Chapter Eleven

in which sam bargains

Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love. —Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“Mistress Franklin—my lady Lewis,” Susan called, then corrected herself, startling Daisy and me to a stop in the cramped hallway of the coaching inn.

“Susan?” I asked. “What are you doing here?”

“We did not expect you and his lordship just yet. The carriage is not yet packed.”

Susan cut a look between Daisy and me, as confused as I was. Daisy backtracked to smile pleasantly at her.

“You recall, Finch charged your husband with finding my family lodgings so we could accompany my brother to the funeral?” Daisy asked me, eyebrows raised meaningfully so I would play along. “And so that we were here for the breakfast, to celebrate with you?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” I agreed quickly. “George stayed behind to finalize some things. I’ve come ahead to change, you know, into my traveling clothes. For the . . . the traveling.”

Susan cut another shrewd look between us, then waved for us to follow her into a small room upstairs. A private table for two was laid in anticipation of the breakfast in question.

“Remain here, my lady,” Susan said urgently, throwing the bolt behind us. “I’ll fetch your valise.”

“You’re not going to—?” I started, but wasn’t sure how to finish that question, so didn’t.

“Plenty of brides get cold feet,” Susan said, like it was that simple. “You get your nerves about you, ma’am, and we’ll have you back to the church in a jiffy.” Then she slipped through a servant’s door hidden in a back corner and was gone.

The room was furnished with just one window, made up of many tiny lead-mullioned diamonds of glass, which provided Daisy and me with a view of the inner coach yard. I didn’t have to ask who she was really keeping an eye out for, even as we tracked Susan across the cobblestones to the grandest rig of the lot.

“Your notion of changing for travel is a wise one. This dress was described in the papers,” Daisy said.

While I remained at the window to follow Susan’s progress, Daisy crowded in behind me to undo the row of tiny buttons leading down from my nape. Her hands were warm and sure, her breath sweet. I wondered if she’d had drinking chocolate with her own breakfast. By the time Susan returned with a leather gladstone bag, I was down to my stockings, chemise, and stays. Daisy had noticed the two odd lumps of my wallet and phone in the cups of the stays but hadn’t inquired. Instead, her eyes kept bouncing back to the bandage around my upper arm. It had come loose in the struggle, dipping low enough to show off the yellow bloom of the healing bruise, the red escarpment of scar tissue.

“Oh, nice, you packed my real clothes,” I crowed when Susan opened the valise for us. I slid on my purple Chucks and my hat, to hide the tragedy of my hair. I longed to don my jeans, but discretion was wiser. I yanked out the black gown and cranberry-colored spencer. Susan had done a remarkable job of getting all the back-alley grime off of them.

“There’s a much nicer tawny cotton—” Susan trailed off and stopped as I also pulled my button-down, jeans, and jacket out of the bag.

“Best not to leave with anything that’s not actually mine,” I explained.

“Leave?” Susan asked, even as she helped me re-dress.

Daisy resumed her post at the window.

“That is—” I began.

Daisy neatly cut through my prevaricating: “The judge has been jilted.”

“I see,” Susan said, going very still.

“I know I promised I’d protect you,” I told her. “I can find a way to—if this will endanger you, I mean, we can—”

“He’ll never know I helped you,” she said. “What’s more, he’ll also never hear of it from me.”

“Thank you,” I told her sincerely, and sealed my gratitude with a kiss on her cheek. She blinked in surprise but otherwise didn’t seem to find it weird. Okay, so maybe the Georgians weren’t as prim and hands-off as I’d worried.

“Give me those clothes,” Susan said, stripping off her apron to fold my remaining modern clothing into an easy-to-carry bundle while Daisy packed the wedding clothes into the valise. Then Susan was back out the servant’s door with the bag and a hasty but heartfelt, “Good luck, Miss Franklin.”

“Same to you,” I said earnestly.

