Chapter 17: Sophia's Sources

Sophia arrived without her usual warning, slipping into the garden where Chloe sat with a piece of needlework she'd been pretending to concentrate on for the better part of an hour, and settled into the chair across from her with the particular restrained energy of someone bursting with something she was trying not to blurt out too quickly.

"I asked around about your Mr. Ferris," she said, once she'd confirmed they were sufficiently alone. "Carefully. No one connected the questions back to you, if that's what you're about to ask."

Chloe set the needlework aside entirely. "And?"

"He's not simply wealthy and unplaceable, the way I first assumed. He's employed, in some capacity I couldn't fully pin down, by a family called Renshaw." Sophia watched her carefully, gauging whether the name meant anything. "Does that mean something to you?"

Chloe frowned, casting her mind back through everything Fenwick and Kesworth had told her, none of it including that particular name. "Not directly. Should it?"

"I don't know yet. But here's the interesting part." Sophia leaned forward slightly, lowering her voice further. "The Renshaw family married into the Ashworth line two generations back, according to the one person I found willing to discuss it at all. A cousin marriage, apparently, the sort that's meant to consolidate influence rather than simply expand a family tree. If Mr. Ferris works for them, and he's the one asking pointed questions about your mother's branch of that family, I'd guess he's not acting on his own curiosity."

Chloe absorbed this slowly, the pieces settling into a shape that felt, uncomfortably, like confirmation of everything Kesworth had already theorized. "The cousin branch. The one that's spent years assuming the succession would resolve in their favor."

"That would be my guess, though I couldn't confirm it outright without asking questions considerably more pointed than I was comfortable asking." Sophia's expression had turned serious, some of her usual composed reserve slipping to reveal genuine concern underneath it. "Amber, whoever these people are, they have enough resources to employ someone like Ferris specifically for this kind of careful, deniable probing. That's not a family testing idle curiosity. That's a family actively managing a threat."

"A threat they consider me to be."

"I'd imagine so, yes." Sophia was quiet a moment, watching her. "Are you frightened?"

Chloe considered the question honestly before answering. "A little. Mostly I'm tired of feeling like I'm always three steps behind people who've had decades longer than I have to plan this out."

"Then let's even the odds a little." Something determined settled over Sophia's features, an offer forming behind it. "I have connections you don't, Amber, built over years of exactly this sort of careful social maneuvering. I could ask more questions, discreetly, about the Renshaw family, if you'd let me. I'd be careful. I wouldn't put either of us at unnecessary risk."

"What would you even ask? I doubt anyone's going to volunteer information about a family actively hiding something."

"No one volunteers anything outright, that's true. But people talk, at gatherings like the Whitcombe ball, especially when they don't realize what they're revealing. A comment about who's been unusually attentive lately, who's expanded their household staff, whose fortunes have shifted without an obvious explanation. I've spent years learning to listen for exactly that kind of careless detail." Sophia's smile turned briefly sharp, confident. "It's rather the only genuinely useful skill this world ever bothered teaching women like us, so I intend to make the most of it."

"Why would you do that for me?"

Sophia's answer came without hesitation, which somehow made it land harder than if she'd taken time to consider it. "Because you've spent the past few weeks treating me like an actual person, rather than an obstacle to be managed or a rival to be outmaneuvered, and I find I'd rather return the favor than simply enjoy the novelty of it." A faint, wry smile touched her mouth. "Also, I confess, I've grown rather fond of watching people underestimate you. I'd like to see how that continues to work out."

Chloe felt something loosen in her chest, gratitude tangled up with something that had grown, over these past weeks, into genuine affection for the woman sitting across from her. "Be careful. Whatever's happening, I don't want you caught in the middle of it because of me."

"I'm already rather fond of being in your corner, Amber, careful or otherwise." Sophia rose, smoothing her skirts, the earlier intensity giving way to something lighter. "I'll let you know what I learn. In the meantime, try to look less like a woman carrying the weight of an entire hidden family conspiracy. It's terrible for your complexion."

---

Chloe sat alone in the garden for a long while after Sophia left, turning the new information over. Renshaw. A name that meant nothing to her directly, and yet felt, somehow, like the first genuinely solid thread she'd been handed since this whole tangled mystery had begun unraveling around her. Not a vague cousin branch, not an anonymous rival family. A name. A place to actually begin looking.

She found Tony later that afternoon, in the small study where he'd taken to reading most evenings, and though she said nothing of Sophia's discovery, something of her renewed determination must have shown regardless, because he set his book aside and studied her with quiet curiosity.

"You look like a woman who's just found something worth fighting for," he observed.

"Maybe I have."

"Good." He didn't press further, didn't demand an explanation she wasn't ready to give, simply offered her the small, steady kind of support that had become, over these past weeks, something she found herself relying on more than she'd expected to. "Whatever it is, I hope it goes well. You've seemed lighter today than you have in days."

"I feel lighter," she admitted, surprising herself with the honesty of it. "Like I'm finally doing something, instead of simply waiting to be told what I'm allowed to know."

"That sounds like you," he said, with something warm and approving in his voice. "I don't think I've ever met anyone less suited to simply waiting around for permission."

She smiled at that, the first easy, uncomplicated smile she'd managed in what felt like days, and left the study feeling, for the first time since her father's warning, like the walls closing in around her weren't quite as immovable as they'd first appeared.

She thought of her father's warning, of Kesworth's caution, of Fenwick's careful, limited disclosures, all of them treating her like something fragile that needed protecting from a truth too dangerous to hand over whole. And she thought, watching a pair of sparrows squabble over crumbs near the garden wall, that she was rather tired of being protected by people who'd apparently already decided, without asking her, exactly how much danger she was capable of handling.

Renshaw. She turned the name over once more, committing it carefully to memory, and allowed herself, for the first time in days, something that felt almost like the beginning of a plan of her own.

Whatever came next, she thought, she wouldn't be facing it entirely alone. Between Mrs. Pryce's quiet loyalty, Kesworth's careful guidance, Fenwick's guarded honesty, Sophia's newfound determination, and Tony's steady, unquestioning support, she'd built something in these few short weeks that Amber, by every account Chloe had gathered, had never managed to build in years. Not a fortress, exactly. But something considerably sturdier than the isolation she'd woken into that first strange morning.

She only hoped it would be sturdy enough for whatever the name Renshaw turned out to mean.