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He told himself this was a reasonable thing to want to know. She was living under his roof for the better part of every week, responsible for his grandmother’s comfort and safety, and a man in his position could hardly afford to be surprised by whatever she was carrying around with her. That was the whole of it. It had to be.

It had nothing to do with curiosity for its own sake, and certainly nothing to do with the particular color her cheeks had gone when the jeweller slid the ring onto her finger.

“Go on, then,” Anthony said.

“From what I have gathered, Your Grace, Miss Ashcroft has been making inquiries at a number of the jewellers in and around the city. She is asking after the provenance of a piece of jewellery. Specifically, she wishes to know who first sold it, and to whom, before it made its way to auction.”

Anthony sat forward slightly. “She is tracing the necklace?”

“That would be my understanding, yes.”

“Did you find out if she has told anyone what she hopes to find at the end of it.”

“Not that I have been able to discover, Your Grace.”

Anthony nodded slowly, and brought his hand to his jaw, stroking it. It made a certain sense of things, though it did not answer every question he had. She had told him that the necklace belonged to her mother, who had vanished when she was a child, and that it was the one thing of hers Leonora had left. He had believed her. He still believed her. But there was a considerable distance between a woman treasuring her mother’s necklace and a woman disguising herself as a man to bid on it in a gaming hell full of strangers, and he had never quite managed to close that distance in his own mind.

A sentimental attachment explained the wanting. It did not explain the risk she had been so plainly willing to take to satisfy it.

He understood it now, or thought he did. She was not merely holding on to a keepsake. She was following it backward, link by link, hoping it would lead her somewhere. To her mother, presumably, or to whatever had happened to her.

That was not a small undertaking, and it was certainly not a safe one. London’s jewellers were respectable men for the most part, but the sort of questions Leonora was apparently asking had a way of reaching ears that were not respectable at all, and a young lady wandering from shop to shop unescorted, pressing men for names and dates, was not a young lady who had considered every possible consequence of doing so.

He found himself thinking, with an ease that surprised him, that perhaps he ought to offer to help her with it. He had resources she did not. Connections, money, the sort of leverage that opened doors a young woman’s polite inquiries never would.

He stopped the thought before it went any further.

Focus, Anthony.

It was not his business. She had not asked for his help, and there was every chance she would resent the offer if he made it, the same way she resented most things that suggested she could not manage entirely on her own. He had learned that much about her in the short time he had known her. She did not appreciate being managed, and she was considerably more likely to dig her heels in than to thank him for interfering in something she had clearly decided to handle herself.

“One more matter, Your Grace, if I may.”

“Go on.”

“His Grace, the Duke of Norwyn’s man called round this morning while you were out. He left word that His Grace wishes to speak with you at your earliest convenience, regarding the Bristol shipment.”

Anthony rubbed a hand across his jaw. William had been pressing him for a decision on the venture for the better part of a fortnight now, and Anthony had been putting it off for no reason he could entirely account for, other than that the matter required more attention than he currently had to spare for it. “Send word that I will call on him tomorrow. Today I have no patience left for cargo manifests.”

“Very well, Your Grace.”

“That will be all, Miller. Thank you.”

Miller bowed and turned to leave.

Once the door had closed, Anthony pulled the stack of shipping correspondence back toward him and tried, with limited success, to return his attention to it. There was a delay on the cargo out of Bristol that required a decision before the end of the week, and William had sent word asking whether he intended to invest further in the venture or pull out while he still could. It was precisely the sort of practical matter that ought to have occupied the whole of his attention, and for the better part of ten minutes after Miller left, it did.

Then the pianoforte started.

It came faintly through the walls, from somewhere further down the corridor, and Anthony did his best to ignore it. He dipped his pen, reread the same paragraph of William’s letter twice without absorbing a word of it, and told himself the music would stop on its own soon enough. It did not stop. If anything, it grew more confident as it went, the notes landing perfectly, and Anthony found his attention drifting toward it again and again despite his best efforts to keep it fixed on the page in front of him.

His grandmother had not touched the instrument in longer than he cared to think about. She claimed her fingers had grown too stiff for it, though he suspected the truth had more to do with memory than with stiffness, and he had long since stopped asking her to play for fear of what asking might cost her. Hearing it now, unbidden, was enough to pull him fully out of his correspondence.

He set down his pen, stood, and told himself he would simply look in, offer a word of praise if it was warranted, and ask her gently to bring the session to a close so he could finish his work in something resembling peace. That was the whole of his intention when he crossed the hall and pushed open the door to the music room.

“Grandmother, I –”

Anthony’s words stopped in his throat when he saw that it was not in fact, Marian at the keyboard.