then I will help you find whoever is veiled in Sir Hugh's house," she said. "And we will learn whether your wife's story ended where you think it did."

His eyes went sharp. A breath passed between them—some new thing, unnamed and hazardous.

"Cornwall," she said. "I am leaving at dawn. If you mean to stop me, you will have to come with me."