Poor, poor Cordelia. When I think of what she must be feeling I can’t help but cry. Robert says it’s unbecoming to take on someone else’s misery, and I’m certain he’s right, yet I can’t find a way to stop. I remember the joy that consumed me as I became a wife. Cordelia will never feel that. Even if, years from now, she finds affection somewhere else, how could she ever escape a constant dread that her happiness is about to be ripped away from her?

I suppose it can happen to any of us, at anytime. I feel so fortunate to have escaped a similar fate. My husband languished in prison, but only for a relatively short period of time (although at the time it did not seem so). He wasn’t taken from me forever, he was returned to me, and now I’ve the sweetest daughter on earth. What does one do to deserve such luck?

I’m off to see Emily now. She’s persuaded me—much against my will—to accompany her to some dreadful meeting. I never could refuse her anything. I have two hopes: one, that it won’t last too long; two, that it is more interesting than Latin. Surely the latter is a certitude.

2

Violent death was no stranger to me. In the past few years, I’d been intimately involved in apprehending four heinous murderers, one of whom had killed my first husband, Philip, the Viscount Ashton. Only a year ago in Normandy, I’d found the brutalized body of a young girl, and had been kidnapped and cruelly tormented by her killer, whose subsequent trial and execution had enthralled Britain and the Continent. Try though I might to shake the images of these ghastly events from my mind, I found I could not do so, and now the news of Mr. Dillman’s death was taking its own gruesome hold on me.

“We were dancing, Colin,” I said. “Dancing.”

“It’s a disturbing contrast, I agree,” he said, smearing ginger marmalade on a piece of toast.