Read Chapter 8: The Rival's Arrival

The first carriage crested the rise before Clara had finished her morning tea. She set down the cup and crossed to the window of the small morning room, watching as a smart barouche—all dark green lacquer and polished brass—drew up the uneven gravel drive. Three horses, matched bays. A crest on the door she did not recognize.

She pressed her palm to the cold glass. Visitors had been rare in the weeks since their arrival. The village wives had called, stiff with curiosity but warm enough once Clara had served cake. Julian had received two tenants' petitions and one letter from London that had made him shut himself in the library for an hour. But this—the carriage, the groom who jumped down to open the door, the lady who descended with a hand extended as though she owned the ground beneath her slippers—this was something else.

Clara recognized the figure before the bonnet lifted. The sharp violet silk. The way she tilted her chin as she surveyed the crumbling facade of Ashworth Park, not with distaste but with the particular appraisal of someone cataloguing what could be sold.

Lady Eastleigh.

Clara's stomach tightened. She had met her once, two seasons ago, at Almack's—a widow with a fortune and a reputation for collecting people the way other women collected porcelain. Julian had been her solicitor. That had been the story, at least. But there had been whispers, the kind Clara had ignored because they had seemed irrelevant then.

She went to find Julian.

He was in the library, which had become his habit each morning, and he looked up from a stack of property ledgers with an expression that shifted too quickly from surprise to something cautious. Clara had learned to read him in the weeks of their marriage—the way his jaw tightened when he was weighing what to say, the way his fingers moved toward his scarred hand when he was uneasy.

"Lady Eastleigh is here," she said.

Julian's hand moved.

"Indeed." He rose, straightening his cuffs. "I did not know she was in the country."

"Did you not?" Clara kept her voice even. "She seems to know we are."

He met her eyes, and there was something unreadable there. "I had a letter from her a fortnight ago. She mentioned she had taken a house in Derbyshire for the summer. I did not think she meant to call."

"Derbyshire is not so very far from here. Ten miles, perhaps."

"Perhaps."

They stood a moment, the silence between them holding a question neither wished to voice. Then Julian offered his arm, and Clara took it, and they went together to greet the woman whom Julian had once—according to his own careful admission—rescued from financial ruin at the hands of her late husband's gaming debts.

Lady Eastleigh was already in the hall by the time they reached it, having swept past the stammering footman with the ease of one accustomed to being admitted everywhere. She turned at their approach, and her smile was a weapon polished by years of use.

"Mr. Vance—Julian, I may still call you Julian, surely—how delightful to find you so happily settled." Her eyes slid to Clara with a practiced warmth. "And Lady Clara. What a lovely home this must be, once one looks past the damp."

Clara inclined her head. "We are still making repairs. But one must begin somewhere."

"Indeed one must." Lady Eastleigh's gaze traveled the peeling wallpaper with the particular interest of a creditor. Then she smiled again, brighter. "I confess I could not resist calling. When I heard you had taken possession of Ashworth Park, I said to myself, Augusta, you must go and congratulate them. We are all so delighted by your match."

"Are you?" Julian's tone was pleasant but flat.

"I am, at least." She stepped forward, placing a gloved hand on his arm with familiar ease. "You saved me from ruin, Julian. It is only right that I should see you happy in your own salvation."

Clara watched Julian's expression. He did not flinch from Lady Eastleigh's touch, but he did not welcome it either. He looked, Clara thought, like a man remembering something he would rather not.

"You must stay for tea," Clara said, because it was the only gracious thing to do. "Allow me to ring for it."

---

They sat in the drawing room, which was still sparsely furnished—the best pieces had been sold years ago—but which Clara had made serviceable with fresh curtains and a fire that burned coal rather than wood. Lady Eastleigh accepted a cup with the air of one conferring a favor.

"I have been hearing the most extraordinary rumors," she said, stirring her tea. "About the Ashworth Sapphire."

Clara's hand stilled on her cup. Beside her on the settee, Julian did not move.

"Rumors?" Clara repeated carefully.

"Oh, you know how people talk. They say it was lost when your poor father died. That it is somewhere in this house, perhaps walled up in a priest hole or buried beneath the knot garden." Lady Eastleigh laughed, light and tinkling. "I never believed the romantic tales myself. A sapphire of that size and color would not remain hidden for long. Someone would have found it and sold it."

Clara thought of the broken cabinet lock. The empty velvet case. The lie she had told Julian about the bribe payments. She kept her face still.

"My mother's necklace was stolen," she said. "Or lost. We have been searching."

"How dreadful for you." Lady Eastleigh's sympathy was immaculate. "I do hope you find it. A piece of family history like that—it is worth more than sentiment, is it not? It is worth a fortune."

Something in the way she said it made Clara's skin prickle. She was not merely making conversation. She was probing.

"You seem to know a great deal about it," Clara observed.

