The Secret House

Count Poltavo

Poltavo moves through London society on charm and a threadbare purse, living alone, answering his own door, husbanding every shilling until fortune turns. A letter from the vanished Gregory Farrington told Doris Gray to trust him absolutely — a position Frank Doughton furiously resents, and one the Count defends with silky, unshakeable composure. As friend and adviser to the bereaved girl, he sits at the center of the will-reading and the suspicion swirling around Farrington's disappearance.

T. B. Smith

T. B. Smith takes charge of the Farrington case and works it with patient, unhurried precision, prying open pick-locks and piecing together a conspiracy that reaches from a foggy London office to the underground cells beneath Great Bradley. He is calm where others panic, and his steady competence makes him the story's spine of investigation. When he steps through a red-painted door and finds Farrington standing over a body, his revolver rises — and the lights go out.

Mr. Gregory Farrington

Farrington is the wealthy guardian whose supposed suicide — a letter in his own hand, a body in the river, a fortune mysteriously lost — sets every engine of the plot running. But he was a man who never told the truth about his movements, and Lady Dinsmore coolly insists he is no more dead than she is, merely existing surreptitiously for purposes of his own. His letter commanding Doris to marry Frank within seven days, and his role in Lady Constance's old scandal, make him the knot at the center of the mystery.

Frank Doughton

Frank Doughton is the young man who once held a commission from Farrington to find old Tollington's missing heir — a trail that leads, inconveniently, to Great Bradley and to Poltavo. He loves Doris Gray with an honest, unglamorous devotion, and watches with rising fury as Farrington's letter installs the Count as her trusted adviser and poisons her mind against him. Blunt where Poltavo is silken, he is the story's impatient conscience, forever a step behind the intrigue he can smell but not yet prove.

Lady Constance Dex

Lady Constance Dex is the woman whose youthful indiscretion — a dead lover, a brother who knows, a blackmailer named Montague who threatens murder if she goes to the police — has kept her entangled with Farrington and the secrets of Great Bradley. She is resourceful enough to survive captivity in a tapestry-hung cell, and grateful enough to guide T. B. Smith toward the red-painted door that matters. Her buried history with Farrington is one of the keys the detective must turn to understand the whole conspiracy.

Doris Gray

Doris Gray is the ward whose fortune and future sit at the center of the Farrington affair, courted by the wholesome Frank Doughton and increasingly under the influence of the magnetic Poltavo. When a typewritten letter arrives instructing her to read alone, she recognizes Farrington's hand and reads an order to marry Frank within seven days — a command that terrifies as much as it confuses her. Her divided loyalties and growing unease make her the emotional weathervane of the book's middle stretch.