Sterling looked about the room and found no friend in it. The admirers who had circled him moments before had drawn back, their faces hard with the particular fury of people who have been made fools of for ten years. They had honored a thief and shunned his innocent victims, and they did not forgive him for it.
"You have nothing," Sterling tried, but his voice cracked. "Suspicion... old paper... you cannot—"
"It is already done," Arthur said quietly. "The proof has been laid before those with the authority to act upon it. By morning, the matter will be beyond any of us." He looked at the broken man with something close to pity, and found he had none to spare. "Titles will be stripped. The Crestwood estate and all you took with it will be returned to its rightful heir, and every soul in this room will know what you are."
It happened almost gently in the end. There was no shouting, no struggle. Two grave gentlemen approached Sterling at a quiet word and led him from the hall, and he went with them with his head bowed—an old man suddenly leaving behind him a fortune built on another family's grief.
The crowd turned as one toward Genevieve.
For ten years, she had been nothing: a name to be forgotten, a daughter of disgrace, a maid in borrowed rags. She stood now in the candlelight of the grandest room in the capital, her family's honor restored before the very society that had cast it out. And the people who had once looked through her bowed their heads as she passed.
She felt her father near her then, as she had not felt him in ten years. The truth had been told at last.
A week had passed, and the autumn had turned the woods around Crestwood Manor to copper and gold.
The house stood as it had stood in Genevieve's childhood: a long, gracious building of pale stone, its windows bright again after ten years of shuttered dark, its gardens already being coaxed back into order by men who tipped their caps to her as she passed. The estate had been returned in full by order of those who held such power—every acre and every farthing—and with it, the name that had been stripped away. She was Lady Genevieve of Crestwood once more, and no one in the county ever would pretend again not to know it.
She stood upon the front steps in the soft morning light, looking out over the lands that were hers again, and found it hard to believe it was not a dream. So many mornings she had woken on a thin pallet in a servant's attic, her hands raw from scrubbing, her name a borrowed thing. To stand here now in a gown of her own choosing, mistress of her father's house, was a happiness almost too large to hold.