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T he next morning, after a solitary breakfast of tea and toast, Constantia set out to make the improvised studio ready for the day’s instruction. At every table, she stopped and studied the results of yesterday’s efforts. The assignment had been to draw a chair—specifically, the straight-backed wooden chair from her bedchamber, which she had dragged out and positioned at the front of the schoolroom. Dull as ditchwater, perhaps, but more challenging than most beginning artists were willing to acknowledge, because of the varying angles involved.

Edwina had drawn it almost as it appeared in life. Somewhat bereft of detail, but precise. Careful. Unassuming. Like the young woman herself.

Frederica’s and Georgiana’s she expected to find similar to one another, for the two girls were themselves difficult to tell apart, close in age and temperament, as well as appearance. But here, Constantia was surprised. Frederica had drawn the chair—not well, but there was nonetheless something interesting in the flattened perspective she had employed. An error, some teachers would have called it. Constantia wasn’t so sure. One day, the world might be ready to call that unusual collection of shapes and lines art. But not yet.

Georgiana, who had rolled her eyes and yawned through the lesson on light and shadow, had sketched a rather childish daisy in place of the chair. Constantia leaned over and jotted on the edge of the paper: I asked for an ordinary chair. How clever of you to give me a seat for a fairy instead.

Last of all came Harriet, whose rendition was extraordinary for someone untrained. Far more interesting than the chair itself. The rough wood leaped from the page. Constantia could have sworn she would risk a splinter if she touched it.

And there, she thought, scanning over the whole room, were the Haythorne sisters in essence: A rule-follower. A rule-breaker. A troublemaker. And an artist—as Alistair had predicted.

But it was up to her to tease out the greater potential in each of them, with whatever limited tools she could find and in whatever time she had left.

Absently she wound her hair into a knot and secured it with a pencil. Her injured wrist still ached a bit, especially at the end of the day, but it was no longer useless. As she stood staring across the room without really seeing it, weighing the subject of the next lesson, she heard voices and the clamber of footsteps in the stairwell that heralded the arrival of her pupils, fully half an hour ahead of their time.

“You’re here early,” she said, as the door to the schoolroom swung open.

To her surprise, Georgiana was the first to enter. “Oh, miss, you’re not going to believe it.”

“Take your seats,” she urged when they persisted in clustering together at the back. It took a full minute for her to realize there were five dark-haired young women now, instead of four. But of course, the carriage yesterday must have brought the last of the unmarried sisters home.

“This is Danny,” said Edwina, bringing her forward. She was nearer to Constantia’s age than the rest, a year or two younger than Alistair perhaps, with the same dark brown hair, almost black, and eyes extraordinarily like her brother’s.

“Lady Danielle,” Constantia said and curtsied.

“Only Aunt Josephine insists on our proper names,” Frederica told her, not for the first time.

“And right now especially,” said Georgiana, propping one hip on the corner of an empty table, “you do not want to encourage any comparison to our Aunt Josephine.”

“I don’t see how this is her fault, Georgie,” insisted Edwina. “ He asked.”

“But to give her of all people the power over such a choice. She’ll try to make him miserable, I just know it.”

“Danny, can’t you talk sense into him?”

“Stop it! Just stop it!” That was Harry, who had all but thrown herself into her usual seat and was covering her ears. “Can’t we have an hour to think about something else?”

“Lady Harriet is right,” Constantia said, glancing from face to face as each young woman slid into a spot. “I would be remiss in my duties if we wasted a lesson. But you also need to be in the proper frame of mind to create. So, at the risk of encouraging gossip, I’ll ask the question you all seem to be dying to answer: Did—did something happen last night?”

Five voices answered her at once, and the phrases she could catch refused to sort themselves into sense. She must have misunderstood.

“Forgive me, but it sounded—it sounded as if you said something about someone getting married...”

They all would have spoken at once again, but Edwina held up a hand. Once something like silence fell, she explained, “Our brother has asked our aunt to find him a wife.”

Constantia sucked in a sharp breath and sat down abruptly on her chair.

Not, of course, that Lord Ryland’s decision to marry had any bearing on her life. In fact, she could hardly think of any matter that concerned her less.

It was only this strange...fluttering in her chest, like...like butterflies.

If butterflies had fangs.

And claws.

Fortunately, the sisters were too distracted to notice anything odd about her behavior. Harry crossed her arms and scowled at Eddie. Freddie added, in a sardonic voice, “A rich wife. You forgot the most important part.”

“Some Bristol merchant’s docile and doe-eyed daughter who has assiduously pursued the sorts of accomplishments her family imagines will make her welcome in the ton ,” sneered Georgiana, “but whose most pleasing attribute is an ample...” She made a gesture that insinuated she was referring to a woman’s bosom but finished with “...purse.”

“Georgie!” Edwina scolded. “You’re speaking of the future Lady Ryland, who will be our sister! And I also think it’s highly improper of you to suggest that our brother may have”—her cheeks pinked—“prurient motives for making a match.”

“I fail to see how that would be worse than the pecuniary motives to which he himself confessed last night.”

