Eleanor turned and faced the room. She stood behind the little settee, behind Miss Trent. This upright posture of Miss Trent’s was not quite natural, she observed, even if one accepted the girl was unwell. It was not the bearing of a gentlewoman brought up for drawing rooms and a good marriage. It was the posture of a girl expected to work, who had worked, in some capacity or other, for much of her twenty-two years. Her answers, too, were the unconsciously diffident responses of someone more accustomed to serving than being served. But not quite a servant, no. An artisan’s daughter, perhaps, or a clerk’s.

But fallen.

Eleanor paid no heed to the lashes wet with tears, the hand that shook. Here was a woman who had compromised herself—and for what? So that she might have another woman’s husband? Or because circumstances demanded it? Eleanor had sat on the board of the Benevolent Asylum, she was not without knowledge of the sort of woman who found herself in such a precarious position, but that was not Miss Trent—there was no child, so far as one could ascertain, no deserting or drunken or violent husband. She was not in poverty. Why, then, had she thrown her morals aside? Spoiled her chances, such as they may be, of a normal life?

Unless she had no morals to lose in the first place.

She thought of the Jellicoes’ housekeeper, the faceless, the omnipotent Dora Hyatt. A destroyer of marriages, reputations, lives, and all for her own nefarious, sordid ends.

Or so one presumed.

Miss Trent turned her head, but short of twisting herself right around she could not meet the gaze of the stranger standing behind her. It was awkward; her discomfort was evident. How much more powerful I am than you, thought Eleanor, and she felt her power—she did!—as it surged through her, and in the same moment found she had no power at all. For what could she do? What was there to do?

‘Oh, see what I have found on your carpet!’ Eleanor exclaimed. She came around and resumed her place on the edge of the settee, holding out before her, so that Miss Trent might see it, the gold tiepin with the engraved initials: A.D. ‘It is a gentleman’s gold tiepin,’ she added, so that there be no mistaking it.

Miss Trent peered at the pin. It was not quite dismay on her face but something close to it. She looked away. She said nothing. What could she say? A gentlemen’s gold tiepin in her apartment.

She did, then, have some modicum of respectability, some modesty.

‘It looks to be quite valuable,’ said Eleanor. ‘Perhaps it was left by the previous occupants.’

She was not sure why she had presented the girl with this way out.

Miss Trent nodded weakly. ‘Yes, perhaps.’