The house that held my flat was narrow and tall. The ground floor was devoted to a bake shop, where my landlady, Mrs. Beltan, sold bread and seed cakes to passersby. She did well out of the shop and rented the rooms in the two floors above it. The first floor held my rooms, reached by a dim staircase from a door to the street.

The house had been grand in the time of Charles II, but its elegance had long since faded. My two rooms, bedchamber and sitting room, had once been a bedchamber and grand salon. Now they housed my eclectic mix of furniture-chest-on-frame and huge tester bed from the era in which the house had been built, a writing table and chair from the middle of the last century, a wing chair from 1780, and a low bookcase, carved and gilded in the Egyptian style, a gift from Grenville, which had been made in the last year.

The rooms above mine, identical but with lower ceilings, once had been rented by Marianne, before Grenville had taken her away to live in luxury. In the attics above those, my valet-in-training, Bartholomew, kept himself as comfortably as possible.

Since March, when I'd returned from a brief stay in Berkshire, two different lodgers had taken the rooms above mine, but neither had stayed more than a month. The rooms were currently empty. I'd pondered taking both floors for myself, so that I'd have an extra room and so Bartholomew would not have to sleep in the chilly attics, but Mrs. Beltan and I had not come to an agreement. She was a kindhearted lady but steely hard about money.

Bartholomew was not in evidence when we arrived upstairs. Marianne plopped herself on the wing chair and held out her glass. I filled it with brandy, then I drew up the straight chair from the writing table for myself.

"You knocked me over with a feather, you know," Marianne said. "A wife? You?"

"Few people know." I drank a swallow of brandy, absently noting its rich texture, in too much shock to appreciate it.