His thoughts wandered to his most recent fascination: the scandalous Mrs. Webster. She hadn’t seemed particularly scandalous when he’d met her—she’d seemed smart, and strong, and … wary. He’d discovered why the next morning when he’d started into the newspaper archives at the Astor Library. He’d meant to focus on her house, but his curiosity about the woman had overwhelmed him, and it wasn’t as though she was hard to find.

Two years ago, with no instigating incident Sam could find, Alva Webster had jumped from the society column of the Parisian papers (“Mr. and Mrs. Webster hosted several American friends at a select dinner party…”) to the pages of scandal sheets across Europe. Her name was dragged from salacious headline to salacious headline; thinly sourced stories about extravagant orgies and titillating affairs. Ten months later, her husband, whom she had not been living with at the time, had been murdered by ruffians in Monte Carlo. This poured oil onto an already roaring fire, and Mrs. Webster was promoted again, from scandal sheets to front page news. The papers had even breathlessly reported when she’d begun wearing lavender three months after the murder, a sartorial decision which was apparently very shocking for reasons Sam didn’t quite grasp.

He got one boot unlaced and frowned down at it. Did it always take that long to unlace a shoe? He removed his watch and set it on the step next to him before he began the next one.

The stories were awful and almost certainly libelous. They would have flattened a weaker person. That Alva Webster still stood, with her back ramrod straight and her jaw set firmly against the world, only intrigued him more.

He’d researched the Rensselaers, the wealthy banking family she came from, and discovered her father was a member of one of the consortiums that had recently approached him about the same municipal lighting project the Dentons were interested in. Curiously, there was hardly any mention of them in the newspaper stories, a fact that nagged at him. He wondered how they’d been able to restrain themselves during the worst of it. He wouldn’t have been able to, if it had been a member of his family.

Once he’d been able to tear himself away from the woman, he’d begun gathering data about the house. The project had occupied every spare moment of the last three weeks—well, perhaps not every spare moment; there was the prototype of the carbon lantern that had popped into his head that night, which he’d quickly knocked together, as well as the three iterations that had come after—but otherwise he’d been devoted to the Webster project.