When Adam returned to the Hall, his mood still heady from the encounter with Miss Miller — Charity — he was greeted by the edifying sight of Sir Toby seated in the drawing room, a cold compress clutched to the black eye that was blooming across his smug, pale features.

Adam managed to resist greeting him with a glib ‘Good evening, cousin’, but as soon as Sir Toby caught sight of him, it was clear that a confrontation was going to take place, whether Adam provoked it or not.

“Here is the man!” Sir Toby said, rising to his feet, one hand still clamped over his eye. His voice slurred a little, though Adam could not tell whether that was caused by his injuries, or by the half-empty bottle of port that sat next to him on one of the side tables.

“Here is the rogue!” Sir Toby continued, his voicing rising in pitch. “The very blackguard, the common brawler who struck his own flesh and blood, who unhorsed me in front of poor womenfolk! Have at you, sir!”

He lurched toward Adam but misstepped and almost fell. Adam leaned forward and caught his arm, preventing him from crashing into a table.

“Steady on, Toby. Here. Sit down, would you? There is no call for all of this.”

“No call?” Sir Toby could barely articulate the words, so potent was his mixture of rage and drunkenness. “I shall be the judge of that, sir!”

“Indeed,” Adam replied, keeping his tone amiable. There was no sense in antagonizing Sir Toby into a state of still-greater drunken fury. He took his arm and guided him rather forcefully onto a nearby armchair, where he sat down in a motion that was more akin to collapse.

“Perhaps a rest would be in order, Toby? Shall I call for some tea?”

“You condescend to me, sir!” Toby replied, his words barely intelligible, but the aggression in his gestures quite plain. “You condescend to me, but know well that soon it will be I that speaks to you in this proprietorial fashion! How smug do you believe you shall be when this Hall — this whole estate, and the dukedom that accompanies it — shall come to me?”

The sheer arrogance that infused his voice was staggering. It occurred to Adam that the dukedom of Mornington was probably the first thing that Sir Toby had ever wanted in his life he had not been able to have.

It occurred to him, too, that there was a strange kind of benefit to the way that his father had treated him in the past year. Though it had caused Adam a great deal of pain, it had also knocked some of the sense of entitlement out of him. He was very glad that he had, through his experiences, become a different sort of man to the vile Sir Toby.

“Firstly, Toby,” Adam replied pleasantly, half-amused and half-angered by the tone and content of Sir Toby’s speech, “I never endeavor to speak to anyone with condescension, so if I do so at present, then please accept my heartiest apologies.”

Sir Toby looked at him with a mixture of drunken confusion and embarrassment, as if he had suddenly realized how truly appalling his behavior had been.

“Secondly,” Adam continued, now allowing a rumble of anger to infiltrate his voice, “I think it best if you free yourself immediately of the illusion that I shall ever allow you to be master of this house as long as there is breath in my body. If you believe for a moment that I intend to roll over and submit my birthright to a fool and a drunk such as you, then I am afraid you are most severely mistaken.”

Toby was swaying in his seat, and in truth, Adam was not wholly convinced that the anger in his voice had any effect on his cousin. But then, when Toby spoke, it was with a vile little sneer in his voice, and he suddenly seemed a great deal more lucid than he had previously.

“You may well believe that to be the case, cousin,” he said, his voice quite malevolent. “But your father sent for his attorney to come here tomorrow, and I have it on good authority, that the purpose of the visit is to alter your father’s will. Whether you will allow it or not does not matter a jot. It is the law, not me that you will have to quarrel with.”

He dissolved into high-pitched giggles, hiccuping as his chin came to droop down onto the front of his shirt.

At the sight of his bloated, complacent features, all Adam’s self-control melted away. Before he knew what he was doing, he had seized Sir Toby by the collar and pinned him to the wall of the drawing room.

“You are a fool,” Adam hissed. “A fool, and a greedy mercenary.”

He paused for a second, and the thought struck him for the first time — the thought that had been playing at the edges of his consciousness, but now came abruptly to the fore.

“Perhaps you are more than a fool,” Adam snarled into his cousin’s face. “Perhaps you are a murderer. Where were you on the day that Mary and Freddie died? No doubt that you have been plotting your filthy ascent to the dukedom for a long time. I can well believe that you held their lives to be cheap. Tell me, cousin, is it time for you to confess?”

For a long moment, the two men simply stared at each other.

Then, without warning, Sir Toby dissolved into silly, drunken giggles. The weight of him sagged, nearly bringing Adam down to the floor too. The giggles brought with them great bursts of foul, port-infused breath, and Sir Toby’s cheeks reddened still further.

