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The evening wore on more slowly than a funeral procession, the clock ticking loudly in the family parlor in counterpoint to Miss Fotheringham’s snores. Oscar had gone out, of course, while Uncle Walter remained across the room, nose buried in the financial pages.

“Early morning outings have left me fatigued,” Lily said, tucking her embroidery into her workbasket. “I believe I’ll retire.”

The rhythm of Miss Fotheringham’s snores hitched, then resumed.

Uncle turned a page. “Good night, ladies.”

Meaning Lily was to rouse her companion and escort her upstairs. Miss Fotheringham was by no means elderly, but she had elderly ways, which for the most part, Lily appreciated. A drowsy companion prone to megrims and chills was less of a burden.

The dignified procession up the steps plucked Lily’s last nerve, though she parted from her companion on the landing, the same as she had for a thousand other nights. Miss Fotheringham had been an acquaintance of Tippy’s, though Lily had never been sure what her companion knew, or what she surmised.

Lily’s bed had been turned down, her fire built up, meaning the maids would not disturb her. The first order of business was to unlatch her window, for Hessian’s instruction had been clear.

Rather than undress or take down her hair, she went to the wardrobe. Her money was in its little glove box, beneath the satin lining. She poured the lot of it into her oldest reticule. Next, she assembled the least-impressive, sturdiest, most-sensible ensemble she could—brown velvet walking dress, plain brown cloak, a straw hat such as any shop girl might own, gloves darned on the right index finger—

“Might I ask what you’re about?”

Lily turned to find Hessian Kettering standing just inside the window she’d opened not five minutes before.

“Hessian.” She was across the room without another thought, her arms wrapped around him.

His remained at his sides.

She held him tightly for one more moment, needing the feel of him close, loathing the sense that her embrace was merely tolerated.

“I would greet you as Lily, except I suspect you are not she.”

His gaze was once again the distant nobleman, the man easily annoyed with posturing or dithering. Lily stepped back as his words penetrated her whirling mind.

“I am Lily Ferguson.”

His gaze flicked to the drab clothing on the bed. “But are you my Lily, or some creature fashioned for your uncle’s convenience—if he’s your uncle?”

The question was gently put, and yet, Lily sank onto the bed, felled by the disappointment she saw in Hessian’s eyes. He remained by the window, probably unwilling to come any nearer to a woman who was a lie.

Protestations suggested themselves, the same ones she’d offered Oscar: You have leaped to conclusions, you speculate, you conjecture from hunches and innuendo.

She barely tolerated Oscar; she loved Hessian Kettering.

“Walter Leggett is my uncle, my mother’s brother.”

A night breeze caught the curtains. Hessian closed the window and tied the curtains shut. “You are a by-blow?”

Lily seized on the question for the invitation it was. “My mother was newly widowed, not newly widowed enough, and I was conceived. She could not marry the man with whom she’d faltered, so she traveled. I was born in Bern. The first language I learned was German.”

Still, Hessian remained in the shadows across the room. “Go on.”

He’d be fair, then, hearing her out, or perhaps he was simply appeasing his curiosity. Lily owed him—and only him—an explanation.

“When I was three, Mama found a vicar and his wife in Derbyshire whose discretion she trusted. For the next six years, I was raised as their distant relation. My mother visited when she could and brought my half-sister with her most of the time. I was not unhappy.”

Lily got up to pace, and to be nearer to the man she was losing. “My sister treated me as a curiosity. She was more than two years my senior, and though much indulged, she grasped that my circumstances were not as comfortable as hers. Then Mama died.”

Oh, how the words hurt. “I’d lived for those visits from Mama, for her letters. I never knew when she was coming, and I never knew what to say to her. She’d hug me so tightly, then tell me to play with my sister, and I could feel a weight, always, of love, but also frustration, hers and mine. A mother and child should not be parted, but she’d tell me to be good and leave.”

Hessian held a square of white linen out to her, at arm’s length.

Lily took his handkerchief and dabbed at her cheeks. “I never cry, but then, I never talk about this.”

“I lost my mother when I was a youth. I miss her still, and my papa.”

“Mama had told me, and Vicar had told me, that I’d be provided for if anything happened to her. Six months after Mama died, Vicar and his wife both succumbed to influenza. They’d not been young, and there I was, nine years old, proficient at French, German, Latin, Holy Scripture, and keeping quiet. Only the charity of the next vicar kept me from the poorhouse.”

