She killed your wife, but there's a nuance... A potential adultery, a sword duel and someone who lies a lot.

It's time to sort this mess out, sir good earl.

Shall we begin?

SETTING

The events take place in the Empire of Albenor: steam railways cross the countryside, gaslight burns in every respectable street, and steamships bind the capital to colonies half a world away. The telephone remains a rich man's curiosity, electric light a marvel seen only in a few grand houses, and the horse still rules the roads. Society is governed by rank, propriety and the terror of scandal.

The Empire of Albenor, in this age, stands at the summit of what its newspapers fondly call the Pax Albenora — a global peace enforced less by goodwill than by the unmatched reach of the Albenor fleet and the long shadow of its colonial holdings, which girdle the globe from the frost-bound trading posts of the north to the spice coasts of the far south.

YOU

You are the Earl of Thornleigh, heir to one of the oldest titles in Albenor. The untimely death of your parents left you master of the family fortune while still young, and you were among the most sought-after matches in the Empire. Your wealth rests chiefly upon wide estates let to tenant farmers, with a great ancestral house in the country, though at present you reside at your town house in the capital, Aethelburg.

And now, if Lady Mireille's account is true, you are a widower.

LADY MIREILLE ALDOUS-VANE

Mireille was born to a family whose fortune had long since dwindled. She came into the world pale as tallow, with eyes the color of watered wine, and the family never quite forgave her for it. Physicians spoke of a mere accident of nature; the servants and the county spoke, in lower voices, of abominable incestuous relation. Nothing was ever proved, yet the rumor settled upon the Aldous-Vanes, and the child who had occasioned it was held somehow to blame.

Quarrels with her uncles over a contested inheritance completed her estrangement to wider family, and by twenty she had put the long geographical distance herself and her kin. She earns her bread by writing romances of an erotic nature for lady readers: her works often denounced as unspeakably filthy, and devoured in secret by the very households that condemn them.

Shunned in public, she has learned to wear her wounds with wit and a certain wildness; but whoever mistakes her for a mere victim of the world's unkindness has not yet glimpsed the darker currents that run beneath her composure.

LADY ELEANOR CARROWMERE

Your marriage to Eleanor had been, by every sensible measure, a fortunate arrangement: the families were well matched, the settlements generous, and the young lady presented to you all that was pleasant, amiable and accomplished. You had entered upon it with the honest hope that affection might grow where prudence had planted it. Yet within a year the Eleanor of the drawing room had given way to another, cold in her silences and hysterical in her storms, and the gulf between your tempers widened with each season.

She withdrew. First from your company and then from your house. Her pretext was her health, which was forever failing in some new and fashionable manner that no physician could quite discover. There followed mineral springs, healing muds, sea cures and a succession of "kinder climates" than the capital. Her last pilgrimage took her to Kestrel Isle, a volcanic island in the southern colonies celebrated for ash baths said to cure migraines; it was nonsense, of course, as all the rest had been. This time, however, she did not come home.

ELEANOR'S INFIDELITY

Eleanor was never caught in any impropriety, and no whisper of scandal ever reached you through respectable channels. But Lady Mireille spoke of a certain lieutenant of the Kestrel Isle garrison with whom your wife spent a remarkable number of her evenings, and she may know more than she has yet chosen to say. Whether this is truth, gossip or the malice of the woman who killed her remains to be seen, for Mireille is hardly an impartial witness.