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How very surprised her parents would be at the turn events had taken. They would not at all be pleased by the part Anne had played, so outside everything she’d been taught.

The girl carefully opened the top doors of the mahogany clothes press and stared into it. “Aye, what’s the cambric, bonesig— Miss?”

Anne patted her face dry and went to the tall piece of furniture. “How old are you, child?”

“Ten, Miss.” The child bobbed a quick curtsy.

“Young to be a maid, aren’t you?”

“Aye, but Mrs. Harries said I’ll do. Too young to catch the eye of the gent, s’what she said.”

Anne’s fingers went numb as she reached for the gown she sought. “Does she mean Calvin? She’s hoping you’ll avoid Mr. Calvin Vaughn?”

The girl’s eyes flared with horror and she took a step back. “Oh—Miss—I didn’t—I’d never—that’s to be your husband, is that one, and I?—”

“I’m not to marry Calvin,” Anne said quickly. Seeing the maid’s startlement, she kept her voice gentle. “Calvin meddles with the maids here, doesn’t he?”

The girl’s cheeks turned the color of an orange poppy. “Oh, Miss, I mun say … I ought’ve said nothing, I don’t know a thing, I?—”

“Child,” Anne said again, and she thought this must be the new Anne speaking, the Anne who had held and washed a newborn baby while speaking with Eilian and Dovey of the rules hedging in single women and the fines that fell on a woman who caught a babe outside marriage, while there was no consequence for the man who had put the babe in her.

“You needn’t try to protect me. It is my duty to protect you.

You are wise to stay out of Mr. Vaughn’s way—that is Calvin, I mean,” she added, feeling her own cheeks grow tight with heat.

“Do not get within his arm’s reach if you can help it.

And if he says ought to you, flirts or tries to cozen you, run to me or Mrs. Harries immediately. ”

“Yes, Miss,” the girl said, eyes round as hazelnuts.

“I mean this,” Anne said, fearing the child was only saying what she thought Anne wanted to hear. “If you do not feel safe. If it does not feel right. Come to Mrs. Harries or me.”

The girl paused, then nodded gingerly. “ Gwnaf , I will.”

“Good.” Anne realized she had taken the girl’s arm, as if she could put her own will into the child, and let go immediately.

When had this new boldness in her come about?

But the thought of Calvin Vaughn harming this girl—or Mathry, or Gwen, or anyone—made her blood boil.

And if she did not have the power to stop Calvin, Anne saw, finally, that she had the power to protect this girl, or try. “What is your name, dear?”

“They calls me Mair, Miss. After Miss Meredith, she as raised me.”

“And who is Miss Meredith?” Anne took the cambric gown and inspected the creases. She hadn’t the time to press the light fabric, given Hew’s urgency. She’d simply have to come to the table rumpled and hope the tunic, lightly embroidered with matching rosettes, would mask the worst of it.

“She’s a lady as lives in High Cross, a right fine lady she is, and takes in girls like me, with no mum to look after us.

” The girl drew the matching tunic from a drawer and ran an admiring hand over the delicate fabric.

“She’s a friend of that place as you’ve been going, St. Sefin’s.

Many an orphan as came there’s gone to the charity school with Miss Meredith. ”

“How did you—never mind. I should like to meet this Miss Meredith,” Anne said, and meant it.

She had a new interest in these women with charitable impulses.

Like Dovey. Like Eilian. Like Gwen. They, too, were the pillars of a little community like this, but in a far different manner than a woman like Lady Vaughn.

Anne had been raised to become a Lady Vaughn. She had no pattern for becoming anything else.

“Will she be at dinner tonight, your Miss Meredith?”

“Oh, no, it’s all Lady Vaughn’s high friends tonight, as many ladies as she could scratch together,” Mair said innocently, hanging the tunic from a peg and searching the drawers for the matching hair accessory. “And a few men too, she said, so as to entertain you.”

“Men to entertain me?” Anne echoed. “Though I am to marry her son?”

Mair looked up quickly, her face paling and flushing poppy-orange again—she really did have the most revealing skin. Anne hoped she wasn’t as transparent as this child.

“Never mind,” Anne said. “Lady Vaughn is hoping to divert my attention, I don’t doubt. She thinks I am an adventuress and, if she dangles better bait before me, I might snap at it, and so leave both her sons free.