All over again, the terror of that time struck her, the pitying looks from wealthy congregants who had a coin for the poor box, but no place in their nursery for old Vicar’s little niece.

Hessian took her by the wrist and led her to the fire. “This is why Daisy trusts you, because you know the abandonment she’s experiencing.”

He sat Lily down in the reading chair and took the hassock for his own seat. The air was warmer, the light better, but he made no move to hold her or touch her.

“I know the grief she faces. I wrote to my sister, and I saw the housekeeper post the letter for me. I have guessed that Uncle found me because of that letter. When Annie never replied, I concluded she was ashamed of me, and gave up.”

Hessian held his hands out to the fire. “Are you ashamed of yourself?”

Was Lily supposed to say that yes, she was ashamed of the decision she’d made as a frightened fourteen-year-old? Ashamed of being unable to outwit Walter Leggett and a posting inn full of footmen, stable boys, guests, tinkers, coachmen… a horde of masculine dishonor all charging straight for her safety and her virtue?

“What do you want me to say, Hessian? Uncle made it plain that I must choose, and if I was despoiled by some passing university scholar or merchant—which had become a daily possibility—I was no use to Walter. I had one chance to step into my sister’s shoes. The alternative was disgrace, penury, disease, and very likely death—for me and for any child I might conceive.”

Disappointment settled on Lily, a surprise nearly welcome for the shame it replaced.

Why wasn’t Hessian Kettering reeling with outrage at how Walter Leggett had treated a vulnerable poor relation? Why wasn’t his almighty lordship appalled that a duke’s granddaughter had ended up emptying chamber pots and dodging unwelcome hands?

“Then what happened?”

“Then I died. The chambermaid Lilith Ferguson was taken away from the coaching inn by a wealthy London gentleman. Uncle sent word back to Derbyshire a few months later that I’d taken ill and not survived. The headstrong heiress Lillian Ann Ferguson departed for finishing school in Switzerland.”

Hessian checked his pocket watch.

“Am I keeping you from some card party?” Lily asked, for this recitation was making her angry, and Hessian was the only available target. “Is there a debutante who expects you for her supper waltz?”

Her questions met with a fleeting smile. “I am exactly where I planned to be, though the activity on the agenda is not at all what I had envisioned. Is your half-sister dead?”

“I assume so. She did elope with a Mr. Lawrence Delmar, Uncle’s house steward. I know not if they married, but Uncle told me their coach overturned in the midst of a storm.”

Hessian remained silent for some moments, staring into the fire.

Why did he have to be so attractive? His looks would change little over the years, his hair would fade from blond to wheat to white, his eyebrows might grow more fierce, but he’d weather rather than age.

“How old would she have been when she eloped?”

“Seventeen.”

“So your approaching birthday is not your birthday, much less your twenty-eighth birthday?”

“Correct.” Though Lily herself had stopped noticing when her true birthday went by, and that added to her anger.

Another silence grew, while the wrongness of Lily’s life assailed her. “My birthday is not my birthday. I can barely scrape out a tune at the keyboard, though I love to sing. I have a companion in part to tend to my correspondence, because I cannot match my sister’s hand despite years of trying. I cannot use half the cobblers in Mayfair because my left foot is slightly larger than my right, while hers were the opposite. She abhorred pets, while my cat Hannibal is my dearest comfort. Daily, I am confronted with the reality of not being the person I pretend to be.”

“You are not her,” Hessian said, “so who are you?”

He was watching her now, and Lily had the sense that her answer would decide everything. Whether Hessian remained in her life, whether she went to jail, whether she had a life.

“I had hoped to be Lady Grampion.” The first sincere hope Lily had expressed in years.

Hessian rose. “You must know that is an impossibility now.”

He was so tall, staring down at Lily. His expression was severe, an angel of judgment. Lily stood, because she would not be looked down upon by any man, least of all one who’d claimed to care for her.

“I have wondered, Hessian, if my tale outrages you on behalf of that fourteen-year-old girl, who was friendless, preyed upon, exhausted, and alone.”

“You are no longer fourteen.”

He seemed to be puzzling that out for himself as he spoke.

Lily was not puzzled, an unexpected and thoroughly satisfying revelation. “I am no longer fourteen, but finally, I am outraged, and you are free to go.”

Part of Hessian wanted to leap out the window and fly right back to his acres in the north, back to a life of napping in duck blinds and making up the numbers at the neighbors’ dinner parties.

