Dirty Secret in Palace

The marquis's household needs a girl to send into the prince's residence as a bedchamber maid, and the one they come and ask is the daughter the marquis had by a concubine. She is the one the legitimate daughter has been ordering around all her life. She goes, and she tells them that since they were the ones doing the begging, none of them get to be sorry about it afterwards. At the prince's residence she is up against his principal consort and two other women, all of them after the same position and the same man. A pregnancy gets used as a lever and there is a miscarriage. There is poison in the household, an affair nobody is supposed to know about, and evidence put together after the fact to make someone look guilty. She sides with one of the women for a while, in an arrangement where turning on each other is the normal thing. Her mother and her younger brother are still back in the marquis's house, and she intends to take them away with her.