Read Chapter 12: The Sapphire's Shadow

The rain had held off for the morning, which meant the house party guests had demanded outdoor amusements, and Lady Pemberton, ever the enthusiast, had decreed a game of hide-and-seek across the entire grounds. Clara had smiled through the announcement, pressed her gloved hands together, and prayed the hour would pass quickly.

It did not. She found herself crouched behind a settee in the library, skirts gathered in a most unladylike heap, listening to the shrieks of Mrs. Barlow's twin daughters echo through the corridors. The girls had been chasing a footman for the better part of twenty minutes, and Clara suspected they had entirely forgotten the rules.

She rose to stretch her legs, and it was then that she noticed the bookshelf behind the settee was slightly askew.

Not visibly, not to a casual eye. But Clara had grown up in this library. She knew its scents and its shadows, the particular way the oak paneling caught the morning light. And she knew, with the certainty of a child who had once hidden from her father's temper in these very shelves, that the section near the window should not sit a quarter inch proud of its neighbor.

She pressed her palm against the carved rose at eye level. Nothing. She tried the leaf below it, then the stem, then—with a breath of frustration—the center of the bloom itself.

A click. Soft as a mouse's footstep.

The panel swung inward.

Beyond it lay a recess no larger than a linen cupboard, and within that recess, propped against the stone of the outer wall, stood a portrait.

The canvas was small, perhaps two feet by eighteen inches, but the figure upon it caught all the light. A woman, young, dark-haired, with a guarded smile that did not quite reach her eyes. She wore a gown of deep sapphire blue—and at her throat, nestled in the hollow of her collarbone, was the Ashworth Sapphire.

Clara's hand went to her own neck, where the jewel had never hung, where it should have hung since her grandmother's death.

The gem in the painting was unmistakable. Even rendered in oils, it seemed to hold a light of its own, a cold blue fire that had been the subject of family legend, of whispered speculation, of her father's desperate—and failed—attempts to sell it before his debts consumed him.

She reached for the frame, tilted it toward the window light. On the reverse, in faded ink: *Jane, 1798.*

Jane. The name meant nothing to her. There had been no Jane in the Ashworth line for three generations. She ran her finger over the letters, frowning.

"Found you!"

Clara startled, jerking her hand back as if burned. The panel slid shut with a soft click, and she spun to find Mrs. Barlow's eldest, a girl of twelve with no sense of appropriate boundaries, beaming at her from the doorway.

"I saw you come in here, my lady! You hid very well, but I am the champion of hide-and-seek in our county."

"So I see," Clara said, forcing a smile. "You have won, fair and square. Shall we return to the others?"

But Julian was not among the others. When Clara finally escaped the twins and their triumphant cousin, she found him in the morning room, staring at a letter with an expression she had learned to read as poorly concealed displeasure.

"You look as though someone has stolen your breakfast," she said, closing the door behind her.

"The clay seam bids low," he said, setting the letter aside. "Sir Aldridge sends his regrets. He says the venture requires more capital than he assessed."

"More capital, or more Sapphire?"

Julian's eyes met hers, sharp and quick as a blade. "What do you mean by that?"

Clara hesitated. The note in her pocket seemed to burn against her thigh, its anonymous demands still unanswered. But she had made her choice in that moment, weeks ago now, and each day she did not correct it made the lie heavier.

"Only that he seemed most interested in the Ashworth heirlooms when we spoke," she said carefully. "Before you arrived. He asked about the Sapphire with rather more familiarity than a man who had only just heard its legend."

"You did not mention this."

"You did not ask."

A silence settled between them, thick and uncomfortable. Julian's jaw worked, a muscle jumping near his ear.

"I found something," Clara said, to break it. "In the library. A hidden panel behind the bookshelf with the rose carving on the left side."

Julian's expression shifted instantly. "Show me."

She led him back, checking the corridor empty before sliding the panel open once more. Julian bent to examine the portrait, his fingers tracing the painted jewel with a reverence that made something twist in Clara's chest.

"Jane, 1798," he murmured. "I know this name."

Clara's heart stopped. "You do?"

"Lady Eastleigh." He straightened, face gone pale beneath his tan. "Her Christian name is Jane. She was born in 1790, but—" He paused, counting. "That cannot be right. She would have been eight years old when this was painted."

"Unless the portrait is of someone else. A relation. A namesake."

"Or unless the date is wrong." Julian turned the painting over, examining the frame's edge. "There are marks here. Scratches, as if someone tried to gouge out the ink and gave up."

Clara leaned closer. He was right. The paint on the reverse had been scraped, but the original letters were still legible beneath the assault.

"That is not 1798," she said slowly. "Look at the second digit. It has been altered. The original was darker, a heavier stroke."

Julian fetched a candle from the mantle, held the flame close to the canvas back. The heat brought out the old ink like a ghost rising from still water.

*Jane, 1793.*

Ninety-three. The year of Clara's birth. The year her father had nearly lost the estate to Lord Eastleigh's father in a single night of cards—a story her mother had told her in whispered fragments, never the whole.

"Lady Eastleigh's family," Clara said, the words cold on her tongue. "They had the portrait all along. She knew where the Sapphire was. She has always known."

"Then why would she come here?" Julian asked slowly. "Why insert herself into our household, feign friendship, drop hints about the jewel's whereabouts? If her family stole it, she would not announce herself so brazenly."

"Unless she did not steal it." Clara looked up at him. "Unless she intends to retrieve what she believes is hers."

Julian frowned. "The Ashworth Sapphire was never Eastleigh property—"

"Wasn't it?" Clara cut him off. "My father lost it, Julian. Everyone knows that. He lost the Sapphire at a gaming table—the question has always been whose table." She touched the painted woman's face. "Jane, 1793. Lady Eastleigh would have been three years old. But her mother? Her mother was born Jane Ashworth, a cousin twice removed, married into the Eastleigh line in 1788."

Julian stared at her. "You think the portrait belonged to her mother. That she was painted in the Ashworth Sapphire because she wore it at her own wedding. And that your father lost it not in a night of gambling, but to a woman who had already claimed it as her due?"

The implications unfolded like a dark bloom. Clara's father had been many things—weak, foolish, doomed—but he had never stolen from kin. He had borrowed, begged, mortgaged. He had lost at cards what little remained. But the Sapphire had vanished years before his worst excesses, a fact the family had accepted with grim silence.

Now that silence had a name.

"The note," Julian said quietly. "The one you received. It demanded the Sapphire."

Clara's hand flew to her pocket, but it was too late. Julian had already seen her gesture, had already read the guilt in her face.

"You lied," he said. It was not an accusation. It was worse—a statement of fact, delivered with the weary resignation of a man who had expected betrayal but hoped against it.

"I did not want you to worry," she whispered. "There is nothing you could have done with a threat you could not trace."

"I could have traced it." His voice hardened. "I am a lawyer, Clara. It is what I do. But I cannot trace what I do not know. When you lie to me, you do not protect us. You blind us."

She opened her mouth to defend herself, to explain the fear that had gripped her, the certainty that if Julian knew the full extent of her father's depravity he would abandon this marriage and this estate and her. But the words would not come.

"Lady Eastleigh has the Sapphire," Julian said, turning back to the portrait. "Or she knows who does. And she has placed herself in our home, at our table, with our trust." He set the painting down carefully. "We must find out what she wants before she takes it—and everything else—from us."

In the corridor beyond, Lady Eastleigh's laugh rang out, bright and careless, like a bell summoning them to a game they had not agreed to play.