Ward put down his quill and yawned. He’d been working all day and half the night on incorporating a steam engine into the continuous paper-roller that had made his first fortune.

He heard a creak from deep in the house as it shrugged off the heat of an unusually warm spring day.

A different creak sent him to the door of the library. “Are you on your way to the kitchens?” he asked the thin white ghost coming down the stairs.

“No,” his sister Lizzie said, with the patient air of a person explaining the obvious. “I’m not on the backstairs, am I?”

Ward pushed the door further open and stood aside.

As a child, he’d spent a good many sleepless nights wandering his father’s mansion; it seemed his siblings possessed the same tendency. They went to bed at the appropriate time and fell sound asleep—for a while. He hadn’t seen Otis, but the night before his brother had spent several hours in the library working on a mousetrap he was building.

“I came to speak to you,” Lizzie said serenely, walking past him into the library.

“May I say how pleased I am to see you without your veil?”

Sans veil, Lizzie promised to grow up to be as beautiful as their mother, Lady Lisette. Of course, that did not necessarily indicate that his sister would end up mad as a hatter. As their mother had.

“Mother always said that it’s inappropriate to mention a lady’s sartorial choices, particularly if they are somewhat original.”

“You wouldn’t wear it if you didn’t want attention,” Ward said, following her to the sofa.

“I wear it because I see no reason to show my face to the world. Nuns feel the same way.”

“I think their veil has to do with being a bride of Christ.”

“A veil is useful,” Lizzie persisted. “What if I wish to keep bees, for instance? At any rate, I need to talk to you about something important.”

“Yes?”

“I have decided that you ought to marry,” Lizzie announced.

“I’d prefer not,” Ward told her. He had decided to be honest in dealing with the children, or at least not to lie to them outright. To his memory, Lady Lisette had an extraordinary ability to bend the truth. He had the idea that Otis and Lizzie would benefit from a different model.

“Otis needs a mother.”

Otis wasn’t the only person who would benefit from a woman’s presence; Lizzie was only a year older than her brother. He thought of mentioning his stepmother, but what if his sister thought he meant to drop them on his father’s doorstep?

Dump them like unwanted puppies.

It wouldn’t be like that.

“I don’t believe people should marry for practical reasons,” he said, instead.

“What’s an impractical reason?”

“Love.”

“I can understand,” Lizzie said after a moment. “It is easy to make a mistake. One of the stable boys told Otis that your fiancée gave you a kick in the goolies. That wasn’t very pleasant.”

“It isn’t precisely true,” Ward said, adding, “Ladies don’t mention goolies.”

Lizzie shrugged. “It is tasteless to have recourse to violence. It’s a good thing you didn’t marry her.”

“I agree,” Ward said, wondering if it would set a bad example if he got up and swigged brandy straight from the decanter.

“I hope she gets crump foot,” Lizzie said. “I could help you.”

“With crump foot?”

“No, with finding a wife.”

“I appreciate that,” Ward said gravely. “However, I’m hoping that we can get along by ourselves—with a governess’s help, of course.”

“A wife would convince Otis that you won’t die alone. You’re the only one left, you see. No family.”

They were back to death. Somehow they always arrived at the subject of death; last night they’d had a long discussion about whether tigers had a separate heaven where gazelles were provided for breakfast, or whether a tiger would have to fast in heaven.

Lizzie had expressed the view that if tigers weren’t allowed to eat, the place wouldn’t be heavenly. It was a tricky subject about which Ward had no particular insight. More troublingly, it was clear to him that she was not thinking exclusively about a heaven for tigers.

But now she had a clearer point.

“I am not alone,” he promised. “Remember that I told you about my stepmother and father, and my other half-siblings? I’ll introduce you as soon as they return from Sweden. Of course, we have a grandmother as well.”

“I don’t like our grandmother,” she said flatly.

“My family will return to London in three months.” Not that he was counting. “Didn’t we make a rule last night that you wouldn’t discuss death for at least a week?”

“I don’t consider it a rule,” Lizzie said. “More of a suggestion.”

That was the problem, right there. Something ran through his family bloodline that converted rules into mere suggestions.

“I hope to return tomorrow with a new governess.”

“Lumpy was good-hearted,” Lizzie said, as if she were discussing a newly deceased acquaintance. “It’s just that she had a tendency to overlook the big things for the small ones.”

Ward had the unnerving conviction that the world had gone awry; before Lizzie came along, he’d always understood grammatical English sentences. “What big things?” he asked.

“She was very upset by Otis’s betting scheme, whereas she might have seen it as an example of ingenuity, or even resourcefulness.”

“Miss Lumley considered it an ethical lapse.”

“That’s the small thing. She could have looked at the bigger part of it, and seen that Otis is afraid and that’s why he is hoarding money under his mattress.”

Ward was silent.

Because he didn’t often have instincts, he tried to obey the rare ones he had. He reached out and pulled his sister across the sofa and wrapped an arm around her. She was stiff for a moment, and then her thin, knobby body leaned against him.

“Do you suppose that you could tell your brother that as big parts go, my fortune is a very big one indeed? And that I already changed my will and the two of you will inherit the whole thing?”

The room went very, very quiet while Lizzie thought about it.

After a while, Ward looked down and found that she had fallen asleep. Dark eyelashes lay on pale skin. He took a moment to look, because he rarely saw her without that blighted veil.

She had the promise of great beauty. Right now, she was too thin, and her face was too strained, even in sleep.

Anger is a reasonable response to having a mother like theirs, a terrible mother in anyone’s judgment. It’s just that there’s nowhere for that anger to go when the lady is dead.

Ward picked up Lizzie and carried her upstairs to bed.

Otis had crawled into Lizzie’s bed. Ward carefully laid her next to him and watched as they adjusted themselves on the narrow bed as if they’d been sleeping together their whole lives.

There couldn’t have been much room in a traveling theater caravan.

He pulled up the blanket to their chins. A mother—a real mother—would give them each a kiss. He knew that to be true because the moment his father married his stepmother, Roberta started popping into his room at bedtime to kiss him.

He had disliked it, as he recalled. Or at least, he had complained at the time.

He bent down and gave Otis and Lizzie kisses.