Upstairs, she knocked on the door to his office. “Mr. Ainsworth?”

The gas lights behind her hissed in the quiet. She glanced over her shoulder at the empty hall. Bringing a hand to the doorknob, she raised her voice. “Mr. Ainsworth, it’s Miss Daly.”

She opened the door, looked in, and stepped back at once.

Jonathan Ainsworth was quite dead.

He lay on the floor, his desk chair pushed back as though he’d collapsed from it. His face was pallid, his eyes staring in the fixed, unseeing manner of the departed. There was no blood, no gaping wound from which Catherine could discern the cause of his demise. Heart pounding, she crouched down, taking his wrist in some futile attempt to find a pulse. Pieces of a broken teacup were strewn over the floorboards, dark tea splashed across the wood. Ainsworth’s skin was already cold, his body stiff, as though he’d been dead for some time, throughout the night even.

Sitting back, she cut her eyes away from his vacant expression. It was startling to stumble upon him like this, but she couldn’t find it in herself to shed any tears for her former employer. In place of grief, there was only overwhelming puzzlement, and underlying it, a sharp edge of fear. The sensation coalesced within her heart, and she scrambled to her feet.

She had to tell someone. She had to find Spencer.

In his office downstairs, Spencer sat at his desk, looking over a bit of paper. He jerked his head up when she came in, putting the paper away in a drawer. “Catherine! What—good gracious, can’t you knock?”

Catherine closed the door, pressing her back against it. “Spencer,” she said. “You need to come upstairs. Mr. Ainsworth—Mr. Ainsworth is dead.”

His eyes flew wide. “What? What do you mean?”

“He—I just went up there and, Spencer, it looks like he’s been there all night. Did you see him come in this morning?”

Spencer shook his head slowly. “No.” He ran a shaking hand through his hair and stood up, coming around the side of the desk. “Oh God, I haven’t seen him since yesterday afternoon.”

They went up to the fourth floor together. Ainsworth’s door hung partially ajar, where Catherine had left it unlatched; through the gap, she saw a chipped fragment of the teacup, part of one of Ainsworth’s boots. Spencer eased the door open the rest of the way, and they regarded the body in silence.

After a long moment, Spencer said quietly, “I’ll inform the police. I don’t know what could’ve—perhaps the shock of it.”

“The shock of what?”

Spencer shuddered, pulling the door closed. Even with Ainsworth’s body out of sight, Catherine couldn’t rid her mind of the scene. It was as if it were printed on the insides of her eyelids.

Still in that same quiet voice, Spencer said, “He signed over the paper to Mr. Boyd at their meeting yesterday. I thought he might’ve gone home afterward. I had no idea he was still here.” He dragged his fingers through his hair again, his face white as chalk. “I wanted to find you, Catherine, but I wasn’t sure where you’d gone. Mr. Boyd may very well let you work here again.”