Chapter 2: The Woman in Gold Thread
Her name was Isabelle Ravensworth, and Toby did not learn it until nearly an hour later, when the head steward pulled him aside near the kitchens, pale and stammering apologies of his own.
"That's Miss Isabelle," the steward said, glancing over his shoulder as though the name itself might summon consequences. "The young mistress of the house. You don't slap a guest of Cornelius Vail's standing in front of two hundred people unless you're a Ravensworth — or unless you don't care what it costs you."
Toby didn't understand, then, why a woman with a house full of chandeliers would spend either kind of currency on a waiter she'd never met. He was still turning the question over, sitting on an overturned crate in the narrow service corridor with a cloth of ice against his cheek, when Isabelle herself pushed through the swinging door, still in her wine-damp gown, and crouched in front of him without any of the careful distance the other guests kept from staff.
"How's your face?" she asked.
"It's nothing, miss. Really." He tried to stand. She put a hand on his shoulder, not ungently, and kept him seated.
"It's not nothing. Cornelius Vail has struck two other people at events in this house that I know of, and both times my family looked the other way because his family's money matters to ours." Something hardened behind her eyes. "I'm done looking the other way."
She reached for the ice cloth to adjust it, and that was when her sleeve caught the strap of his worn canvas satchel, hung on a hook behind him, and knocked it to the floor. A few coins spilled out. So did a small object wrapped in a scrap of felt, which rolled to a stop against the toe of her shoe.
Isabelle went very still.
"Where did you get this?" she asked, and her voice had changed entirely — no longer the warm, protective tone from the ballroom, but something taut and disbelieving.
Toby looked down at the object she'd picked up: a small silver locket, tarnished with age, engraved on its back with a pair of interlocking initials worn nearly smooth from years of being turned over in someone's hand.
"It was my mother's," he said. "She died when I was small. It's the only thing I have from her — the woman at the orphanage said she was found with me, wrapped around my wrist, when I was left at the gate."
Isabelle turned the locket over with trembling fingers and thumbed open the tiny clasp on its side, revealing a portrait no larger than a fingernail — a young woman with dark hair and a birthmark shaped like a comma just beneath her left eye.
May you like
Her own hand went, unconsciously, to a birthmark in the exact same place beneath her own eye.
"This locket," she said slowly, "belonged to my aunt. She disappeared from this house eleven years ago — pregnant, unmarried, and, according to my family, ashamed enough to run rather than embarrass us." She looked up at Toby with an expression he would spend years afterward trying to describe. "Everyone told me she vanished alone."
