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blessing.”
    “Would you?” she asked doubtfully, as he referred to a suitor foisted upon her once by her mother.
    “Yes, I would. It would hurt terribly, but I would do my best to want what is right for you, as you have done in thinking that you should support my marriage in order to further my career.”
    She stared at him and he stared back. Finally she said, “I had better go in.”
    It was as if he hadn’t heard her. “Anyone, Francesca, anyone but my selfish, no-good, disreputable brother.”
    She nodded brusquely and said good night.

CHAPTER
THREE
    W EDNESDAY , F EBRUARY 19, 1902—HALF PAST 7:00 A.M.
    “M ISS C AHILL ! T HIS is a delightful surprise.” Alfred beamed at her.
    Francesca stood bundled up in her fur-lined cashmere coat, her hands in a muff, trembling. Her shivers had little to do with the cold. She had not been able to sleep at all last night, and not simply because of the predicament her brother might find himself in. She had worried about Evan’s connection to Grace Conway’s death and the vandalism of Sarah Channing’s studio, but she had also been haunted by Calder Hart. His shocking marriage proposal kept replaying itself in her mind as she tossed and turned restlessly for hours on end. She had spent most of the night dreading the encounter now about to take place. Hart was opinionated and difficult. She intended to firmly let him down. She prayed, however, that the conversation she must now have with him would not become a confrontation, and hoped he would see the folly of his thinking and they would both wind up chuckling over the entire affair.
    But nothing ever went the way one hoped with Calder Hart.
    She managed to smile at his butler, Alfred, a slim, short bald man with merry yet respectful eyes. Here, at least, she had an ally. Most of what she knew about Hart’s private life—like the fact that he at times dismissed the entire staff and would wander alone around his mansion, staring at his paintings and sculptures—she had gleaned from Alfred. What she liked the most about the Englishman, however, was not the fact that he had violated Hart’s trust by revealing that kind of information to her, but the fact that he seemed genuinely fond and caring of his rather eccentric and often difficult employer. “Good morning,” she began, rather grimly.
    “Do come in; I can see you are freezing,” Alfred said, ushering her swiftly inside and closing the door behind him. Hart’s mansion—which was several times the size of her own home—was ten blocks uptown and also on Fifth Avenue. His property seemed to take up an entire block, as nothing else was built upon it other than his five-bedroom guest cottage, tennis courts and stables, and a very attractive gazebo. But then, he was very flamboyant with his wealth. Francesca knew it had to do with the fact that he had grown up on the Lower East Side with his half brother in extremely impoverished conditions, until their mother, Lily, had died. Now he flaunted his wealth, not caring what society thought. Calder Hart’s father had not bothered to come to take in his own bastard son when Lily had died, but Rathe and Grace Bragg had come at Lily’s dying request to take in both boys. How dramatically their lives had changed when the Braggs had arrived and the boys had moved from the run-down tenement in a crime-ridden neighborhood of the Bowery to the Georgian mansions of Washington, D.C., where Rathe had been in Grover Cleveland’s administration. But Hart, being Hart, had run away six years later at the age of sixteen, apparently to look for his biological father. Francesca knew that had not gone well. He had then gone to Princeton for one year, only to drop out. Now he was theowner of several shipping companies and one insurance firm, not to mention one of the world’s foremost collections of art. And he had achieved his wealth and success without any help from his foster family.
    Francesca suspected most of Hart’s current