The rest of him wished that he and Lily—if that was her name—were in the nearby bed, anticipating their vows, which proved only that his plodding, orderly mind had not grasped the complexity of the upset Lily had dumped in his lap.

“Might I remind you,” Hessian said, “if you purport to marry anybody using a name other than the one your mother gave you at birth, the ceremony will be invalid.”

Lily subsided into her chair, her indignation dropping away as a sudden shift in the wind leaves even a seventy-four-gunner adrift.

“Invalid?”

“You are not Lily Ferguson.”

She drew her feet up under her, something a lady would never do when entertaining a caller. “But I am. I was born Lilith Ann Ferguson. My sister was Lillian Ann Ferguson. We were both named for Mama’s favorite aunt, Lilliana. All my life, I have been Lily Ferguson, while my sister went by Annie with me to avoid confusion.”

Which relieved Hessian only a little. “On the registry, on the special license, the full, correct name must be used. If I misstate so much as my baronial title, my marriage can be invalidated, provided the right bishop is bribed. The bride’s name must also be correct in every detail.”

Lily tucked the hem of her dress over her slippers. “I can’t marry anybody? Ever?”

“You certainly can’t marry that strutting donkey’s arse you call a cousin.” Much to Hessian’s relief. 

Lily gazed up at him, though Hessian had the sense she wasn’t seeing him or the bedroom where she’d slept for years.

“I can’t marry a peer of the realm either,” she said. “At any point, Walter could take a notion to have the marriage declared invalid, me sent to jail, and my children declared illegitimate.”

Hessian paced over to the window. He’d intended that her children be his children too, more fool he. “I hate messes. I loathe, despise, abhor, detest… This is the mess to end all messes.”

Lily worried a nail. “You hate me.”

Curled by the fire, she looked young and dispirited. Her bun sagged to one side, and she still clutched Hessian’s handkerchief.

“I could never hate you, but this is a muddle.” Like Daisy’s muddle: Good girls ended up beneath the churchyard; bad girls were sent away.

Lily could not marry him, and she could not remain in Walter Leggett’s avaricious grasp.

Hessian took the dress from the bed and rehung it in the wardrobe, along with a plain brown cloak, straw hat, and mended gloves. The smooth white counterpane was a reproach to him, for charging headlong into a courtship despite all sense to the contrary.

He’d hoped to again disport with a woman to whom he was neither engaged nor wed, when in truth, he hadn’t even known her true, legal name. What had he been thinking?

Nothing at all, that’s what. He hadn’t been thinking. He’d been wallowing in wishes and dreams, animal spirits, and selfish pleasures. 

“I have seventy-eight pounds,” Lily said. “I can make that last a long time. I am conversant in French, German, and Italian, and my Latin, history, and sums are good. I can be a governess or companion. If nobody will have me in those roles, I’m not above honest labor. I’ve worked in the kitchen, the dairy, the laundry, the stables, and the garden. I’ve been a chambermaid, scullery maid, and everything in between. I know the New Testament as well as any curate, and I l-like children.”

She abruptly bent her head, as if ducking a blow.

Hessian went to her and took her in his arms, despite messes, muddles, and anything resembling rational thought. She’d been worked nearly to death, a household drudge at some busy inn, then taken away from everything and everybody she knew and cast into a scheme not of her making. 

At fourteen, Hessian had still considered females an exotic species, of no more import to him than penguins. Females had a natural habitat, a place in the order of creation, but with the exception of one sister, they thrived in environs he did not frequent. That had suited him, for he’d had butterflies to collect and poetry to memorize.

At fourteen, Lily had feared for her virtue and her safety. “I promise you,” he said, “you will not be thrust alone into the world again.”

She lifted her head from his shoulder, her eyes glittering in the firelight. “I cannot marry you. Walter will learn of it even if we go to Scotland, even if we live in France. You are a peer, and I am a felon.”

Hessian scooped her up and sat in the reading chair. Accusations of criminal wrongdoing could turn a muddle into outright pandemonium. He’d taken his turn serving as magistrate and knew of what he dreaded. 

“How are you a felon?”

“Walter says that impersonating a dead person to earn their inheritance is fraud, and he’s read law.”

A man who detested untidiness of any variety excelled at untangling knots and restoring order. Hessian put that part of his brain to work, which was oddly easier when he was holding Lily.

