Lady Eva Brackwell was a British society lady and débutante who was a client of Sherlock Holmes. She was engaged to marry the Earl of Dovercourt when some compromising letters from her past fell into the hands of the notorious blackmailer Charles Augustus Milverton. Milverton demanded £7000 for the letters or he would send them to the Earl, ruining the engagement. However, Lady Eva could not pay due to her relatively meagre financial situation, so she hired Holmes to help her recover the letters. After Holmes and Watson failed to intimidate Milverton into returning the letters, they broke into his house with to steal them. Holmes successfully recovered and burned Milverton's entire cache of letters after Milverton was unexpectedly murdered by an old victim. With the threat to her engagemen