“No time to linger. It appears that Finch has secured us a carriage. I see my mother haranguing the driver,” Daisy said, then headed for the other door.

She paused to check the hallway.

All clear.

“Will we fit?” I asked, then followed her down a rickety flight of stairs, around a corner, and down another, definitely less grand corridor. It seemed the rooms Lewis had secured for his would-be bride’s family hadn’t been quite so nice as his own.

“Finch can ride. I presume he meant to do so anyway, he has a penchant for escaping onto horseback when the conversation becomes too feminine for him. Or he can—”

“I can do what, sister?” Fenton interrupted, coming up behind her with a mischievous air.

He’s the younger brother , I decided on the spot. He’s gotta be .

And then he got an eyeful of me.

“Dear lord, Samantha,” Fenton blurted. “What are you—” He clocked my clothing. “ Why are you—” He looked behind me. “Where is—”

“There has been a change of plans,” I said, echoing his words to Lewis from last night.

Fenton understood immediately. “You have not . . . ?”

“No,” Daisy said. “And she never will.”

“Thank god!” Fenton shimmied around Daisy to close me in an embrace that even I knew was too intimate to be proper. “He received my payment and released you from the contract?”

“Weeell,” I hedged, giving him a squeeze and backing out of his arms. He was an engaged man. I had to remember that. “More like I left him at the altar? You didn’t happen to get that annulment of the special license, did you?”

All the color drained from Fenton’s face. “The archbishop was not in. Miss Franklin, what will you—”

“Miss Franklin has agreed to become our lodger, has she not?” Daisy said, with all the calm authority of someone who was lying through her teeth.

“Forgive my vulgarity, but with what money , Miss Franklin? I have sold your watch—and what a fascinating piece it was, the watchmaker was enchanted —but the whole of that has gone to satisfy my debt to Sir Lewis in the stead of your marriage.”

“Miss Lewis has an education,” Daisy said, proving that she did listen keenly indeed. “The little school that Marigold runs out of our back parlor is proving more popular than she can manage—we had discussed the possibility that I would take on some tutoring duties, but it would be better still if Miss Franklin were to step into the role, for my management of the household would have quite divided my attention. Marigold can take on more pupils that way, and Miss Franklin has already agreed that rather than request wages she will be content with her share contributing to her upkeep.”

“That certainly does solve the problem of how to stretch both Marigold’s and Mother’s widow’s portions while freeing you up to resume pursuing a suitable marriage,” Fenton said, with no little relief.

Daisy grimaced at the mention of marriage but didn’t contradict him.

“Well, with that settled,” I said, deciding it was neither the time nor the place to bring up the fact that Daisy and I’d had no such conversation, “should we shake a leg?” Both Goodenoughs shot me identical looks of confused bemusement. “Get going, I mean.”

“Mother has ordered a lunch.”

Daisy was off with a quick, “I’ll chivvy our mother along, shall I?”

“Tell her to get it to go!” I shouted after her.

And then I was alone, in a half-lit hallway, with the man who had sold me to a qualified domestic abuser.

The punch was both well deserved and cleanly landed. Mostly because Fenton wasn’t expecting it. He reeled back into the wood-paneled wall, holding his jaw and staring at me with wide, hurt eyes.

“I can’t believe you did that to me!” I snarled, shaking out my hand. “I can’t believe you were going to do that to your own sister . And your mother ordered lunch? Which means she didn’t know there would be a wedding breakfast? Weren’t your family aware that they’d come to London for Daisy’s wedding?” Fenton was too much the gentleman to squirm, but the shame was clear on his face. “You disliked selling Daisy to Lewis so much that you didn’t even tell your mother? Jesus Christ on a piece of melba toast , Fenton.”

“It was badly done,” Fenton agreed, working his jaw.

“It was cowardly ,” I corrected. I stepped closer and he flinched. Good. “And on top of that, you turned me into your side chick .”