“You are Lily Ferguson. You haven’t impersonated anybody. You are Walter Leggett’s niece, the daughter of his deceased sister.”

“But I’m not the right Lily Ferguson. I’m not Lillian Ann.”

“You never said you were. If Walter represented that you were Lillian, he did so out of your hearing. As for earning an inheritance, you’ve told me you haven’t even pin money, and your sister’s inheritance has been under Walter’s control since her death.”

Lily scooted off Hessian’s lap to sit on the hassock. “You’re saying Walter is committing the fraud? Aren’t I an accessory? I’ve benefitted from his scheme. I’m not emptying chamber pots or scrubbing floors sixteen hours a day.”

Starting at the age of nine, after years in a vicarage, for God’s perishing sake. “Nor shall you do so again.”

Hessian wanted to say more, to assure Lily that he could sort all of this out, but he’d made his last headlong charge where she was concerned. Caution, deliberation, and thorough preparation would be the order of the day henceforth.

Then too, the part of him that had cringed at his reckless courtship of Lily was braced for another quagmire: Did she esteem him honestly, or had she seen him as a way out of Walter Leggett’s household?

Something of both? And what if—heaven forefend—she’d already conceived a child?

Hessian’s penchant for considering every iota of available information offered him a morsel of comfort: Lily had had at least one opportunity to compromise herself with him—with him and Apollo Belvedere—and she’d not taken advantage. She’d freely admitted Walter Leggett’s desire to ingratiate himself with Worth. She’d conveyed this daft scheme to marry her to her cousin at the first opportunity.

Instinct and evidence both prodded Hessian to give Lily the benefit of the doubt. “When is your ostensible birthday?” 

“Seventeen days hence.”

How to free Lily from her uncle’s control without exposing Leggett’s scheme to public scrutiny in seventeen short days?

Hessian touched Lily’s earlobe, the one that had never been scarred in the first place. “I could elope with you.” Though an elopement was scandal on the king’s highway and a sure way to provoke all manner of accusations from Leggett. Then too, a trip to Scotland meant hundreds of miles of travel, during which any number of mishaps could occur.

“We can’t get a special license?”

“One typically waits up to a week for the license to be prepared. If a license for Miss Lillian Ferguson and a license for Lilith Ferguson are applied for within days, the coincidence is bound to be noted.” 

Though Lily was perched on the hassock not three feet away, Hessian again sensed she was physically present and mentally elsewhere.

Why hadn’t he stayed in Cumberland, where he knew his place and his neighbors, where he’d been the dullest excuse for a widower and resigned to the inevitable approach of middle age? He’d come south mostly out of boredom and to put a stop to Worth’s chiding and hinting.

Worth, of course, would chide endlessly over this situation. “Something bothers me,” Hessian said.

“I’m no end of bothered. I should have told you the truth sooner, but now that I have told you, it hasn’t made anything better. I thought about eloping with you, but that would add intrigue to dishonesty. Then there’s Daisy, who must not be made to suffer any more upset. She’s just finding her feet again, and more drama would set her back considerably.”

Good God, Daisy. “Daisy trusts you.”

Lily peered at him. “Am I to apologize for that?”

Hessian made himself think rather than offer some lordly platitude. “Regardless of your proper name, regardless of your dealings with me, you have been genuinely kind to the child and gone out of your way to help her. You have my thanks for that.”

The realization steadied him. Lily had taken an interest in Daisy when most other women would have patted Hessian’s arm and instructed him to hire more nursery maids. Even the ladies bent on becoming his countess asked about Daisy only in passing.

That Daisy trusted Lily suggested Hessian had been precipitous yielding his heart, but not a complete fool.

“We will not allow this imbroglio to affect Daisy,” he said, “but what bothers me is your sister. When did she die?”

“I’m not sure. I was approaching my fifteenth birthday when Uncle came for me. He’d already put the story about that his niece was off to finishing school in Switzerland. He brought Tippy with him, my sister’s governess. I’d met her on Mama’s last visit. I was so glad to see Tippy again…”

“Is Tippy extant?”

“She lives in Chelsea,” Lily said, climbing back into Hessian’s lap. “Ephrata Tipton. Uncle keeps an eye on her too.”

Despite the utter chaos of the situation, Hessian’s body was all too pleased that he was holding Lily, and that would not do. Dear Uncle, conscientious warden that he was, might send a maid by with the evening’s last bucket of coal, or Lily’s companion might decide to borrow a hair ribbon.

