The morning after the dinner party, Elena woke with the photograph of Camille Delacourt pressed between the pages of Isolde Vane's poetry like a dried flower, something dead preserved in the act of seeming alive. She had not slept. The night had passed in a strange, suspended wakefulness, her mind turning over the facts of her situation with a clarity that felt almost chemical, as though some sedative fog she had breathed for years had suddenly lifted. By the time the first gray light seeped through the curtains, she had arrived at a single, unshakable conviction: she would not be the woman who wept, or the woman who begged, or the woman who looked away. She would be the woman who understood.
Understanding required information. And information, in the walled city of Ashwick society, required a particular kind of currency: the trust of other women.
It was this insight that propelled Elena out of bed and through her morning ablutions with an efficiency that surprised even Mrs. Alden, who was accustomed to her mistress's languid, almost somnolent rhythms. By nine o'clock, Elena was dressed in a walking suit of dove-gray wool, her hair pinned beneath a modest hat, her gloves buttoned to the wrist. She declined the carriage, saying she wished to walk into the village, to take the air, to visit the shops. Marcus had already departed for the courthouse, and the servants asked no questions. A mistress who walked was a mistress who gave no trouble.
The village of Ashwick lay nestled in a fold of the green Valdorian hills, a cluster of stone buildings that had grown up around the old market cross like moss around a stone. It was a place where nothing happened that was not observed, and nothing observed that was not discussed, and nothing discussed that was not judged. Elena had learned this early in her marriage, during the first terrible months when every servant's glance had seemed a verdict, every shopkeeper's smile a sentence. She had learned to move through Ashwick as though through a gallery of mirrors, reflecting back only what others wished to see.
Today, however, she was not shopping. She was hunting.
Her quarry was a woman named Lydia Carrow, the wife of the village physician, a woman of middle years and middling reputation who possessed, Elena had long suspected, the single most valuable commodity in Ashwick: information. Lydia Carrow sat on the parish council, the library committee, the charitable society for indigent widows. She visited the sick, consoled the bereaved, and organized the flower rota for the church. In the course of these activities, she learned everything about everyone, and she was, moreover, constitutionally incapable of keeping any of it to herself.
Elena found her at the milliner's shop on Threadneedle Lane, a narrow establishment crowded with ribbons and feathers and the faint, sweet smell of new felt. Lydia was examining a length of velvet ribbon in a shade of mauve that did not suit her complexion, and when she saw Elena enter, her face lit with the particular pleasure of a woman who has just been presented with a fresh source of conversation.
"Mrs. Voss! What a delightful surprise. I so rarely see you in the village. But then, you must be so busy with your household. How is the judge? I heard your dinner party was a great success. Cornelia Aldritch told me the consommé was exquisite. Is it true you have a new French chef?"
The questions came in a torrent, each one requiring no answer, each one carrying its own hidden barb. Elena smiled her practiced smile and allowed herself to be drawn into the orbit of Lydia's chatter. She examined a display of hatpins, commented on the weather, and waited for the conversation to turn, as she knew it must, to the subject of marriage, and infidelity, and the secret lives of the prominent families of Ashwick.
It took less than a quarter of an hour. Lydia, having exhausted the subject of the dinner party, leaned in with the confidential air of a woman about to impart something delicious. "And have you heard," she said, lowering her voice, "about the Delacourt girl?"
Elena's hand, which had been resting on a bolt of silk, went very still. "Delacourt?" she repeated, as though the name were unfamiliar to her. "I cannot say that I have."
"Oh, you would not know the family. They are not from Ashwick proper. The father was a merchant of some kind, made a fortune in the Lyrian wine trade before he died. The mother is an invalid, I believe. They have a house on the edge of the moor, quite isolated. Very strange people. But the daughter—" Lydia paused for effect, her eyes bright with the pleasure of revelation. "The daughter is a painter. An artist. They say she has taken a studio in the old guildhall and paints the most scandalous pictures. Nudes, if you can believe it. And she is not even married. She lives alone, with only a maid for company, and comes and goes as she pleases. The rector's wife is quite beside herself."
Elena absorbed this information with the same detached precision she had once applied to her study of the Latin poets, in the brief, shining interval between her engagement and her marriage, when Marcus had still encouraged her to read, to learn, to be something other than an ornament. An artist. A woman who lived alone, who painted nudes, who came and went as she pleased. A woman who had nothing to lose and everything to take.
"She sounds," Elena said carefully, "like a very modern sort of woman."
"Modern!" Lydia sniffed. "That is one word for it. I can think of others. But then, I suppose the judge would not approve of such a creature. He is so very proper, is he not?"
Elena turned her head slightly, fixing Lydia with a gaze that was mild and unblinking. "My husband," she said, "is a man of the highest principles. I am sure he would not give such a person a moment's thought."
The lie came as easily as breath. And Lydia, who could scent scandal as a hound scents a fox, tilted her head with a new interest. "Of course," she said. "Of course he would not. But one hears things, you know. The guildhall is not so very far from the courthouse. And the judge does take his lunch at the inn on Tuesdays, when the assizes are in session. And the Delacourt girl is often at that same inn, sketching the patrons, or so I am told."
Elena filed this away. Tuesday. The inn. The convergence of two trajectories, her husband's and the artist's, in the public rooms of the Black Swan, where anyone might see them, where anyone might talk. She thought of the photograph, the easy intimacy, the laughter. She thought of how long it must have been going on, how many Tuesdays, how many glances exchanged over a glass of wine.
