Page 40 of A Legacy of Lies

Chapter Sixteen

The corridor was too quiet when she left Eleanor’s rooms, the kind that made her hear her own heartbeat. Every stolen breath was borrowed from the hush that ruled the house. Eleanor’s written words still echoed through her mind.

Truth kept too long asks a higher price.

Sleep would not come while those words lived inside her. They nested beneath her ribs, restless as wings. The house itself seemed to listen, every shadow waiting for her to falter. She turned down the corridor, the lamp trembling in her hand. The portrait of Charles Hartleigh waited in the gallery ahead, the proud face that still ruled this house long after his death. Tonight, she meant to look him in the eye and learn what he had kept from them all. She lifted the lamp, wrapped her shawl, and slipped into the dark.

The farther she walked, the louder the storm became. Wind pushed at the eaves. A shutter banged open somewhere overhead, then slammed again. The flame in her lamp flinched.

The air carried that strange heaviness old houses keep, a memory of every storm they’ve endured, as if the stone itself still trembled. Every gust breathed through the walls, stirring old grief awake. The closer she drew to the long gallery, the fiercer the wind grew, not warning her to go back so much as testing her resolve.

Clara’s fingers tightened around the base of the oil lamp as she stepped into the gallery. Wind howled against the mullioned windows. Rain pattered against the glass, soft and insistent like someone tapping to be let in.

She moved forward slowly, her skirts whispering over the rugs. The flame flickered, casting long shadows across the worn faces of painted Hartleighs. Some peered down in quiet judgment. Others, caught mid-smile or mid-battle, looked as though they might step down and finish what they’d started.

Their painted eyes followed her, heavy with expectation. For one fleeting second, she understood what it meant to live inside another family’s story, a life written before her own name was inked in the margins.

The miniature was just where Eleanor had said it would be, resting on the narrow table beneath Charles’s portrait. A small oval in a silver frame, his likeness preserved with painstaking detail. That same proud brow, those distant, calculating eyes. A man certain the world would bend to his design, and perhaps it had, until it broke him.

She reached to lift the small frame—

—and thunder cracked overhead with such ferocity, she cried out, nearly dropping the lamp. It sounded as though the house itself had split in two.

The gust that followed rattled the windows and sent the flame guttering. Clara stumbled forward, her shoulder knocking against the table. The frame above it, the portrait of Charles, shuddered on its hook.

A soft thud.

Something had fallen.

She froze, her breath caught, her heart pounding.

There, on the floor beside the table leg, half hidden by the drapery, was a small velvet pouch. Black. With a silver cord. Unmarked.

She knelt.

Her hand trembled as she reached for it, and again as she loosened the drawstring. The pouch gave way with a whisper of silk and guilt.

Jewels, dozens of them, glinted like shattered lightning in the lamplight. Emeralds, rubies, pearls, too many to belong anywhere but a scandal.

Her breath stopped. She knew these pieces. Not by sight, but by absence. They had been described in every whisper since the Ravenshade masquerade, the scandal, the thefts. All of it. These weren’t just heirlooms.

These gems were evidence.

And someone had hidden them behind Charles’s portrait.

Her father. She didn’t need to see him to know he was there.

“You see, Clara?” The voice slithered from the shadows. “You can help me after all.”

She spun, raising the lamp, but the darkness was thick, and the sconces flickered helplessly against the storm.

“You’re mad,” she hissed. “Do you think I won’t bring this to Eleanor? Or the magistrate?”

A chuckle answered her. Soft. Calculated. Too calm for madness.

“When they find it here, behind his portrait, who do you suppose they’ll blame? The late duke? Or the girl who always walks these halls at night, always near the wrong things at the wrong time?”

“You placed it there.”