“No right to retrieve stolen property? To the contrary, it was me duty.”

“It wasn’t stolen.” She twisted Agnes’s arm, making the maid wince. “You know that, Agnes.”

“I don’t know anything except what I saw.”

“It was a gift.”

“An heirloom, ye said. A lie.”

“It was a gift.”

Agnes shook her off. “‘It was a gift,’” she mimicked. “Ye dimwit. That’s only half the trouble. Yer pregnant.” She laughed at Evangeline’s befuddled expression. “Surprised, are ye? Too innocent to know it, but not too innocent to do the act.”

Pregnant. The moment the word was out of Agnes’s mouth, Evangeline knew she was right. The nausea, her recent inexplicable fatigue . . .

“I had a moral responsibility to inform the lady of the house,” Agnes said, smugly self-righteous.

Cecil’s velvet words. His insistent fingers and dazzling smile. Her own weakness, her gullibility. How pathetic, how foolish, she had been. How could she have allowed herself to be so compromised? Her good name was all she had. Now she had nothing.

“Ye think you’re better than the rest of us, don’t ye? Well, you’re not. And now you’ve had your comeuppance,” Agnes said, reaching for the doorknob and wrenching the door open. “Everyone knows. You’re the laughingstock of the household.” She pushed past Evangeline toward the stairs, knocking her back against the wall.

Desperation rose within Evangeline like a wave, filling her with such force and velocity that she was helpless against it. Without thinking, she followed Agnes out onto the landing and shoved her, hard. With a strange, high-pitched yelp, Agnes fell headlong down the stairs, crumpling in a heap at the bottom.

Peering down at Agnes as she staggered to her feet, Evangeline felt her fury crest and subside. In its wake was a faint tremor of regret.

The butler and head footman were on the scene within seconds.

“She—she tried to kill me!” Agnes cried, holding her head.

Standing at the top of the landing, Evangeline was eerily, strangely, calm. She smoothed her apron, tucked a wispy strand of hair behind an ear. As if watching a play, she noted the butler’s contemptuous grimace and Agnes’s theatrical sobs. Observed Mrs. Grimsby flutter over, squeaking and exclaiming.

This was the end of Blenheim Road, she knew, of primers and white chalk and slate tablets, of Ned and Beatrice babbling about sponge cake, of her small bedroom with its tiny window. Of Cecil’s hot breath on her neck. There would be no explaining, no redeeming. Maybe it was better this way—to be an active participant in her demise rather than a passive victim. At least now she deserved her fate.

In the servants’ hallway, lighted with oil lamps, two constables fastened Evangeline into handcuffs and leg chains while the constable with the droopy moustache made the rounds of the household staff with his notebook. “She were awful quiet,” the chambermaid was saying, as if Evangeline were already gone. Each of them, it seemed to her, overplayed the roles expected of them: the staff a little too indignant, the constables self-important, Agnes understandably giddy at the attention and apparent sympathy of her superiors.