“I do not know what that means—”

“It means,” I said, poking a sharp finger into his sternum, “that you’ve been a fuckboi. A douche canoe. A rake .”

That last term hit home. “I am not .”

“No? ’Cause I sure as hell wasn’t the one to flirt with the mermaid when I knew I was already engaged. Just saying.”

He folded his arms over his chest and scowled. “I find you irresistibly fascinating,” he said, uncomfortable with his own feelings, and making it my problem.

“And that’s flattering,” I said. “But it’s time to be grown-ups about this. I refuse to be a stereotypical greedy bi slut, and you have a fiancé. I’m going to have to stop relying on you and figure out my own path in this shithole era. So we’re drawing a line under this.”

Fenton fidgeted. “If I’m to have the reputation of a fashionable libertine, I don’t see why we shouldn’t—”

“Who’s calling you that?”

“Sailors talk, as well you know, and it escaped no one’s notice I squired you around Gibraltar—”

“If you think”—I pushed him back against the wall with the force of my poking—“for a second that you’re getting your dick wet ever again, after everything that’s happened, you can jump off a cliff.”

“But you—” Fenton sputtered, confused. “You want—”

“To be loved. Not used .”

Fenton took a moment to digest this, then deflated. “I am being uncouth.”

“Hey, I get it, the wanting to be in control when you’ve spent so long feeling like you’re not, trust me,” I said. “But fucking around only to feel like a big man again? It’s a dick move.”

Chastened, Fenton tugged on his earlobe.

“Lewis is not a man to be crossed,” he said at length. “He will not take lightly to what has happened. He will come after you. If nothing else, he will sue me for breach of promise.”

As changes of topic go, it wasn’t subtle.

“How can he? Either it gets around that I jilted him, in which case his reputation takes a hit, or, as per the breathtakingly arrogant move with the newspaper, he goes on acting like the wedding actually happened and there’s nothing to sue you for . Either way, if he makes a stink, he’ll look like an even bigger idiot. And , with your debts paid, going after you will look like a vendetta. I’m sure that’s something we can take to his bosses. No one wants a dirty judge, right?”

“I suppose,” Fenton allowed. “I personally delivered the money to honor my debts to Lewis’s bank, so there is no question of it being outstanding. Moreover, I have no ship with which to do his dirty business.” His whole demeanor brightened. “I am free of his control.”

“Hold up, how do you mean, no ship?”

Fenton not-squirmed again. “The Salacia is being sent out with a different man at her helm for this tour.”

I took a moment to process that. “Is this your boss punishing you? For what?”

“I was late to the battle.”

“Because you rescued me.”

“I was still late,” Fenton said. “And Lord Nelson is still dead.”

“That’s not your fault.”

He shook his head grimly, just once. “The Salacia was not with the fleet.”

“Are you fired?”

“No, but I am on shore leave with no prize money, which means that I cannot . . .” This time he fidgeted. “It’s the least of what I deserve for my pusillanimity.”

Then he turned on his heel, the conversation over in his mind. I grabbed his wrist.

“Hey, Fenton,” I said softly. “ Why did you do it? If you knew it was wrong, if you knew Lewis would grab you by the soul and smear you through the tar, use it to glue you to his side, why ? Why gamble with him, why smuggle, why agree to what he tried to do to Daisy, what he did do to me, why witness it, and still walk away?”

His lips trembled, water like mercury lining his bottom lashes. “Have you . . . have you ever been so in love that it makes you puerile ?” he whispered. “That it takes away any sense of longitude or latitude, for your sextant points only to them? That they become your magnetized north? That sense abandons you and propriety flees, and you would do every vile, despicable thing demanded of you if only it meant they would smile at you?”

The question hit me like an arrow through the heart, driving the air out of my lungs in a pained grunt.

“Yeah,” I gasped. “Yes.”

“Who was he?”

“Her name was Dahlia,” I said, voice thick with emotion.

