Lady Livia had taken the private parlor at the back of the inn. It was a small, low room with a smoky fire even in June, and a window that looked out on the yard where the hired yellow carriage stood with its shafts on the ground. Lady Livia was sitting at the table writing a letter when Isabel was shown in. She looked up with her pleasant smile already on her face, and then she saw who it was, and the smile stayed exactly where it was—which was how Isabel knew she was afraid.
"Isabel, how nice. Have you come to tell me your answer?"
"Yes," said Isabel. She stayed on her feet.
She took the jeweler's letter out of her basket and laid it on the table, open, on top of the letter Lady Livia had been writing, and stood back.
Lady Livia read it. It did not take her long. Isabel watched her read it, and watched the color go out of her face from the forehead downward, like a blind being drawn. When she had finished, she kept her eyes on the page. She sat with her gloved hands flat on either side of the paper, very still, exactly as Isabel had sat at Kezia's table with a jar of honey the day the Duke came up the hill.
And Isabel, seeing it, felt the last of her anger go out of her like air out of a bellows.
"How did you know?" said Lady Livia at last. Her voice had no pleasantness left in it at all; it was quite a young voice without it.
"The heat got into them on the hill. One of them is cracked by the clasp." Isabel touched her own throat. "They're filled with beeswax, my lady. I have had my hands in beeswax every day for a year. I would know the smell of it in the dark."
Lady Livia put her hand up to the pearls. For a moment, Isabel thought she would tear them off. Instead, she only held them the way a child holds onto a rail.
"My husband left me nothing," she said. "Did you know that? Nobody knew it. He left me a house I could not keep, and a great many people to pay, and those pearls. I sold them the spring before the ball to pay what I still owed from the seasons before it. I had the copy made so that nobody would look at my throat and know. And then His Grace came into the county, and everybody said, 'Of course, of course, Lady Livia, it must be you.' And I believed them." She laughed, and it was not a nice sound. "And then a companion in my old blue silk took a swarm of bees off his lime tree. He stood at a window and watched her do it. And I saw his face. I saw it before you did. I saw it before he did."