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“Another reason I hate the country.” Georgie stood at the parlor window, watching the rain bucket down.

“It rains in London,” said Rosalie, with detestable reasonableness. She was stretched out on the pink brocade sofa, a teacup and saucer balanced on her breastbone.

“Let’s play whist.” Anne dealt at the card table, but none of them were used to the three-player variant, and the game disintegrated.

It was the third day of rain. It felt like the three hundredth.

Anne’s chaperone had revived, and after luncheon, she sat with them in the parlor, which spoiled Georgie’s plan to smuggle champagne up from the wine cellar.

Anne was forced to filigree a basket. Rosalie situated herself beneath a lap desk and made unnervingly anatomical sketches of her own hand.

Georgie wrote letters. Desperate, wheedling letters. To Harry. To everyone.

When a yellow sunbeam shot into the room, a collective cry of relief rang out. Mrs. Herridge couldn’t have stopped the stampede to the door if she’d tried. Mercifully, she didn’t.

“Another reason I hate the country.” Georgie stood in the garden by a marble column of the wisteria-cloaked pergola, watching the clouds scud through the washed blue of the sky. “There’s nothing happening out here either.”

Anne and Rosalie stepped into the pergola’s shade and squeezed together on the bench. There was no need to squeeze. The bench was long. They looked at each other and then at Georgie. Clearly, the bench wasn’t so long it could accommodate a third wheel.

“Right,” said Georgie. “I’m off.”

Off to where, though?

Georgie headed nowhere, walking out of the garden into the park, kicking at the clinging wet grasses.

Harry had picked his punishment well.

In London, Georgie could have paid a call to one of a hundred acquaintances, fritterers by Elf’s standards, but only because they had pulses. Because they looked at the horizon instead of down at the dirt.

Here, Georgie could pay a call on a childhood friend. But they were all married, if not confined, too busy with domestic life for more than perfunctory engagements. Certainly nothing fun. Who did that leave?

Not Elf. Or as Anne had called her, the elfin queen .

She’d always seemed otherworldly. Utterly removed from the here and now.

Once, Georgie had sat beside her in a carriage, when Mrs. Alderwalsey had offered them both a ride home from the village during a sudden downpour.

She’d never looked up from her book. She hadn’t acknowledged Georgie with a word.

The other day she’d spoken words enough.

Do not come near me ever again.

Georgie was approaching the woodland. Another few minutes and the fishing pond shimmered through the trees.

It made sense as a destination. It made sense to look again for the amulet. As though it were some kind of key.

To what was a question better unanswered.

—

Elfreda stopped on the sweeping carriage drive up to Redmayne Manor.

This was her last chance to reconsider. When she turned around, she could see Marsden Hall in the distance, stark and gray on the hill.

Papa was huddled in his greatcoat in the frigid library, laboring over descriptions of various disinterred objects for Ancient Derbyshire , perhaps at this very moment recalling her disgrace with strong nouns, giving a disgusted shake of his head.

He would rail like King Lear on the heath if he knew what she was doing.

And perhaps it was foolery, a mistake that would expose her to Papa’s wrath and Georgina’s mockery, yielding nothing.

She turned back around. The Redmaynes’ park was landscaped with small stands of trees.

Yellow flowers—wild irises—brightened the shade cast by the nearest. This wasn’t the wild iris patch from the abbey’s boundary clause.

Silly even to think of it. Charters named features of the landscape familiar at the time, and few endured across the centuries. Even rivers shifted in their beds.

Nonetheless. The irises decided her.

She was closing in on the manor when she heard the giggling.

Instead of knocking on the front door, she followed the sound through the garden.

It was coming from the pergola.

She walked up, stepped between the columns, and…

“Jupiter!” she gasped and shut her eyes.

The sounds she heard now were in a decidedly different register.

Scuffles. Thuds. She spun, prepared to depart posthaste, but her eyes were still closed, and she slammed into something that clasped her in a wild embrace and toppled them both.

The something was a someone. The someone was Anne Poskitt.

She lay on the stone floor, her face inches from Elfreda’s.

She was flushed a dewy pink, and her lips looked bee-stung.

“Oh, thank God!” she cried. “I thought you were Mrs. Herridge.” She sat up. Her gown was rumpled, and her bonnet was askew. “We got carried away.” She said it confidingly to Elfreda. “Rosalie”—she twisted at the waist—“it’s Elf, who we told you about. It’s not Mrs. Herridge.”

“Shhhhh.” This shushing girl was Rosalie, lucky Rosalie, who hadn’t gotten herself pushed into the pond.

She was slight, with glossy black hair and a big-eyed beauty Elfreda associated with portraits from Roman Egypt.

She yanked at her emerald-green gown, also rumpled, and knelt on the bench, peering toward the manor through the curtains of wisteria.

“If you say her name too many times, she’ll appear.”

Elfreda pushed herself to sitting and gripped her elbow. She’d whacked it, hard, the part that sends strange tingles up the arm. But her whacked elbow couldn’t explain all the tingles. Her whole body shivered into gooseflesh.

Kissing. The girls had been kissing. Not the chaste kisses you might bestow on an elderly relative or a child. The two of them had looked like their bones had melted, like they were fusing at the mouth and the rest of their bodies would follow suit.

“Is that why Elf appeared?” Miss Poskitt giggled. “Because Georgie has said her name so many times?”

Elfreda’s tingling intensified and transformed from an inexplicable physical sensation to a familiar emotional one.

She was flustered. Georgina and her friends had always flustered her, with their secret smiles and arch looks and social graces that usually seemed to conceal some private joke, often at her expense. Her awkwardness was so amusing.

She climbed stiffly to her feet. “Where is Georgina?”

“It’s anyone’s guess. I haven’t introduced myself. I’m Rosalie Mahomed. And very pleased to meet you.”

Miss Mahomed had swiveled to smile at her, a warm smile.

“I can guess.” Miss Poskitt put a finger to her temple. “The fishing pond! We spent that whole next day searching for your amulet. It’s worse than a needle in a haystack, but I doubt Georgie would have stopped, if it weren’t for the rain. I’m sure they’re there now.”

“They?” Elfreda’s brow furrowed. “Georgina and Mrs. Herridge?”

“Don’t say her name!” Miss Mahomed tried to hide behind her own arms.

“I meant Georgie,” explained Miss Poskitt, and then to Miss Mahomed: “It doesn’t matter if Mrs. Herridge turns up now. Nobody is getting ravished.”

Her blue gaze was suddenly wistful.

Elfreda blushed more hotly than ever before in her life. But she kept her eyes open, and with a strangled goodbye , she escaped the pergola without tripping over herself or anyone else.

She raced through the park and plunged into the woodland, because the faster she moved, the harder it was to think about what she’d just witnessed, and what it might mean. She stopped at the edge of the pond, and her last blush became the second hottest of her life.

Because Georgina was naked.