Fenton took a moment to wrap his head around my confession, and the full scope of its meaning. “And this is permissible, in your wild land of shorn hair and fist-sized blackflies?”

I snuffled hard. The bundle of my modern clothes still dangled from my wrist, and I dug through it to find the handkerchief Fenton had given me back on the ship. I mopped my nose. “Yeah.”

“In your far-flung year of two thousand and twenty four?”

I jerked my gaze up to search his face. “You believe me?”

“I have seen the inside of that watch. It was both a marvelous and terrifying thing to behold.”

“ Thank you.” I wanted to hug him, so I did. “And yours? What’s her name?”

“Eliza,” he said, exhaling her name like it was the first breath of spring. “Miss Elizabeth Gale.”

His whole face lit up just thinking of her. It was clear that he loved Eliza Gale with everything he was. And maybe she loved him the same. Maybe she didn’t, and was only hooking up with him because she had no other choice too. But that didn’t matter. She would wear his ring, not me. She would bear his children. She would keep his house. She would be entitled to his presence and presents, paychecks and affection. She needed him, and if I got in the way . . .

Then she would end up like me. Abandoned, alone, with nothing.

And honestly, if Fenton wouldn’t pledge himself to me, then I hoped that he could at least take what I’d shown him over the last few weeks and use it on her to good effect. I mean, somebody better be getting orgasms out of this whole thing.

Wow, I suck at this jealous girlfriend schtick, huh?

“But?” I asked. “There’s a but, right there, on the tip of your tongue.”

Fenton dimpled. “Your idioms do baffle me, Miss Franklin.”

“The future is a far-flung country, Captain Goodenough,” I teased. “You’ll learn the language eventually. What’s the ‘but’?”

“But,” he said slowly, “the Salacia captured no enemy ships during the battle, and so we earned no prize money. Without it, I am unable to marry Eliza. I have not mentioned this before, as I had hoped that selling what we’d salvaged from your craft would have made up the shortfall. It was not enough.”

“Oh.” I felt like an asshole. I’d thrown suitcases, cameras, clothes, bottles of pills overboard. Things that meant nothing to me, and I’d just chucked them. I’d made him kill some of his own men in my defense, waste good medicine on my arm and money on two dresses that I’d immediately ruined. I’d refused to wed the man he’d found to take care of me (though not even my guilt could make Lewis any less of an asshole) and now I was about to become a financial burden on his family. “I’m sorry.”

“I am now living only on my wages, and even those are throttled, for I will not be at sea again for six months at the earliest. Yet I am expected to arrive in her father’s house ready to wed—we had agreed that it would be after this last tour. We are anticipated. Tell me, how can I take my sisters, my mother there, and prostrate myself at the feet of her father and beg him not to call it off, when he has every reason to do so?”

“Does he hate you?”

“No—he approves the match most strongly. Yet it would not be sensible to proceed when I cannot provide for his daughter.”

I rucked up my skirts and dug up the side of my corset.

“Miss Franklin!” Fenton gasped.

“Oh, don’t be such a prude,” I scolded. “You’ve seen it all anyway. Here, stick your hand up—”

“Absolutely not!”

“—the side of my stays, you dork. It’s slid around the back, and I can’t get—there’s a hard, rectangular thing—”

“Oh, lord forgive me,” Fenton groaned heartily. He pulled out my phone. “Do you mean this?”

“Yeah, that. I don’t know what it’s made of—plastic and metal, but I’m sure there must be some quantity of copper and gold in it. The battery is garbage but the little circuit boards, I don’t know. Surely you can sell this too?”

“You cannot simply give me everything you own worth pawning.” But he was already entranced by the smooth face, the acid-eaten, bloated backing.

“Why not?” I asked. “You heard your sister. I have bed, board, and a job now. What use to me is a smartphone that doesn’t work? Make it worth something. Marry her.” I closed his hands around it.

“Samantha.”

