Miss Dewsnep

Miss Dewsnep moves through the D'Arblay circle with the authority of long acquaintance, someone who remembers what the family would rather forget. Her knowledge of old scandals and hidden arrangements gives her a leverage that sits uneasily beside her respectable manner, and the investigation's early progress depends on prising loose what she knows. She matters because the case's middle stretch turns on family history that only a few insiders, Miss Dewsnep among them, can confirm or conceal.