It had lost its bright gold luster over the long, bleary autumn, but she knew what lotions and potions would bring back its shine, what pots of paint to select to put false color in her cheeks, on her lips.

 She knew all the tricks of the trade. How else could she have caught the eye of a man like Reginald Harper? How else had she seduced him into making her his mistress?

 She would use them again, all of them, Amelia thought, to seduce him once more, and to urge him to do everything that must be done.

 He hadn’t come, in all this time, in all these months, he hadn’t come to her. So she’d been forced to send notes to his businesses, begging him to come, only to be ignored.

 Ignoredafter all she had done, all she had been, all she had lost.

 What choice had she had but to send more notes, and to his home? To the grand Harper House where his pale wife reigned. Where a mistress could never walk.

 Hadn’t she given him all he could ask, all he could want? She’d traded her body for the comfort of this house, the convenience of servants, for the baubles, like the pearl drops she fixed on her ears now.

 Small prices to pay for a man of his stature and wealth, and such had been the limits of her ambitions once. A man only, and what he could give her. But he’d given her more than either of them had bargained for. The loss of it was more than she could bear.

 Why had he not come to comfort her? To grieve with her?

 Had she complained, ever? Had she ever turned him from her bed? Or mentioned even once the other women he kept?

 She had given him her youth, and her beauty. And, it seemed, her health.

 And he would desert her now? Turn away from hernow ?