“You saved my life. Twice. Three times, if you count helping me get away from Lewis, though technically I don’t know if that actually does count if you’re the reason I was in danger in the first place.” He huffed and touched the swelling spot on his jaw where I’d socked him. “Take it.”

“I will need to get it appraised, immediately, before I can join you at Swangale House. I am meant to escort the ladies, though—”

“I have trousers, and short hair, and I’m a pushy bitch. I can play brother for a few days,” I told him. He wavered. “I’ll take care of them for you. Good luck, Captain Goodenough.”

I stuck out my hand. He shook it.

“Fair winds, young Master Franklin.” He chuckled.

And then he was gone, back up the passage in the direction we had come.

I turned to track down Daisy, and jumped when I damn near ran into her. This close, I realized my eyes were exactly level with her pretty, pink little flower bud of a mouth. A mouth that was twisted in an unimpressed moue.

“Hi,” I breathed, entranced by the bald fascination in her moonstone eyes. “How much of that did you hear?”

“Nothing of note,” she said, cold and swift. “The carriage waits only for you, brother .”

“Then let’s be off,” I said, with a playful bow.

~

“What is she doing here?” Marigold spluttered, then quickly regained her decorum as Daisy shoved over on the bench to make room for me opposite their mother. “Where’s Finch?”

“He’s a last-minute errand,” Daisy said blandly. “He’ll be along after us, and will likely catch up before Swangale if he pushes that poor sweet mare he’s borrowed off his first officer.”

“Yeah, not to make this sound too much like a Hollywood car chase, but can we go ?” I asked, pulling the door closed behind me.

Daisy rapped on the ceiling, and the carriage lurched into motion. I caught sight of Susan by the judge’s carriage, watching our escape anxiously, fingers twisting in her skirts. Then we were out in the bustling streets of London, just another nondescript vehicle in just another inner-city traffic jam.

We wriggled out of our hats and coats and cloaks, the air of the carriage already stuffy with the windows closed tight against the January cold. The interior wasn’t luxurious, the padding worn flat, the fabric on the wall crushed, the curtains dusty. But the one thing it was good at was keeping in the body heat from four adult women.

As soon as Daisy had bundled up her own cloak behind her in a makeshift pillow and hung her bonnet from the door handle by its ribbon, Iris plopped the basket of foodstuffs into Daisy’s lap.

“Be a dear and manage that for me,” she said, settling back opposite under a lap rug. “I’ll help myself to a pie.”

“Can the basket not sit on the floor, Mama?” Daisy protested.

“It’s cramped,” Iris said, and held out a mittened hand imperiously.

Daisy sighed—the put-upon sigh of a daughter indulging her mother hadn’t changed in the ensuing two hundred years—and rooted through the basket for still-warm pastries for each of us.

“Aren’t you meant to be wed this morning?” Marigold asked me as we did our best to keep the crumbs off our fronts.

“Mary, leave off,” Daisy warned.

“Mary?” I asked.

“My Christian name is no more Marigold than my brother’s is Finch,” Marigold said.

I turned to my seatmate. “Are you really Daisy, then?”

Daisy only smirked at me like butter wouldn’t melt.

“Your marriage ,” Marigold prompted sniffily.

“I allowed the horse to lead me to water,” I answered. “But I didn’t like the look of his teeth, so I decided not to buy.”

The attempted levity had the opposite of the intended effect on Marigold, whose scowl grew deeper. “The judge is a very finely established man who has a great deal of comfort to offer any woman. Marriage is a fine and noble institution, not to be undertaken—”

“—lightly. I agree, Mrs. Kempel. Which is why I’ve elected not to enter into it at all.”

Marigold had little to say to rebut that, so fell back on belligerent chewing.

The pies lasted us until we passed the disappointingly diminutive Tower of London, and Daisy was quick to hand out further victuals to keep our mouths occupied more with peacekeeping endeavors than sniping. Wrinkled winter apples, candied nuts, and a glass bottle of lemonade were shared. Luckily, the meal had a soporific effect on Iris and Marigold.

