Read Chapter 8: Lady Isabelle's Portrait

The gangplank groaned beneath Eleanor’s heels as she stepped onto the rain-slicked cobbles of the London docks. The city rose around her in a haze of coal smoke and grey stone, warehouses hulking like sleeping beasts along the Thames. She clutched her travelling cloak at the throat, the emerald necklace cold against her skin beneath the layers of wool and silk. A reminder. A shackle.

Lord Ashworth’s carriage waited at the far end of the wharf, a glossy black landau with the Beaumont crest emblazoned on the door—a falcon, wings spread, talons bared. The earl himself stood beside it, hat in hand, his face arranged into a mask of courteous welcome. He was younger than she had imagined from his letters, perhaps forty-five, with silver threading his dark hair and a politician’s smile that never quite reached his eyes.

“Miss Whitmore.” He bowed, taking her gloved fingers and brushing them with his lips. “The Atlantic has treated you kindly, I see. You look positively radiant.”

Radiant. She had spent the night in a borrowed cabin, her own having been flooded in the storm, the ledgers from the Beaumont estate tucked beneath a loose floorboard where she had discovered them. The thin steward had watched her disembark with an interest that made her skin prickle. She forced a smile.

“The voyage was eventful, my lord. But I am delighted to finally see London.”

“And London is delighted to see you.” He helped her into the carriage, his hand lingering a moment too long on her elbow. “We have a full evening planned. I trust you will find the mansion to your liking.”

The Beaumont mansion sat at the edge of Mayfair, a sprawling Georgian edifice of red brick and white stone, its windows glittering like eyes in the fading afternoon light. Servants swarmed the entrance, hauling her trunks, pressing tea and biscuits into her hands before she could protest. The interior was everything she had expected—marble floors, gilded cornices, portraits of stern-faced ancestors lining the grand staircase like a jury awaiting her verdict.

It was the portrait at the top of the stairs that stopped her cold.

A woman, perhaps thirty, with hair the colour of burnished copper and eyes the shade of winter sea. She wore a gown of deep emerald, the same cut Eleanor herself favoured, and she smiled with a warmth that seemed utterly foreign to this house of cold grandeur. A brass plaque at the base of the frame read simply: Isabelle, Viscountess Beaumont, 1862–1892.

“My late wife,” Lord Ashworth said, his voice carefully neutral. “She passed several years ago. A tragedy.”

“In Paris, was it not?” Eleanor asked, keeping her tone light. “I recall reading of it in the papers.”

A flicker crossed his face—there and gone, like a fish surfacing in dark water. “Yes. A sudden illness. The doctors were baffled.”

Behind them, a woman’s voice cut through the silence like a blade. “Baffled is one word for it.”

Eleanor turned. The woman standing in the doorway of the morning room was older, perhaps sixty, with iron-grey hair piled high and a face that had once been beautiful but was now sharpened by something harder than age. She wore black, unrelieved by any ornament save a single pearl brooch at her throat.

“Miss Whitmore,” Lord Ashworth said, a tightness entering his voice, “may I present my sister, Lady Margaret Hale.”

Lady Margaret did not curtsy. She looked Eleanor over with the frank assessment of a horse trader examining a filly. “So you are the American. I must say, you look less like a spendthrift than your father’s letters suggested.”

Eleanor’s smile did not waver, though something cold slithered down her spine. So her father’s poison had already arrived ahead of her. Of course it had.

“My father has a flair for dramatic correspondence,” she said. “I assure you, my tastes are quite modest.”

“Are they?” Lady Margaret’s eyes dropped to the emerald necklace at Eleanor’s throat, and something strange passed across her face—recognition, and then a flicker of something darker. “That necklace. Where did you get it?”

“A gift from my mother. A family heirloom.”

“Is it?” Lady Margaret’s lips curved into a smile that did not reach her eyes. “How curious. Isabelle had one very much like it. Of course, hers was genuine.”

Lord Ashworth stepped forward, his voice sharp. “Margaret.”

“I was merely remarking on the coincidence, Edward.” She turned to Eleanor, her gaze steady and unnerving. “My brother prefers to forget that his first wife ever existed. But I find it useful to remember. One never knows when history might repeat itself.”

Eleanor’s heart quickened. “You speak of Lady Isabelle as though—”

“As though her death was not the tidy little story my brother tells,” Lady Margaret said. She glanced at the portrait, and for a moment her mask slipped, revealing something raw beneath. “She died in Paris, yes. But the doctors who attended her never signed the death certificate. Did you know that? They claimed it was a matter of jurisdiction. A convenient excuse, I always thought.”

“Margaret, that is enough.” Lord Ashworth’s voice was ice. “Miss Whitmore has just arrived from a long voyage. She does not need to be subjected to your morbid fancies.”

“Morbid fancies.” Lady Margaret laughed, a brittle sound. “Yes. That is what Edward called my concerns then, and what they remain now. But I have learned to trust my instincts, brother. And my instincts tell me that this young woman should ask herself what happened to the last bride who wore that necklace before she agrees to become the next.”

She turned and swept down the corridor, her black skirts rustling like the wings of a crow. Lord Ashworth stood rigid, his jaw tight, his hands clenched at his sides.

“I apologize,” he said, forcing a smile that did nothing to soften his eyes. “My sister has never recovered from Isabelle’s death. She clings to fancies and rumours. I hope you will not let her darken your impression of this house.”

Eleanor looked at the portrait again. The woman in the emerald gown smiled down at her, serene and unknowing. But her eyes—her eyes seemed to hold a question.

“Of course not, my lord,” Eleanor said softly. “I understand that grief takes many forms.”

But even as she spoke, her mind was racing. The necklace. Lady Isabelle had worn a necklace like it. And Lady Isabelle had died in Paris, under circumstances that her own sister-in-law did not believe were natural.

The ledger in James’s possession listed a claim against the dowry from a Paris creditor. Lady Isabelle had died in Paris. The marriage contract required Eleanor to wear the necklace as proof of family assets.

Coincidence? Or design?

She watched Lord Ashworth’s back as he led her toward the morning room, and for the first time since she had set foot in London, she felt the shape of something larger taking form—a pattern she had only glimpsed in fragments aboard the ship, but which now seemed to be drawing her into its centre.

Somewhere in this house, she thought, there was a truth that Edward Ashworth did not want found. And she intended to find it.