"I make it my business to know about beautiful things." Lady Eastleigh turned to Julian. "Do you not remember, Julian? You once advised me on the purchase of a sapphire parure. You told me then that I should always ask where a gem had come from—that provenance was as important as quality."

"I remember," Julian said.

"If I had known then that you would marry the daughter of a man who owned one of the finest sapphires in England, I should have asked you more questions." She laughed again. "Tell me, Lady Clara—if you did find it, what would you do with it? Sell it, to restore this handsome old house? Or keep it as it deserves, as a treasure for your daughters?"

Clara felt the trap closing around her. Whatever she answered, she would reveal something.

"If it is found," she said carefully, "it will be returned to its rightful place—around the neck of whichever Ashworth woman comes next. The house can wait. The sapphire is not only property. It is legacy."

Lady Eastleigh's smile did not falter. "How noble. I do hope you are not tested on that conviction."

The tea was finished. Lady Eastleigh rose with a rustle of silk, and Julian escorted her to the door while Clara remained in the drawing room, her hands pressed flat against her knees to keep them from trembling. She heard the murmur of voices in the hall, too low to make out words. Then the front door closed, and Julian returned.

He crossed to the window and stood watching Lady Eastleigh's carriage roll down the drive. The firelight caught his face, casting his scarred hand into shadow where it rested on the sill.

"She knows something," Clara said.

Julian did not turn. "She knows many things. She always did."

"About the sapphire."

"About that." He paused. "And about you. Your father. The debts."

Clara's breath caught. "How much does she know?"

"Enough to be dangerous." He turned to face her, and his expression was grave. "Clara, I need you to understand something. Augusta Eastleigh was not my client out of charity. She was a woman in desperate need, and I helped her—but I also learned things about her that she would prefer forgotten. That is why she keeps me close. She is not here to renew our acquaintance. She is here to learn what we know, and to ensure I do not use what I know against her."

"Is there a reason you would?" Clara asked.

Julian's jaw tightened. "There is always a reason. But I have no intention of playing her game. The problem, Clara, is that she is not the only one playing."

He crossed to her, and for a moment she thought he might take her hand. But he stopped an arm's length away, and when he spoke, his voice was quiet and urgent.

"Trust no one. Not the servants. Not the tenants. Not the neighbors who call with jam and curious eyes. And especially not Augusta Eastleigh." He met her gaze. "She mentioned the sapphire for a reason. She wants us to think she knows where it is. But I suspect she does not—I suspect she wants us to believe that because she wants us to lead her to it ourselves."

Clara thought of the letter she had found in her father's papers, the correspondence with a London pawnbroker. She had not told Julian. She had hidden it in her dressing table, beneath her mother's gloves, afraid of what his reaction might be if he learned the full truth of her father's fall.

"Julian," she said slowly, "what if someone else has already found it?"

His eyes sharpened. "What makes you say that?"

She hesitated. The truth balanced on her tongue—the pawnbroker's name, the date of the transaction, the sum her father had received for a necklace his wife had worn at her wedding. But if she told him, he would ask how she knew. He would ask what else she had hidden.

"I saw the lock on the cabinet," she said instead. "It was not forced. Whoever took it had a key."

Julian considered this. "Then it was someone in the household."

"Or someone my father trusted."

The words hung between them. Clara watched a dozen thoughts move across Julian's face—calculations, suspicions, connections. Then he nodded slowly.

"Either way," he said, "we cannot afford to be naive. Lady Eastleigh's arrival is not a coincidence. She has been sent, or she has come for her own reasons, and both possibilities are troubling."

"Sent by whom?"

Julian's smile was thin. "That is what I intend to find out. I have a name to trace—a steward who disappeared and an inn called the Golden Hind." He looked at her, and something in his expression softened, just slightly. "I had meant to leave tomorrow. I think I should leave today."

"Then I am coming with you."

"No." His voice was firm. "You are needed here. If Augusta returns, someone must keep her entertained while I am gone. Someone must watch her."

Clara set her jaw. "You cannot expect me to play hostess to a woman I despise."

"I expect you to be cleverer than her." Julian's eyes held hers. "And I think you are. I think you are cleverer than nearly anyone you meet, Clara. That is why I married you."

He said it without irony, without romance. But it was the first honest compliment he had paid her, and Clara found herself caught between anger and something she did not wish to name.

"While I am gone," Julian continued, "do not open any letters that do not bear the Ashworth seal. Do not admit any visitor you did not expect. And if anyone mentions the sapphire—anyone at all—tell them you have no idea where it is. Do you understand?"

Clara understood. She also understood that Julian had just told her to lie, and that he expected her to do it well.

"Fine," she said. "But when you return, Julian, I expect the same honesty from you. Every secret. Every part of your past that touches this family." She stepped closer, close enough to see the faint pulse at his throat. "You married me to save this house. But I married you to save myself from being sold to the highest bidder. We are partners in this, or we are nothing."

Julian looked at her for a long moment. Then he removed his glove, slowly, deliberately, and held out his scarred hand.

"Partners," he agreed.

She took it.