Susan bent and picked up the book. “I came to remember my father,” she said, and put the book back on the shelf. Who had torn those pages out? Lengyll? Rimer? She doubted it. She thought it more likely that the woman standing before her right now had done it. Perhaps for as little as a single piece of red gold. Nothing asked, nothing told, so all is well, she would have thought, popping the coin into her money-box, after first biting its edge to make sure it was true.

“Remember him? It’s ask his forgiveness, ye should do. For ye’ve forgotten his face, so ye have. Most grievous have ye forgotten it, Sue.”

Susan only looked at her.

“Have ye been with him today?” Cordelia asked in a brittle, laughing voice. Her hand went to the red pillow-mark on her cheek and began rubbing it. She had been getting bad by degrees, Susan realized, but had become ever so much worse since the gossip about Jonas and Coral Thorin had started. “Have ye been with sai Dearborn? Is yer crack still dewy from his spend? Here, let me see for myself!”

Her aunt glided forward—spectral in her black dress, her bodice open, her slippered feet peeping—and Susan pushed her back. In her fright and disgust, she pushed hard. Cordelia struck the wall beside the cobwebbed window.

“Ye should ask forgiveness yerself,” Susan said. “To speak to his daughter so in this place. In this place.” She let her eyes turn to the shelf of ledgers, then return to her aunt. The look of frightened calculation she saw on Cordelia Delgado’s face told her all she wanted or needed to know. She hadn’t been a party to her brother’s murder, that Susan could not believe, but she had known something of it. Yes, something.

“Ye faithless bitch,” Cordelia whispered.

“No,” Susan said, “I have been true.”

And so, she realized, she had been. A great weight seemed to slip off her shoulders at the thought. She walked to the door of the office and turned back to her aunt. “I’ve slept my last night here,” she said. “I’ll not listen to more such as this. Nor look at ye as ye are now. It hurts my heart and steals the love I’ve kept for ye since I was little, when ye did the best ye could to be my ma.”

Cordelia clapped her hands over her face, as if looking at Susan hurt her.

“Get out, then!” she screamed. “Go back to Seafront or wherever it is thee rolls with that boy! If I never see thy trollop’s face again, I’ll count my life good!”