“Do none of you understand what this means?” Danny’s question was quiet, but her voice possessed the same knifelike quality as her brother’s and sliced cleanly through her sisters’ chatter. Everyone turned and looked at her. “Do none of you recall how Bernie and Charlie married first and foremost out of esteem and affection?”

“Love,” Edwina corrected.

“Yes,” Danielle conceded. “Love. And has he balked even once at your understanding with Mr. Forster?” Edwina shook her head. “Because he wants you—all of us—to be happy. Could any of you have foreseen”—she looked almost frantically about the room, taking in the scattered sketches—“having someone here to teach art, given what—”

She broke off without finishing that thought, though Constantia found herself on the edge of her chair, wishing to know what she’d been about to say.

“That only makes his decision more inexplicable to me,” declared Frederica. “To allow Aunt Josephine, of all people, to choose his bride, and based on the size of her dowry? That’s not like Alistair at all.”

“It’s a sacrifice,” said Edwina, in a tone that made clear a willingness to sacrifice was very much in her brother’s nature. “For us.”

“I think we all suspected that the estate finances were not perfectly in order,” Danielle said. Four dark heads bobbed in agreement. “But for him to do this, things must be desperate indeed.”

Constantia knew it was unlikely that in that particular moment, they were wondering about her presence at Rylemoor Abbey. They’d probably forgotten about her entirely.

But she could not help but think of the circumstances that had brought her here. She thought of the crumbling spire of the abbey church and recalled how Alistair had told her he hadn’t the ready funds to hire a coach, how his cheeks had flushed at the confession. She hadn’t any notion what had produced this state of affairs, but she was ashamed she had ever thought him irresponsible. He was bowed down with his own worries, but he had insisted on caring for her nonetheless.

She had no reason to go on increasing his troubles or intruding on his hospitality. He had his family around him, and he—why, he was to be married, to someone who could help make his problems go away.

Certainly, she had no call to be jealous.

Rising, she clapped her hands twice to draw her students’ attention. “Thank you for satisfying my curiosity, but now it is time to begin our les—”

“We can’t let him do this,” insisted Harriet, her anguished eyes raking over her elder sisters. “We have to put a stop to it.”

Frederica nodded, and Georgiana said, “You’re right, of course.” She had been slouching slightly in her seat, but now she raised her eyes to Constantia, who could not read their expression. “But how?”

Edwina glanced at Danielle. “And what will become of us if we succeed?”

Tabetha, Lady Stalbridge, held the saucer in one hand and lifted the cup to her lips, blowing across the surface with enough energy that her breath ruffled the papers spread before her.

“I happen to know your tea is not hot,” said a male voice behind her. She turned to see her stepson Oliver, Viscount Manwaring, standing with one shoulder propped against the doorjamb. His chestnut brown curls were unruly, as always, and his eyes looked tired. She suspected he had made a late, and rather wild, night of it, as he often did.

Smiling up at him, she returned the cup to the saucer. “And how would you know that?”

“It’s my house, Mamabet.” Which was true, though he rarely made a point of it; they had shared the house for many years after his father died, and now, even after her remarriage, she stayed with Oliver whenever she came to London.

He pushed away from the door and into the morning room. “And my housekeeper just informed me she served your breakfast an hour ago. So,” he said, pulling out a chair across from her and dropping into it, “what has you so distracted this morning? Another love letter from Stalbridge?”

She sent him a mock scolding glance. “Those arrive by the afternoon post, as you well know.”

After twenty years in a loveless marriage, she had been reunited with and married her childhood sweetheart a year ago, and now each of them dreaded any moment they had to spend apart. But Kit, the Earl of Stalbridge, was dedicated to the estate in Hertfordshire he had unexpectedly inherited, and equally supportive of Tabetha’s decision to found the Magazine for Misses , which often demanded her presence in Town.

“I was reading the reviews of last night’s premiere of The Poison Pen .” Ransom Blackadder’s latest vicious satire, this one on theater critics, had been said to have as its particular target Julia Addison, known to readers of the magazine as Miss on Scene. Tabetha had of course attended the performance, apprehensive of the damage the play might do to the magazine and everyone associated with it. Now she sifted through the newspapers and broadsides scattered across the tabletop. “They have remarkably little to say about the play itself.”

“It is rare one goes to the theater and finds the action on stage the most compelling part of the evening.” Oliver picked up an untouched piece of toast from her plate, took a bite, chewed twice, and grimaced. “Perhaps more performances ought to involve shocking revelations and attempted murder.”

Even with his mouth full, she could hear the irony in his voice. The shocking revelations threatened by The Poison Pen would have cost both Oliver and Tabetha dearly, but he would have paid the greater price. Eventually, they would have led to society’s discovery that he was the famed Mrs. Goode.

In the end, though, the performance had shocked its audience for far different reasons, including an attempted murder onstage. Thanks to some quick-wittedness on the part of a few, and a heroic sacrifice on the part of the playwright, the identities of Mrs. Goode and the Magazine for Misses writers remained a secret.

“I gather,” he continued, washing down the cold toast with a slurp of cold tea from her cup, “Ransom Blackadder means to marry Miss on Scene?”

“Miss Addison and Lord Dunstane are betrothed, yes. And after the wedding, I expect they will return to Scotland.”

