I stared at his watch chain and his plump hands, the light shining through the thin spot in his hair. He wasn’t even looking at me anymore; he’d pulled his chart back and was scribbling more figures on it and crossing them out again.

It was petty of me, but I reached across the table, slid the chart out from under his hand, and gave the columns of numbers a looking over. Before he could bristle, I took a pencil stub from the edge of the desk, crossed out his figures, and wrote down the correct ones. “You were off by a quarter of a percent,” I said, sliding the sheet back. “That’s why your balance was coming out wrong. Run it through an adding machine just to be certain, though. Since I clearly can’t be trusted with money.”

His smile slipped. I stood, chin raised to the highest I don’t care setting on the dial, and stormed out into the sunshine. My own money. Not just money I’d inherited but money I’d earned, and I couldn’t get five cents of it for myself unless I had my father in tow. It was so utterly unfair my teeth were still grinding, but I couldn’t say I was completely surprised.

That was why I had a backup plan.

Finn looked up as I hurled myself back into the front seat, shutting about half my skirt in the door. “You look somewhat disreputable, if you’ll forgive me for saying so,” I said, reopening the door and yanking the rest of my crinoline in. “Are you actually disreputable, Mr. Kilgore, or do you just hate to shave?”

He folded the battered paperback he’d been reading. “Bit of both.”

“Good. I need a pawnshop. Someplace that won’t ask too many questions if a girl has something to sell.”

He stared a moment, then moved the Lagonda back into the noisy London traffic.

My American grandmother had left me some money in a trust fund. My French grandmother had had a spectacular double strand of pearls, and before she died she’d had them divided into two single-strand necklaces: “One each, for petite Charlotte and la belle Rose! I should give them to my daughters, but mon dieu, how pinch-mouthed your mothers both turned out,” she’d said with her usual French candor, making us giggle guiltily. “So you two wear them instead when you get married, mes fleurs, and think of me.”

I thought of her, reaching into my purse and fingering the luscious strand of pearls. My little French grandmother, dead long before she ever saw a swastika waving over her beloved Paris, thank God. Pardonnez-moi, Grandmère, I thought. I’ve got no choice. I couldn’t get at my savings, but I could get at my pearls. Because my mother had been quite serious about dragging me to Paris after my Appointment, getting new clothes and making calls on old friends and making it clear we were in Europe for social reasons, nothing scandalous. Hence, pearls. I let myself have one more look at them, the great milky beads with the single square-cut emerald that served as a clasp, and then I stalked into the pawnbroker’s shop where Finn had pulled up, laid the pearls down on the counter with a clatter, and said, “What can you offer me?”

The pawnbroker’s eyes flickered, but he said smoothly, “You’ll have to wait, miss. I’m finishing up some important orders.”

“Usual trick,” Finn murmured, having unexpectedly followed me in this time. “Get you impatient so you’ll settle for what he offers. You’ll be here a spell.”

I jutted out my chin. “I’ll sit here all day.”

“I may just go check on Gardiner; the house isn’t far from here. You won’t scarper on me, miss?”

“You don’t have to call me miss, you know.” Even if I rather liked it, the formality seemed silly. “It’s not like you’re escorting me around Buckingham Palace.”

He tilted a shoulder and loped out. “Yes, miss,” he said just as the door closed. I shook my head, then sat down in an uncomfortable chair with my grandmother’s pearls looped through my fingers, and it was a good thirty minutes before the pawnbroker turned his attention and his jeweler’s glass to me. “I’m afraid you’ve been duped, young lady,” he said with a sigh. “Glass pearls. Good glass, but just glass. I could give you a few pounds, I suppose—”

“Try again.” I knew down to the dime what my necklace was insured for. Mentally I converted dollars to pounds, added 10 percent, and named my sum.

“Do you have some provenance? Perhaps a bill of sale?” His glass flashed at me, and I could see his fingers twitch toward the emerald clasp. I twitched the strand back and we kept haggling. Another half hour eked grimly by, and he wasn’t budging, and my voice rose despite myself.

“I will go somewhere else,” I snarled finally, but he just smiled, bland.

“You won’t get a better offer, miss. Not without provenance. Now, if you had your father with you, or your husband—someone to give assurances that you had permission to dispose of them . . .”

That again. All the way across the Atlantic, and I was still on my father’s strings. I turned my head toward the window to hide my rage, and saw the flash of Rose’s blond head in the passing throng outside. A moment later, I saw it was just a scurrying schoolgirl. Oh, Rosie, I thought miserably, staring after the girl anyway. You left your family and went to Limoges; how in God’s name did you do it? No one lets girls do anything at all. Not spend our own money, sell our own things, or plan our own lives.

I was girding myself for a helpless argument when the shop door banged open, and a woman’s voice caroled, “Charlotte, what on earth—lord, gel, I told you to wait for me. I suppose you knew it would break my poor old heart parting with my b-baubles, and thought you’d spare me?”

I stared. Eve Gardiner came sweeping through the shop, beaming like I was the apple of her eye. She had on the same print housedress she’d worn this morning, wrinkled and threadbare, but she had stockings and a pair of respectable pumps; her gnarled hands were hidden by darned kid gloves, and she’d tucked her straggling hair up under a vast, once-stylish hat with half an osprey pinned to the crown. She looked, to my utter astonishment, like a lady. An eccentric lady, maybe, but a lady.

Leaning discreetly in the doorway with his arms folded across his chest, Finn gave an almost invisible smile.

“Oh, I shall be sorry to part with these,” Eve sighed, patting my pearls like a dog and turning an aloof smile on the pawnbroker. “South Sea pearls, you know, from my d-dearly departed husband.” A handkerchief dabbed to her eye, and it was all I could do to keep my chin from hitting the floor. “And the emerald, that’s from India! Came from Cawnpore, far back in my family, my dear grandfather under Q-Q—under Queen Victoria. Blowing up sepoys, and good riddance to the little brown devils.” Her voice dripped Mayfair elegance. “Now, examine that luster under your glass again, and let’s hear your real price, my good man.”

His eyes were flicking over her meticulously mended gloves, the wobbling osprey. The picture of threadbare gentility; an English lady on hard times, come to pawn her jewels. “Some provenance, madam? Some proof of—”