“What a story!” he slurred. “Good God, Adam. If you believe that, then you will surely believe anything.”

There was some note to his voice that somehow sounded genuine. Whatever it was, it was enough to make Adam loosen his grip on Toby’s collar a little.

“Oh, cousin.”

With a rough, abrupt movement, Sir Toby shook off Adam’s grip and slouched away from him toward the couch. “What a novel thought of yours. I take my hat off to you and your great imagination. You ought to write these sorts of stories for the papers.”

Toby’s sneer seemed to have consolidated onto his face, as though there was nothing that could possibly remove it.

“Believe me,” he continued. “At various times in my life, I have toyed with the idea of what it might be like to take the dukedom by force.

“I did not kill your father’s strumpet and her little bastard whelp — why should I? They were never of any threat to me. The stain of illegitimacy meant that I would never have concerned myself with such low, common creatures. No, Adam. If I were to kill anyone…” here his little piggy eyes fixed on Adam, with a look that was almost demonic in its idiotic glee, “rest assured, it would have been you.”

Perhaps Adam ought to have been afraid in that moment. After all, it was not every day that a man confessed to his face that he had fantasized about murdering him, or even that he had the motive to do so.

But Adam was not afraid, although he did look up to the walls and take note of the ornamental swords mounted there. Perhaps he was unconcerned because he was quite certain that in a physical match he would get the better of Sir Toby, and he was quite convinced that his cousin was not clever enough to attempt any more underhanded methods of murder.

But the point was that it mattered not. He looked at his cousin with a healthy dose of disgust, but with no fear at all.

“I suppose I see the truth of that,” he conceded. “Your own foolishness and snobbery have served you well, in this instance, Toby. I can easily believe that you would never imagine the value of another human being if you believed them to be lower than yourself.

“However,” he continued, and then abruptly, in a fluid motion, he strode to the wall and seized one of the swords.

“I believe that you were spoiling for a fight when I entered the room earlier, and a fight is what you shall get. You insulted a lady earlier…” at this moment, he swept out his arm to level the sword at his cousin’s chin, moving so swiftly that Sir Toby leapt back.

“That lady will one day be sitting in this drawing room as mistress in this house,” he continued. “And when she does, you will go down on your knees and beg her pardon for your vile behavior. And if you do not, then you will have me to contend with.”

He removed the sword from his cousin’s face so quickly that it made a whipping sound through the air. Sir Toby had gone as white as marble under the layer of drunken ruddiness, and he had suddenly grown very still.

Coward, Adam thought dismissively. One good thing about men like Toby is that they are so predictable because everything that they do is governed by fear alone.

He had undertaken a vow to himself — a vow that he would no longer allow himself to be governed by fear. He had no wish to see himself as a cowering mess on the couch, the way that Sir Toby was at that moment.

He knew what Sir Toby had intended to provoke through his taunting. He knew that his cousin was trying to get him to go up to his father’s chamber, to disturb his sickbed and beg and plead for his inheritance.

Well, he thought grimly, Sir Toby does not know me very well at all. He does not know that I would choose my honor over money and social position any day.

Instead, he left the house and walked to the lake. It had become the place where he went when he needed to mull things over. But even apart from that, it had also become the place where things seemed to fall into place for him — whether good or bad.

It was the beginning of the evening’s light, and the shadows had begun to dance across the grounds. They filled up the lawns and distorted all the shapes, making the hedges turn into crouching beasts and the trees tower with a graveness that made them seem impenetrable.

When Adam got to the side of the lake, he stood for a while, staring at the shadows. The light was so distorted that it took him a while to notice the dark figure standing on the lake’s opposite shore.

The woman was standing on the other edge of the lake once again.

She had that same strange, still, haunted quality, so that Adam’s first impulse was to reassure himself that she was corporeal, and not some hallucination, or else the angered spirit of Mary Warwick, walking the banks of the lake where she had died.

But he was sure that she was real.

He could not make out the woman’s features, but from the way that her head was directed, he could see that her eyes were fixed, not on Adam himself, but on a little jetty that extended into the water, where his father often enjoyed an afternoon’s fishing. It was believed that it was that same jetty where Mary and Freddie had been pushed into the water.

It was apparent that the woman had not yet seen Adam. Silently, almost without deciding consciously to do so, he began to walk around the side of the lake toward her, moving with the same care as a hunter might when stalking a deer.

The woman appeared to be so lost in thought that she did not perceive him, and by the time that Adam had rounded the final little clutch of trees she still had not moved. Indeed, he was almost upon her when he stepped on a twig, and she turned around, clearly startled out of her reverie, her countenance quite white.

Adam stopped dead. How could he not?

He had recognized the young lady immediately.