Lady Livia had walked a long way up a hot hill in the June sun. The rope lay against her throat, and the heat had got into it, and one bead close to the clasp had a fine crack running across it, like a crack in the glaze of a cup. Inside the crack, there was something pale yellow. And coming off the warm pearls, faint and sweet and unmistakable, was a smell that Isabel knew better than her own name: it was beeswax.
She understood it all in that single moment, the way you understand a whole landscape when the mist lifts off it. She had heard of such things, though she had never seen them: paste pearls, the French kind. They were little bubbles of blown glass, each one lined with a shining stuff made from fish scales, and then filled with wax to give it weight. They could fool a room full of people by candlelight.
They had fooled her. They had been lighter than she expected that night on the stair for a thing the whole county talked about, and they had been cold.
She looked at Lady Livia's face. Then she looked at her gloves, which were very good gloves, and had been mended at the tip of one finger very neatly by somebody who did not want it to show. She looked at the yellow carriage down at the inn, which had the look of a carriage that is hired by the week. And she felt something she had never expected to feel for this woman in all the long nights on this hill when she had thought about her: it was not triumph; it was nearer to pity.
She said nothing about the pearls at all. "I'll think about what you've said," she said instead.
Lady Livia looked faintly surprised, as though she had come ready for a fight and been handed a cup of tea. Then she smiled again. "Do. I shall be at the inn until Monday. After that, I go on to my brother's in Bath, and I shall have to tell the story to somebody. You know, people will ask where I have been." She turned to go, and turned back. "You really do look very well, Isabel. Quite brown, like a farm girl."
When the Duke came up the hill that evening, Isabel was waiting for him at the gate. She did not let him say a word. She told him about the visit and the story that London liked, and she watched his face go hard and quiet. Then she told him about the crack, the wax, the gloves, and the hired carriage, and she watched his face change again.
"She sold them," he said slowly.
"Before the ball, she must have. She had the copy made so that nobody would know. She couldn't afford to be poor—not with the whole county watching to see if you would marry her." Isabel held the gate between them with both hands. "She was never going to send for the justice. She couldn't. A justice would have held those pearls up to the light. I walked out of your house in the dark for a string of glass and wax."
"You didn't know."