“And,” she guessed further, stripping off her day gown and tossing it on the bed, “I don’t doubt the young women are to tempt Mr. Vaughn away from me, and save him from the clutches of a girl with little standing and no dowry, who has turned out to be a bad bet.”

Mair took up the discarded gown and shook it out, then draped it over a chair as deftly as any trained lady’s maid. “I dun s’pose the captain could do better than you, Miss,” she said. “You is kind, and you’s pretty. That’s a fair way to his favor, I should think.”

“You are ten, and too young to be thinking of courting.” Anne’s voice came out muffled as she pulled the gown over her head.

She’d wear the same long-boned stays she’d had on all day rather than taking the time to change them for her shorter set.

“In fact you are too young to be working. You ought to be at school learning your letters.”

“I’s been a scullery maid since I was six,” the child said, regarding Anne with surprise. “Orphans as I needs to earn they way. T’won’t get handed to them on a salver.”

Anne heard the echo of a familiar proverb in her declaration, perhaps wisdom handed down from the revered Miss Meredith.

“At least you’ve a skill to earn your keep,” she remarked.

“I’m for deciding whom I might marry to give me a place in the world and hold me there.

I suppose that does make me an adventuress. ”

“Thas the way of the world, that is,” Mair said with a shrug as she set to buttoning the back of Anne’s gown. “But the captain seems a fine one, that he does.”

“Fine indeed,” Anne acknowledged, her chest tightening as she arranged the bodice of the gown so the ribbon lay beneath her breasts.

Hewitt was too fine for the likes of Anne.

Too handsome, and, she was beginning to suspect, honorable after all.

The way he’d played at affection that morning so his mother might think he was wooing Anne in truth.

Hewitt Vaughn was too good to be ruined by the girl Anne had become, a girl without prospects, and lately without shame. She would have been a proper match six years ago, young and pretty and empty in her head. Lady Vaughn was right to want better for him.

The sound of traffic in the house increased, the front door opening and the patter of evening shoes and heeled slippers clicking on the marble tile of the hall.

Anne decided to keep her hair in the coils she’d worn all day rather than take the time to brush it out and repin.

She donned the tunic, which tied at her shoulders like a Roman toga and wafted about her upper body, and tucked the comb into a roll of golden hair.

The small veil fluttered behind, hiding the simplicity of the arrangement.

At least the curls around her face still held.

Her cheeks were pink with a hint of the sun that had come out from the clouds while Eilian walked her through St. Sefin’s herb gardens, Cerys frolicking at their heels as lively as the young goat that followed them about.

Anne would use that memory to give her strength to face what lay ahead.

She dabbed a bit of color onto her lip and picked up her fan.

“What’s the secret to making Lady Vaughn like me, d’you think?

” she asked, as if Mair were her reliable, beloved Pym of Vine Court and not a ten-year-old scullery maid.

As if the new Anne had some affinity with children now, especially half-feral, too-wise ones like this girl, or Cerys.

A girl that would never have come into the orbit of the old Anne, yet here they were.

Mair sighed. “Wish I knew.”

Anne followed the voices to the formal parlor, Lady Vaughn’s favorite, papered in saffron and gold.

The chairs and chaise had been pushed back against the walls to allow guests to circulate.

The enormous chandelier dripped with candles, and all the windows were pulled shut, making the chamber close and warm.

Hew stood to one side of the room with two young ladies hovering about him like butterflies.

Over their heads his gaze landed on Anne, and held.

She stared back at him, ensnared by the currents in his dark blue eyes.

His bold stare was making a claim on her, and she, gaping back like a ninny, acknowledged it.

She shook herself lightly and went to Hew’s mother, dropping a gracious curtsy. “Your ladyship.”

“I mislike that I cannot find another harpist,” Lady Vaughn fretted. “None here are as skilled as Miss Ewyas.” She turned to the matron beside her, done up in glittering jewels and a Norwich silk shawl. “Did you know the new Viscountess Penrydd used to harp for me?”

“So you’ve said, Winifred. Once or twice.” The older woman smiled indulgently. “And this is your Miss Sutton?”

“Anne, this is Mrs. Hawkins,” Lady Vaughn said crisply. “Of Gaer House.”

“That lovely ivy-covered manor on the road to Cardiff,” Anne said. “The one that overlooks the old Roman hillfort? How do you do.”