The needle was almost three inches long, bright enough to catch the candlelight, and it had been sewn into the lining of Nora Fenwick's dress with its point turned toward her heart.
She held it between two fingers while a room full of women stared at the small tear beneath her collarbone. Beside the gilded mirror, Lady Cecily Banford stopped smiling. At the doorway, Lord Alderly looked from the needle to Nora's face and asked, very quietly, "Who put that there?"
Four days earlier, Nora had been sitting at the kitchen table of a narrow house in the village of Bellwick, turning the pages of an account book while rain leaked through the roof. Her mother worked by the window, repairing a child's coat with fingers that had begun to stiffen in the cold. A kettle hummed over a little fire. On the table lay three unpaid bills, a bundle of letters, and an invitation sealed with the crest of the Ashcombe family. Nora had read that invitation six times and still could not decide whether it represented salvation or a particularly elegant trap.
Bellwick's Girls' School had been founded by the late Countess of Alderly to teach reading, arithmetic, and useful trades to daughters whose families could not afford tutors. Nora had attended as a child, returned as a teacher, and finally helped manage the sewing room. Its pupils were not ornaments for charitable speeches. They were twelve-year-old girls learning to write their names for the first time, young apprentices earning pennies toward their families' rent, and daughters of widows who discovered that an education could mean the difference between dependence and a wage of their own.
For most of the previous autumn, the school had been painfully cold. Coal deliveries had stopped, despite a generous allowance for fuel. Several apprentices had received no wages for work performed at a fashionable dressmaking establishment in Brighton. When Nora asked to see the trustees' records, the treasurer, Mr. Lionel Prowse, told her that a teacher ought to concern herself with stitches rather than sums. When she continued asking, Lady Cecily Banford dismissed her from the sewing committee for "encouraging discontent." The school was still open, but every week it seemed to give the girls a little less.
She had written twice to Nathaniel Ashcombe, Viscount Alderly, who had inherited oversight of the charitable trust after his father's death. Neither letter had received an answer. Then a different envelope arrived, addressed in a wavering but unmistakable hand. Lady Honoria Ashcombe, Nathaniel's great-aunt and one of the original trustees, requested Nora's presence at the annual assembly at Westridge House. Her note was brief: I have read your account of the school. Come as my guest, and bring what you can prove.