Outside the carriage, the warehouses, docks, and riverside taverns of Limehouse slowly made way for meadows dotted with cattle. Inside the carriage, Marigold and Iris slumped toward one another like tired old barns in an abandoned pasture.

Daisy waited until the first snuffling snort from Iris, and then wedged the luncheon basket between her fine leather boots and the door.

“I thought she’d never drop off,” Daisy lamented in a low voice.

“Why did she make you hold it?” I asked.

“So I could not retreat into a novel,” Daisy said. “Mother says I shall ruin my eyes.”

“She’s not wrong,” I pointed out. “Especially in this light.”

“Then I shall procure spectacles,” Daisy said, with the same imperious air as her mother had used asking for the pie. “I think I should look rather well in them.”

“They’d be cute, yeah,” I agreed.

The compliment, like my attempt at a joke, landed wrong. Daisy stiffened and turned her face away.

“Okay, now what have I done?”

“Nothing,” Daisy said, frost hanging from every consonant.

“Then why is everyone in this carriage giving me grief?”

I dared to rest my hand on the round of her shoulder. Daisy unthawed under my touch by inches. Finally, she slumped as much as her stays would allow and rested her back against the window to face me. This meant I lost contact, but she pressed her feet between mine, and that was just as nice.

“My sister is not fond of change,” she said after another indeterminable few moments of studying me. I wished I knew what she was looking for. I’d gladly give it to her. “After the loss of Mr. Kempel, she was heaved up like a dinghy dashed upon the stones of the Cobb.”

“How awful.” I had no idea what the Cobb was, but I could still picture a driftwood-gray boat smashing on a rocky shore.

“Mary relies on me most heavily,” Daisy confessed. “I am happy to be her support in such griefs, but of late the weight of her sorrow has grown too much for me to bear alone.”

“Can’t your mom—”

Daisy shot me a sardonic look.

“I sometimes feel as if I am their mother,” she said. It was the closest thing to a complaint I’d heard out of her. “It is terribly selfish of me, Samantha, but having just one other intelligent, resourceful female in the house will free me up to pursue other pastimes, ones I have missed fiercely.”

“So, I’m to tutor and be a caregiver in return for my bread and butter?”

“I’d be so grateful if you could find it in yourself to do so.” Daisy clasped my hands between hers, and then immediately released me at my wince. “Does it hurt much?”

“Less than it used to,” I said. “Do you want to see it?”

“Is it too gruesome?” Daisy asked, sitting forward, fascination lighting her eyes from within.

“Why, Miss Goodenough,” I joked as I worked the sleeve of my dress up. “Are you excited to see a disgusting, gaping wound?”

“Mother says the novels I read have addled me, filled as they are with ghouls, and curses, and all manner of thrillingly horrid tales,” Daisy confessed, a delicate flush skipping over her aristocratic cheekbones.

“They sound like fun books.”

“Your wound is not . . . ” She hesitated. “Not properly disgusting, I hope?”

“Not disgusting at all.” I presented my arm with a flourish.

The wound had closed over into a lumpy knot of angry scar tissue. It was slowly hardening, getting shiner and whiter by the day. It was a proper divot in my flesh now, like a jagged bite taken out of a pear, and the last of the bone-bruise clung to my skin like sickly yellow pollen.

I thought I’d hate it. Looking at it now in broad daylight, for the first time in weeks, I thought I would despise the way it marred my skin, resent it for the weakness and pain it forced on me. But I could only be proud of it. This scar was proof that I had saved someone I admired and spared everyone in this carriage from the pain of his loss. No matter how it ached, here was an eternal reminder of my bravery—and a reminder that silence could, in certain circumstances, actually be a virtue.

