He reached the doorway, and the first thing to meet his eyes was the great four-poster bed from another era, its bedclothes scattered and some falling onto the polished floorboards in a wild tangle.

Jenny Teller lay on the bed in her nightdress, her fair hair tumbled and uncombed, her feet bare.

Walter Teller was stepping aside to let the doctor work with her.

Fielding bent over the bed, his hands quick and sure. But after only a matter of minutes, he straightened and said, “There’s nothing I can do. She’s gone. I’m so sorry, Walter.”

“But she was alive when you got here!” he exclaimed. “I could tell.”

“I don’t think she was. And if she had been, it was too late, far too late. The laudanum had done its work. She must have been dying when you found her.”

“She can’t have been. I won’t believe it.” He leaned over his wife, touching her face, calling her name, begging her to wake up. The doctor watched him for a time, then caught his shoulder and pulled him away. “There’s nothing more you can do, man. Let me make her decent. She shouldn’t be left like this.”

It took some time to convince Teller to go out of the room. He reached the doorway, his face wet with tears, his mouth open in a silent cry of grief, then stumbled into the passage, going as far as the stairs, where he sat down on the top step, his head in his hands.

Shutting the door, Rutledge began searching the room from where he stood, his eyes roving from the armoire to the tall dresser, to the smaller chest of drawers on the far side of the bed, a desk by the windows, and a long mirror.

“There was a glass verra’ like that one in Lancashire,” Hamish said.

And so there was. Very like it. Even to the carved roses at the top of the oval frame. It must have come from the same manufacturer to be so alike.

Odd that both women owned the same mirror. He wouldn’t have accused either of them of vanity.

He brought himself up sharply and continued to search for anything out of the ordinary.

Finishing his inspection of the room, he waited without speaking.

“What are you doing here at this hour?” the doctor demanded as he turned to see Rutledge still by the door.

“I got here not five minutes before you. I was called away before I could finish that business of Captain Teller’s fall.”

Fielding nodded. “I thought he might have called you. Walter, I mean.” He gestured to the woman on the bed. “Well, since you’re here, help me lay her out. The bed’s in a state. Where’s Mollie?”