Chapter 1: CHAPTER ONEThe Forty-Fourth Door

Rosewood Manor contained forty-three rooms. Victoria Sterling had counted them twice, because she disliked being wrong about her own house, particularly when the house seemed determined to make a mystery of itself. Seven bedrooms on the first floor, five on the second, two dressing rooms, three sitting rooms, a library, a morning room, a dining room, a drawing room, a schoolroom no one had used in years, and enough smaller chambers to make the arithmetic unnecessarily complicated. Forty-three. She knew this with the quiet certainty of a woman who kept the household accounts and therefore trusted numbers more than people. The forty-fourth door had appeared on a Tuesday. Or, more precisely, Victoria had noticed it on a Tuesday, which at Rosewood amounted to the same thing. It was narrow, and painted the same dark green as the panelling in the west corridor, and the paint had begun to flake along its edges, as though someone who had spent years keeping it disguised had, this spring, simply stopped. There was no brass plate, no visible keyhole, and no reason for it to exist. That last point interested her most. She stood before it in a cornflower-blue wool dress, fitted close through the bodice and falling in a soft column that made the most of a waist she had never had to work for, Mother’s pearls cool against her collarbone. She was, by any honest account, a striking creature to find alone in a corridor: black hair with a wave to it that no amount of pinning ever entirely subdued, dark blue eyes a shade nearer navy than sky, and the kind of figure that made dressmakers linger over her measurements a moment longer than strictly necessary. She had grown so used to being looked at that she had stopped noticing it,…