It was surprisingly easy to keep their rendezvous secret. Evangeline’s small room was set apart from the other servants’ bedrooms, down a narrow hallway past the kitchen. Because she was on a different schedule than most of the staff, nobody paid much attention to her comings and goings. The proximity to London was its own alibi. Coming back to her room between lessons, she’d find notes slipped under her door—Half six, corner of Cavendish and Circus . . . Gloucester Gate, 7 p.m. . . . Dorset Square at noon—and hide them under her mattress. She told the cook she was going for a stroll, to see the lights on the Thames at dusk, to explore Regent’s Park on a Sunday, and she wasn’t even lying.

Cecil’s best friend from Harrow was an amiable lad named Charles Pepperton. Unlike Cecil, who was studying to be a barrister like his father, Charles wasn’t expected to pursue a vocation. He would inherit both the family estate and his father’s seat in the House of Lords; all he needed to do for the next few decades was cultivate the proper friends, marry an age-appropriate woman from a comparable family (a minor royal, if possible), and improve his fox-hunting skills at the family’s country estate in Dorset. He spent a lot of time in Dorset. His home in Mayfair was spacious, well-appointed, and almost always uninhabited.

The first time Cecil brought Evangeline to the house in Mayfair—early on a Saturday evening, when lessons were over and the Whitstones senior were at a party—she was shy and self-conscious in front of the servants. But soon enough she learned about the mechanisms in place designed to keep secrets, cover up indiscretions, and protect the upper classes from scandal. Cecil, well known to the staff, was treated with casual deference: a discreet lowering of the eyes, a careful coding of language. (“Will the lady be joining you for tea?”) As time went on, Evangeline became more comfortable, more brazenly open. When Cecil pulled her onto his lap in front of the butler, she no longer felt compelled to protest.

It was in the shadowy parlor of Charles’s town house that Cecil gave her the ring. “To remember me while I’m on holiday. And when I’m back . . .” He nuzzled her neck.

She pulled away, smiling uncertainly, trying to parse the meaning behind his words. “When you’re back?”

He put a finger to her lips. “You’ll wear it for me again.”

This was not, of course, the answer to the question she was asking. But it was the only answer he was prepared to give.

It wasn’t until much later that she realized she had built gossamer connections between his words, sticky as spider silk, filling in the phrases she wanted to hear.

Newgate Prison, London, 1840

There were some things she would never get used to: the screams that spread like a contagion from one cell to the next. The vicious fistfights that broke out abruptly and ended with an inmate spitting blood or teeth. The lukewarm midday broth that floated with bony pig knuckles, snouts, bits of hooves and hair. Moldy bread laced with maggots. Once the initial shock subsided, though, Evangeline found it surprisingly easy to endure most of the degradations and indignities of her new life: the brutish guards, the cockroaches and other parasites, the unavoidable filth, rats scurrying across the straw. The constant contact with other women, cheek to cheek, their sour breath on her face as she tried to sleep, their snoring in her ears. She learned to dim the noise: the clanging door at the end of the hall, the tapping spoons and wailing babies. The stink of the chamber pot, which had so sickened her when she’d first arrived, receded; she willed herself to ignore it.