“Oh, the wound is closed,” Daisy said. Her nose wrinkled as she studied it, but it was in concentration, not revulsion. “May I?”

“Yeah.”

Her hands were warm, the callouses on the tips strange. Were they from needlework? Or some other pastime or device I was unfamiliar with?

The press of travel-chapped lips against the top of the scar startled me out of my contemplation, and I came back to myself to find Daisy’s sweet blond head bent over the sensitive skin of my inner elbow. I clamped down hard on a shivering surge of desire.

Down, girl .

I was doing the baby duckling thing again; the first person to treat me with any compassion after yet another trauma had become the new object of my fantasies.

Daisy was not my Fenton rebound.

“There,” Daisy said, smoothing my sleeve back down. “Surely now it will not pain you, for I have kissed it better, and my littlest cousins find there to be great medicine in such a poultice.”

“Oh . . .” I said stupidly, then swallowed hard. “Thanks.”

“Samantha,” Daisy said, straightening up. “If you are to join our household, if you are to be our companion and, I do hope, friend, then trust that you never feel that you need to hide or feel shame for who you are.” She tapped the side of my arm gently, but she was looking at me so steadily that . . .

Christ. I really needed to stop reading into things so deeply. Especially with Marigold and Iris sleeping right there .

“Yeah, okay,” I croaked.

“Do you enjoy novels?” Daisy said, clocking my discomfort and changing the subject with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

“I haven’t had much time for fiction lately.”

“Oh?” Daisy asked. “And why is that?”

“My studies,” I said, thinking that sounded suitably vague.

“Yes! You went to university ,” she said, that breathless wonder back. “For which subject did you read?”

“Social history. Not battles and big historical figures. More like stories and clothes and everyday people, you know? But I don’t want to bore you. What’s the most recent thing you read?”

“Oh! Miss Edgeworth’s latest tale is quite engaging,” Daisy said, immediately engrossed with recounting the fate of lamentable Griselda and the unspeakable sacrifice her husband the Marquis of Saluzzo demands of her when each of her children are born. He commands her to give them up to be killed—while secretly sending them away to be raised with fine educations.

Her retelling of that story, then several more of her recent favorites, lasted until the driver stopped the coach at the side of the road for a comfort break a few hours later. It was both exciting and scary to realize that my brain was filled with pop culture, films, TV shows, and memes that I could never hope to explain to Daisy. And yet, at the same time, there she sat with her own brain stuffed with an equal number of stories, poems, and pamphlets that I, in turn, had never heard of.

Daisy woke Iris and Marigold, and together we donned our wooly armor and ventured behind our own individual trees to see to the needs of our bladders. Figuring out how to pee in skirts and a cloak without hitting my shoes was an experience . Our bend in the forest path proved a popular spot. As I scooped up some snow to clean my hands, another carriage pulled up behind ours, and a gaggle of giggling preteens tumbled out to find their own relief among the brambles.

“ What a palaver!” one of them called to the other, and I leaned back against the tree to eavesdrop, amused by the fact that women shouting back and forth over bathroom stalls seemed to be a time-honored tradition. “I had it from my sister, who was walking outside the church, that the bride declared that she would not have him! But then the coachmen went off on foot after her, and my brother-in-law says he must have returned her the back way, because before he knew it, the vicar and the groom were out on the front steps shaking hands, and the coach drove up on the walk so the bride could exit without being gawked at, and now the judge and his ‘adventurous’ lady are halfway to Lincolnshire for their honeymoon, to be sure!”

A shiver of recognition crawled up my spine.

“You were right,” Daisy said, from over my shoulder.

I hadn’t heard her creep up, and her deep, thoughtful voice was right beside my ear. I may have jumped. But only a little.

“Daisy! Hi! Warn a girl. Right about what?”

“Lewis. His reputation is of more concern to him than the actual location of his bride. This story must be all over town by now. You are wed. He shall not pursue.”

“And let’s hope it stays that way.”