Six months before, while sorting through his late father's papers, Henry had found a sealed letter at the very back of a drawer. On the front, in his father's shaking hand, were the words: *For my son, to be opened if the name of Marlowe ever comes near this family.*
At first, Henry had thought nothing of it. Then, one spring morning, his mother announced that she had arranged his engagement to Lady Cecilia Marlowe. That night, Henry opened the letter:
*My dear Henry,*
*I have done a terrible wrong by staying silent. Years ago, an honest banker named Thomas Hartley was destroyed by the Earl of Marlowe. I was there. I saw the Earl sign the very agreement he later swore was false. I took the original papers into my keeping, meaning to go to the courts, but I fell ill, and I was a coward, and I waited too long. Hartley died in prison.*
*The truth is safe. I have left the key in trusted hands. I pray that one day Hartley's children will come for it. If they do, my son, help them. Keep the promise I failed to keep.*
*Your loving father.*
At the bottom, his father had added one more line:
*Hartley used to say that a torn page is like a broken promise: you cannot always undo the damage, but you can try to hold things together.*
Henry had not slept that night. The next morning, he hired a quiet, clever man from Bow Street—the London police—to look into the Earl of Marlowe's affairs. He told his mother nothing. He agreed to the engagement; if Marlowe suspected anything, he would destroy the evidence and vanish.
So Henry smiled at Lady Cecilia, and waited, and watched.
And then, in his own library, a quiet maid with chestnut hair had mended his father's book and said nothing. And on the night of the scissors, that same maid had stood up in front of forty people and spoken like a duchess.
Henry had wanted to run down those stairs; he had wanted to tear the scissors out of Cecilia's hand. But a Duke who leaped to defend a housemaid would have set every tongue in England wagging. Cecilia would have known at once that something was wrong. So he had turned away, gone to his rooms, and slammed his fist against the wall until his knuckles bled.
Then he had sent for the finest cap a London milliner could make.
And when, in his father's study at midnight, she had said those words—*"A torn page is like a broken promise"*—Henry had known. He had known exactly who she was.
The very next morning, he went to London to make certain. And while he was gone, his mother threw Clara out into the rain.