"Because your mother sat with me through a fever year when no one else would enter the house," Prudence said simply. "And because I dislike young men who smirk while other people's brothers drown in paper. Do not thank me yet. I may still dine out on the milder parts of this."
She swept away, leaving the smell of orris root and the unsettled feeling of having acquired an ally who would never be entirely safe.
In the carriage home, London's wet stones flickered past the windows. A link-boy's torch smeared gold across the glass and was gone. Lady Harriet did not scold. She waited until Isolde's hands stopped shaking inside her gloves.
"Your mother must be told before the morning papers invent her," Harriet said. "And you will sleep, even if you have to pretend. Tomorrow you face him with Croft, not with rage."
"I am not raging," Isolde said.
"You are grieving in a straight line," Harriet replied. "It looks like rage to men who have never had to walk it."
Isolde leaned her head against the carriage wall. Peregrine's face rose unbidden: the same dark eyes as hers, a mouth quicker to laugh, a habit of tapping cards against his chin when he thought he was clever. He had been clever. Cleverness had not saved him from believing that a crest was the same thing as honor.
She remembered him at Christmas two years past, still flush with a small inheritance from an uncle, still certain that London was a puzzle he could solve with charm and a steady hand at whist. She remembered the first time he came home pale and quiet. She remembered the coat he sold without telling anyone, and the lie about having grown tired of the cut. She remembered March—the physician's low voice, the smell of vinegar and fever sweat, her mother's hands useless on the counterpane—and the way Peregrine, near the end, had tried to apologize for the accounts as if arithmetic were the same thing as love.
"Do you think the duke knew?" Isolde asked.
Harriet was quiet for a stretch of streetlamps. "I think he knows now. That may be worse for him than knowing all along. Men who inherit innocence are often more dangerous than men who inherit guilt. The innocent ones believe the house cannot be wrong."
At home, in the narrow Fenwick house that had once felt merely modest and now felt like a held breath, Mrs. Verity Fenwick sat up with a candle and a shawl, waiting. She took one look at Isolde's face and set the candle down carefully.
"You did it," she said.
"I did," Isolde answered.
Mrs. Fenwick closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were wet and steady. "Then we will face what comes. I only ask that you eat something before you face it. Courage is a poor breakfast."