“Merely to give me some feeling for the person you’ve described. I have found that faces tell me more than facts sometimes.”

She hesitated. Rutledge was certain he’d given her the wrong answer, and had lost. Then she opened a drawer in the desk. From it she drew a silver filigree frame and passed it across to him without looking at it. He rose to take it from her hand, and sat down again before turning it over.

The face staring back at him was smiling, one hand on the horse at her side, the other holding a trophy. Beneath the riding hat it was difficult to see her features clearly, but she was an attractive young woman with her mother’s bearing. There was something familiar about the face all the same, and he frowned as he studied it. All at once he made the connection.

She reminded him quite strongly of one of the royal princesses—

As if his thought reached her at the same time, Lady Maude extended her hand imperiously, and he had no choice but to return the photograph to her.

Hamish, following his thought, was scandalized.

His sister Frances would know, if anybody did. But looking at the woman in front of him, and remembering the photograph she’d taken from him, Rutledge found himself wondering if Eleanor Victoria Maude Gray was— possibly—the child of a liaison between Lady Maude and the late King Edward VII. The king had had an eye for beautiful women. It wouldn’t have been surprising if she’d come to his notice.

Small wonder, with that heritage, that Lady Maude refused to believe that her daughter had come to die on a desolate Scottish mountainside, or that she had borne a child out of wedlock.

Eleanor was destined for greater things than a career in medicine—if she was the daughter of a King, and heir to this house and the fortune that apparently maintained it, she could take her pick of wealthy and titled men.

But if she was as contrary as her mother wanted him to believe, might she not have rebelled against this golden future and found instead some perverse pleasure in making her mother’s nightmares rather than her dreams come true . . . ?

LADY MAUDE SAT at the broad desk long after the man from London had gone, staring blindly at the closed door.

How had he tricked her into speaking of Eleanor? She had told a policeman what she hadn’t revealed to anyone else—that Eleanor was headstrong, contrary, that her daughter’s heritage had meant so little to her that she had walked away from it and never looked back. She had chosen a common profession instead, one that dealt with poverty and squalor and hideous diseases. It was unspeakably cruel and headstrong.

She would call London straightaway and have that man broken in rank—