She was just beginning to consider whether or not she should tell Bessie that it was all a mistake—that they should get back into the hackney and return to Lord and Lady Trumble’s—when the front door opened and they were confronted by a stooped, white-haired butler with a candle held in his upraised hand.

He looked at Bessie first before dismissing her and turning his rheumy gaze on Maggie. His eyes swept her from the top of the sable-trimmed hood of her cloak to the toes of her kid half-boots. Seeming to have satisfied himself that at least one of the party was a lady, he lowered his candle. “Madam?”

Maggie stepped forward. “I’m come to see Lord St. Clare,” she said in the same firm tones she used when directing the servants at Beasley Park. “It’s a matter of some urgency.”

The butler’s face was devoid of expression. “Your name, Madam?”

She swallowed. “Mrs. Ives.”

It was Jane who had suggested that Maggie present herself as a married lady. “Servants are prone to gossip,” she’d said before Maggie departed Green Street. “It would be far better if St. Clare’s servants didn’t know you were Miss Honeywell. Indeed, it would be best if they didn’t know who you were at all.”

Bessie had heartily agreed, even going so far as to volunteer her own last name for Maggie’s use. It was a small deception and would surely harm no one, but Maggie was uncomfortable with it all the same.

“I will see if his lordship is at home.” The butler began to withdraw, moving as if to close the door.

Maggie delayed him a moment longer. “If he is at home, inform him, if you please, that my visit pertains to his dawn appointment.”

The butler betrayed no signs of knowledge about the duel, but Maggie suspected her own knowledge of it underlined to him the urgency of her visit. He disappeared into the house, and after a short time, during which Bessie grumbled incessantly about the rudeness of servants leaving young ladies to wait on the stoop with no care at all for whether they would develop an inflammation of the lungs, he reappeared and welcomed them inside.

The entry hall of the Earl of Allendale’s residence was far grander than that of Lord and Lady Trumble’s house in Green Street. An enormous crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling, and a sweeping staircase curved up to the floors above. The floor was tiled in marble, and the silk-papered walls were lined with statuary and artifacts.

Maggie pushed back the hood of her cloak and looked around, her eyes settling first on a sculpture of a horse and then on an eerily shaped bust that, upon closer inspection, appeared to be some sort of a death mask. A shiver ran down her spine.