“I cannot think clearly when your hair tickles my chin, madam.”

“Good. I haven’t been thinking clearly for more than ten years.”

An ugly thought emerged from the facts and suppositions in Hessian’s head. “Lily, has your uncle mistreated you?”

She scooted around to untie her slippers, while Hessian lectured himself about untoward thoughts and animal spirits.

“I should tell you that no, Uncle has never denied me a meal or laid a hand on me in anger. But he left me at that inn for more than five years. Do you know how an orphaned tavern maid is treated? A girl upon whom anybody can heap a task, whom anybody can slap, pinch, or scold?

“Uncle did that,” she went on, setting her slippers aside. “And my mother had assured my foster parents that I’d been provided for. Mama either wrote a provision into her will, or she entrusted my care to Walter. When Walter found me—or bothered to find a use for me—he assured me that I was dependent upon him for every crust of bread. I made my peace with him, faced what awaited me at the inn, or found a handy ditch to die in.”

She straightened and began pulling pins from her hair, letting them pile up on Hessian’s handkerchief in her lap. “Uncle did that too. Frightened me when I’d already dreaded to fall asleep for fear some stable boy would creep into my cot. Uncle led me to believe my mother had lied about providing for me, had turned her back on me. He told me my sister had never mentioned me and that I didn’t exist.”

Her hair gave way all at once, a soft mass of fiery curls that fell to her waist. “I exist, Hessian. I’m not sure who I am, or what my future will bring, but I look at Daisy…”

She closed her eyes. “I think of Daisy—I was not much older than she is now when Mama died—and I recall that my uncle, my only possible source of safety, acquired an interest in me solely when he realized that he could control Mama’s fortune through me. I am finally more angry than I am afraid.”

Hessian brushed her hair back from her shoulder. “You have every right to be enraged with Walter Leggett. The question is, what to do about it. You mentioned the name of your sister’s paramour?”

She scooped up the handkerchief and took the pins to her vanity. The firelight turned her hair into a riot of garnet and gold curling down her back.

Hessian gave up lecturing himself.

“Lawrence Delmar, a Scot,” Lily said. “Oscar recalled the name. Oscar suspects that I am not the cousin who shared a household with him in childhood. He’s prepared to step into Uncle’s shoes as the man best situated to wreck my life.”

A sliver of resentment lingered in some obscure duck blind among Hessian’s emotions. He did not want to be in the business of un-wrecking a woman’s life, but… that was hesitation grumbling at him, as if naps were more important than honor.

Whether he and Lily had a future, she deserved to be free of her past and of her uncle.

“Mrs. Braithwaite was here while I was calling on your brother’s household.” Lily drew her hair over her shoulder and separated it into three skeins. “She left a card and noted an intention on the back to call again soon.”

Another complication. Hessian could not simultaneously watch Lily braid her hair and solve the annoyance that was Roberta Braithwaite.

“I will send my man of business to call on her.” Worth was prepared to help in any capacity, and he excelled at charming widows.

Lily tied off her braid with a plain black hair ribbon. “According to Mrs. Braithwaite, I’m to wed you, and see that you leave Daisy in her aunt’s care posthaste. Your nursery is to be reserved for the offspring I present you with, also posthaste.”

“According to your uncle Walter, you’re to wed Oscar in a little more than a fortnight.” No wonder Lily had at a loss for words earlier in the day.

“Or I can go to jail, possibly to make the acquaintance of an executioner, unless he too expects me to marry him and bear his children.” Lily’s tone was as colorless as the shadows beyond her window, her glaze bleak as she studied the rope of her braid.

“The law will not hold you to vows spoken under duress.”

“The law.” Two words that spoke volumes of condemnation. “What has the law done to honor the terms of my mother’s will? To stop Walter’s mischief, to keep Mrs. Braithwaite from bringing down scandal on you, me, Daisy, and my mother’s memory?”

“Valid point.” Hessian approached her, though she put him in mind of a cornered hedgehog. Everywhere, spines and bristles, no vulnerabilities exposed.

“If you can’t put your trust in the law,” Hessian said, “if your relatives have betrayed you, if your resources are inadequate to solve the problems before you, you might consider one last alternative.”

Her chin came up. “I promised my Creator and the memories of my mother and sister that a rash act of self-harm would never figure in my plans.”

Good God have mercy.