"Thank you, Mrs. Carrow," she said, and her voice was as smooth as the silk beneath her hand. "You have been most informative. I must be getting home now. The household requires a great deal of management."
She left the milliner's shop with the sensation of a door closing behind her, a soft, irrevocable click. The autumn air was crisp and clean, scented with woodsmoke and the distant tang of the sea. She walked through the market square, past the Black Swan with its mullioned windows and its sign creaking in the breeze, and turned her steps toward the old guildhall, a half-timbered building that had stood at the edge of the village since the time of the old kings.
The guildhall had fallen into disrepair in recent years, and the town council had been only too happy to rent the upper rooms to a young woman who asked no favors and paid her rent in advance. Elena stood across the lane, in the shadow of a plane tree, and looked up at the windows. The curtains were drawn, but she could see a light burning within, the steady, golden glow of an oil lamp. Someone was inside. Someone was working.
She did not knock. She was not yet ready to announce herself, to declare her knowledge, to show her hand. That was not the game she intended to play. She had learned from Marcus, in the long years of their marriage, that power lay in patience, in the careful accumulation of advantage, in the slow, silent tightening of the net. She would not confront Camille Delacourt. She would study her, from a distance, with the dispassionate eye of a naturalist observing a specimen. She would learn her habits, her weaknesses, her hidden vulnerabilities. And then, when the time was right, she would act.
She turned away from the guildhall and began the long walk back to Ashwick Hall. The road wound through the village and then climbed into the hills, past fields that had been harvested and lay brown and stubbled under the pale autumn sky. The wind was rising, and the first leaves of the season were skittering across the road, dry and brittle as old bones.
When she reached the gates of the estate, she paused. The house lay before her, a vast pile of gray stone with its formal gardens and its avenue of ancient oaks. It was beautiful, in a cold, imposing way, but it had never felt like home. It had always been Marcus's house, his family's house, his legacy. She was merely a tenant, a caretaker, a body that occupied a certain set of rooms and performed a certain set of functions. And now, it seemed, she was also an obstacle, a problem to be solved, a wife to be set aside.
She walked up the drive, her heels crunching on the gravel, and entered the house through the side door that led to the kitchens. The servants were busy with their afternoon tasks, and no one noticed her passing. She climbed the back stairs to her room and closed the door behind her, and then she did something she had not done in years: she locked it.
From the drawer of her writing desk, she took out the book of Isolde Vane's poetry and opened it to the page where the photograph was hidden. She looked at Camille Delacourt's laughing face, at the careless, radiant beauty of her, and she felt the jealousy rise in her throat like bile. But she did not push it away. She let it come. She let it fill her, a slow, dark tide that rose from some deep, unsuspected wellspring of her soul.
It was not Marcus she envied. It was not even, entirely, Camille. It was the world they inhabited together, the world of laughter and ease and unguarded smiles, a world from which she had been excluded since the day she had spoken her marriage vows. It was the happiness they had stolen from her, the happiness she had never been allowed to possess. And she understood, with a clarity that was almost beautiful, that what she felt was not a desire for recompense. It was not a longing for justice. It was a pure, elemental hunger for destruction.
She wanted to watch that laughter die. She wanted to see that radiant face grow pale and hollow. She wanted to take the world they had built together and reduce it to ashes, not because she would gain anything by it, but because the act of destruction itself would be a kind of vindication. Because the flames would warm her, at least for a moment, in the cold house of her life.
She sat at her writing desk until the light began to fail, and then she lit a candle and continued to sit, her hands folded before her, her face composed, her mind working with the slow, patient intensity of a clockwork mechanism. Outside, the wind rose and the leaves fell, and the first stars appeared in the darkening sky.
When at last she rose, she crossed to her wardrobe and took out a shawl of dark wool, something a village woman might wear, something that would not be noticed or remarked upon. She wrapped it around her shoulders and slipped out of the house by the garden door, into the deepening twilight. The path to the apothecary's cottage led through a copse of birch trees and across a small stone bridge, and she followed it without hesitation, her feet finding the way as though they had always known it.
The cottage was dark, but a light burned in the workshop at the back, a single candle flickering behind a window of thick, greenish glass. Elena knocked, and after a moment, the door was opened by Agnes Blackwood, the apothecary, an old woman with hands gnarled by decades of work with roots and resins, her eyes sharp and dark in a face like a crumpled map.
"Mrs. Voss," the old woman said, and there was no surprise in her voice, only a watchful, patient curiosity. "I wondered when you would come."
Elena stepped inside, into the warm, fragrant darkness of the workshop, where bundles of dried herbs hung from the rafters and jars of tincture gleamed on the shelves like jewels. "You know me?" she asked.
Agnes Blackwood smiled, a slow, knowing smile that revealed very little. "I know everyone in Ashwick who is dying," she said. "And I know everyone who wishes they were. You, Mrs. Voss, are the second kind. What is it you require?"
Elena looked around the workshop, at the jars and the bundles and the mortar and pestle that stood on the workbench, still dusted with the residue of some recent grinding. She took a breath, and the air was thick with the scent of lavender and rosemary, of valerian and wormwood, of a dozen things that could heal and a dozen things that could kill.
"I require," she said, "knowledge. And I am prepared to pay whatever it costs."
The old woman's smile deepened, and she gestured for Elena to sit. "Then you have come to the right place," she said. "Knowledge is the one thing I have in abundance. And as for payment—well, we can discuss that later. Tell me what you want to know."
And Elena, sitting in the flickering light of the candle, began to speak.
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