Chapter 19: Lord Hadley Removes His Mask

The gallery was long and narrow, lit by the same ambiguous illumination that governed the rest of the estate—something that preferred to be called candlelight without entirely committing to the description—and it smelled of beeswax and old stone and, very faintly, of something mineral and dark that had nothing to do with either.

Petra did not move from the doorway.

Behind her, she was aware of Fennwick's precise, arrested stillness—the particular quality of it that meant he was calculating outcomes rather than breathing—and of Miss Chase, who had gone quiet in a different way entirely, the way a person goes quiet when they have arrived at a conclusion they had hoped the evidence would not support.