Constance Vail

Backstory

Constance Vail is thirty-four years old, sharp-tongued, and has spent the last decade making herself indispensable to The London Illustrated Chronicle in ways that her editors are careful never to officially acknowledge. She was born in Leeds, the eldest daughter of a printer who taught her to read type by touch before she could read it by sight, and she came to London at nineteen with a carpet bag, a portfolio of unsolicited editorial pieces, and a ferocity of purpose that the city found either alarming or magnetic depending on who encountered it. She writes society columns under the pen name 'C. Aveline' — a necessary fiction, since no society hostess would grant access to a woman who signed her own name to the stories they'd rather not have told — and she has built, through years of careful cultivation, a network of sources that stretches from Mayfair drawing rooms to Fleet Street taverns to the clerks' offices of the Inns of Court. She knows which earls are in debt, which marriages are arrangements, and which family fortunes are built on foundations considerably less solid than they appear. She does not use this knowledge carelessly. But she does use it. Constance attended the Winter Masquerade Ball last night under a borrowed invitation — a favor called in from a society matron whose rather embarrassing correspondence she once declined to publish — with every intention of gathering material for her annual 'Season's Confidences' column, a piece of elegant, plausibly deniable social observation that her readers adore and its subjects dread. She was not expecting a genuine theft. She was not expecting to be locked inside a manor with Scotland Yard breathing down every corridor. What she was expecting, and what has since become startlingly relevant, is that she spent three months last year researching the Hawthorne family's land history for a piece she ultimately killed — not because it lacked evidence, but because the human cost of publication gave her pause she has never quite admitted to feeling. She knows about the cipher. She knew before almost anyone else in this room. And she has spent the hours since the discovery of the theft in a state of furious, private calculation about what, exactly, that knowledge now obliges her to do. Constance is not warm in the way Neena Sterling is warm, nor composed in the way the Duchess is composed. She is brisk, a little combative, and possessed of a directness that reads as rudeness to people who prefer their truths softened. She asks questions the way a locksmith works a mechanism — methodically, without apology, until something gives. She genuinely believes that truth in print is a public good, and she has built her career on that belief, but the Hawthorne case has introduced a complication she finds professionally irritating and personally uncomfortable: she likes Galvin Hawthorne, whose Cambridge lectures she once snuck into for research and whose integrity she has observed from a careful distance for years, and she is not entirely certain she can write the story that would destroy him without it costing her something she does not have a column inch for.