"I don't know," Clara said quietly.
She lifted the cap to her face. The linen carried a very faint scent: not perfume, but something warmer—leather, old paper, and wood smoke. It smelled like the library.
Clara sat down slowly on the edge of her bed. Someone in this house had seen what happened last night; someone had cared enough to do this; and that same someone had chosen to do it in secret so that no one would ever know. But who? And why hide it?
Clara looked down at the dark blue ribbon in her hands. And for the first time since the scissors, she felt something stir in her chest that she had almost forgotten: hope.
She did not know yet that hope would be the most dangerous thing she could carry into the days ahead. Because that very evening, Lady Cecilia Marlowe would sit down at her writing desk and send an urgent letter to her father in London with only three words: *She is here.*
The great house was in a frenzy. With only four days left until the engagement ball, every servant at Ravenshire Hall was working from dawn until long after dark: chandeliers were taken down and cleaned crystal by crystal, carpets were beaten, silver was polished until it shone like mirrors, and carriages of flowers arrived from London every morning.
Clara wore her new cap every day. Nobody could see a single strand of her ruined hair beneath it. A few of the maids whispered about it, wondering where a housemaid had found such a fine thing; Clara said nothing.
And every day she watched the East Wing. The tall double doors at the end of the second-floor corridor stayed locked. The Dowager Duchess wore the only key on a chain at her waist; Clara had seen it glinting there a hundred times. Four days until the ball. Six weeks until the wedding. And she was no closer than she had been two years ago.
On the second evening, Clara was in the kitchen scrubbing pots when old Mrs. Pike sat down heavily on a stool beside her. The cook rubbed her aching knees and sighed.
"This house," she muttered, "all this fuss over one party. In the old Duke's time, it was never like this."
"Did you know him well?" Clara asked carefully.
Mrs. Pike gave a short laugh. "Better than most. He couldn't sleep, the old Duke. Late at night, he'd come creeping down here to the kitchen for a cup of hot milk and honey. He didn't want his wife to know, so he used the old servants' door—the one behind the hunting tapestry on the second landing." She shook her head. "The lock on that door has been broken for twenty years. Nobody ever bothered to fix it."
Clara's scrubbing brush stopped moving. "Behind the tapestry," she repeated softly.