Hessian took her hand. “I’m suggesting… me. I’m suggesting that you trust me.”

He kissed her fingers and waited for her answer, though he had no earthly idea, not a hint of a glimmer of a notion, how to proceed if Lily accepted his offer.

“She’s avoiding me.” Roberta was as certain of her conclusion as she was sure that Dorie Humplewit was putting on weight. The evidence was incontrovertible. “Lily Ferguson thinks a ducal grandpapa makes her better than anybody else, and that I would not dare expose her family’s soiled linen.”

Penelope occupied the seat closest to the window, as if having light to read by ever consoled a woman for the damage the sun did to her complexion. Roberta was on her feet, inspecting for the dust about which she’d lectured her housekeeper earlier in the week.

“Perhaps Miss Ferguson was simply out paying calls, ma’am. Yesterday did turn fair as the day progressed.”

The words You are sacked! begged to be flung across the parlor.

Penelope was Roberta’s third companion in as many years. As finances had become constrained, Roberta had realized that spending a month interviewing candidates for the post of companion meant a month when no salary need be paid. During those companion-free weeks, much sympathy could be earned lamenting the inconstancy of young women in service.

The number of agencies supplying companions was finite, however, and Roberta had already patronized the top three.

“If you knew that I could ruin you with a word, Penelope, would you be larking about Town, trying on bonnets, and gamboling in the park?”

Penelope put down her volume of Wordsworth. She kept that naughty Bryon by her bedside, proof of a wicked streak in her character.

“If you were determined to ruin me, I might be calling on my friends in an effort to gather their support. Marshaling my troops, as it were.”

What a vexatious creature, and why, having seen to the dusting, hadn’t anybody bothered to polish the brass candlesticks on the mantel?

“Lily Ferguson hasn’t any friends. Her uncle fends off the bachelors. Her lack of charm defeats other connections. This must be what Grampion likes about her, for a more dull, humorless fellow I could not imagine, and that is precisely why we must act on Amy Marguerite’s behalf.”

Roberta had tossed and turned the night away, mentally drafting the letter she’d anonymously send to a half-dozen semi-reputable newspapers. In the morning, she’d taken one look in the vanity mirror, seen the toll Lily Ferguson’s stubbornness had taken, and decided that subtle machinations were a waste of time.

The sooner Amy Marguerite took her proper place in Roberta’s household, the sooner Grampion’s coin would follow.

Then too, Walter Leggett would doubtless pay handsomely to keep his sister’s peccadilloes quiet. Grampion would similarly pay to be spared scandal. To blazes with Lily Ferguson, for the nonce. If the idiot woman ever wanted to see her mother’s letters, she could jolly well join the list of people from whom Roberta would extract a goodly sum for a goodly number of years.

“We must act?” Penelope asked, clutching Mr. Wordsworth to her chest. “In what regard?”

“Your part is simple. You enjoy reading, you enjoy fresh air. You will become a fixture in the park until such time as you know the schedule upon which Amy Marguerite is let out to play. Nursery maids and governesses cannot function without schedules, and Grampion of all people will insist the child’s day be rigidly organized.”

Never did a young lady spend more time vapidly gazing out of windows than Penelope Smythe. Perhaps she expected a handsome prince on a white charger to come cantering up the street.

“When I have established Miss Amy Marguerite’s schedule, then what?”

Then, Penelope would be sacked and replaced with a governess. “If you see an occasion to win the child’s trust, that’s all well and good, but your sole objective is to report her schedule to me.”

Penelope rose. “It’s a fine morning. You’ll want me to be off, I take it?”

“The sooner the better. Wear something inconspicuous. You were with me when I called on Grampion, though I doubt he noticed you, meaning no insult. A titled gentleman will pay no mind to a woman who’s neither young nor pretty nor well-dowered. You mustn’t take it personally.”

As if that statement of the obvious required pondering, Penelope stood for a moment by the window.

“I’m sure you are correct, ma’am. I’ll be about my assigned task now.”

“Take a biscuit or two with you for the girl. Or some bread crusts for the ducks. You needn’t abandon your post for the midday meal either. I’ll manage without you here.”

“Very good, ma’am.” Penelope bobbed a curtsey and took her leave.

She’d sit in the park getting freckles by the hour, provided she could take a book along. Roberta would write Penelope a decent character when it came time to let her go, for such a passionless soul was surely deserving of pity, and Roberta was ever kind to the less fortunate.