“You are fretting, then, about the loss of your theatrical reviewer?”

“Actually, I was thinking of my artist.”

“Miss C.?”

“Yes. She got up and left in the middle of our last meeting, the day we all got those terrible letters. She seemed particularly unsettled at the prospect of our exposure.”

He waved a hand over the collection of papers, each with an account of what had transpired at Covent Garden—a dozen at least. “Unless she’s locked in a cellar or an attic somewhere, she must have heard the news that the letter writer was exposed instead and we’re all safe.”

“For now,” Tabetha conceded. “But the very evening she left, I had another letter, this one from a...well, I shall simply call him a mutual acquaintance, indicating that an accident had befallen her and she was in need of assistance. Under the circumstances, I had little choice but to reply that I was not at that time in a position to help. And since then—nearly a fortnight—I’ve heard nothing more.”

“You trust this mutual acquaintance?” He sounded annoyed at the secrecy those words implied. Oliver dearly loved to gossip.

“Indeed I do.” Forgetting it was cold, Tabetha picked up her cup again, brought it to her lips, and then returned it to the table untasted. “But I have reason to think Miss Cooper does not. She doesn’t appear to place much faith in anyone, really—I’m quite sure she alone, of all the magazine staff, gave me a false name. I’ve often wondered why.”

“Trouble at home, perhaps. A family who would be displeased to find their daughter had taken an aesthetic turn.” Oliver knew whereof he spoke; his father had frequently berated him for dressing and acting in ways he considered detrimental to the name of Manwaring . The discovery that his son and heir had written a housekeeping manual in the guise of a lady would have been the last straw.

“Mm,” she answered noncommittally. She would not minimize her stepson’s difficulties, of course, for they had been great indeed. But she could not shake the feeling that Miss Cooper—or whatever her name might be—faced something even worse.

Oliver rang for hot coffee and picked up a newspaper, turned to something other than the theatrical reviews, and began to read. Tabetha pretended to do the same. A quarter of an hour later, Oliver let the upper half of his paper fall and peered over it at her. “I can hear the wheels turning in that head of yours. Still fretting about Miss C.?”

“I’ll have to go to print with no Unfashionable Plates in the next issue. People will wonder.”

“Let them.” He folded the paper and laid it aside as the housekeeper came in, thanked her for the coffee, and made a project of adding milk and sugar before taking a series of scalding gulps that must have drained the whole cup. “Ahh. Now I can think again. So why don’t you tell me what’s really bothering you, Mamabet?”

She hesitated, but only for a moment. With one forgivable exception—his authorship of Mrs. Goode’s Guide to Homekeeping —they had never kept secrets from one another. “Should I give up the Magazine for Misses ?”

A frown of surprise wrinkled his brow. “Your dream? Your mission to help young ladies think independently, as you wish you had been helped? Why would you do such a thing?”

“Because,” she replied, gesturing toward a review bearing the tortured headline “Miss on Scene’s Near Miss,” “every month, the work I undertake to help the many puts a few people I hold dear, you included, at risk.”

Were their contributions discovered, the young ladies might be ostracized by their families, cut off from good society. Even someone as professedly carefree about such matters as Oliver would hardly benefit from being known as the man behind the most highly regarded voice on matters domestic and the most popular ladies’ magazine.

“Some risks are worth the rewards.” He shot her a mock-stern look. “Rewards which, until very recently, included seeing you happier than you’ve been in years. Though perhaps I ought to give some credit to Stalbridge?”

“Some,” she agreed with an impish smile. “Much as I love being here with you, I do consider the time away from my husband one of the disadvantages of the present situation.”

“Fair enough. Though you must find some consolation in the fact that the Magazine for Misses has helped more than one young lady find true love.”

“That’s another matter—the fact that half my writers are no longer misses . It feels...disingenuous, I suppose.”

“I daresay you could find replacements without too much trouble. You might even find someone else to run the damn thing, if you chose. Or to share the responsibility with you. Better that than letting it wither on the vine, to say nothing of killing it outright.”

“Are you offering, Oliver?” She directed her attention to a speck of dust on the tablecloth rather than meet his eye.

He laughed. “I don’t mind giving you the benefit of Mrs. Goode’s imprimatur, or her occasional wit and wisdom. But I fear anything more would cut dreadfully into my social calendar.”

“I wonder if it mightn’t benefit from a little trimming?” she suggested, studying the dark circles beneath his eyes.

“Mamabet...”

She recognized the warning note in his voice. “All right, all right. So then, I’ll need an editor, an advice columnist, and a theatrical reviewer.” She ticked off each position on one fingertip as she spoke. “Where will I find them all?”

“Don’t forget an artist.”

“Oh, no. Not yet. Miss C. may return.”

Oliver looked skeptical but said nothing.

Privately, Tabetha hoped that Lord Ryland had offered Constantia his assistance, and that the young woman had taken it. Her mocking cartoons of him were no doubt a point of contention between them. But rough patches could be got through.

Tabetha knew of no one so steady and reliable as Ryland, and no one more in need of someone trustworthy than Constantia. She had always struck Tabetha as a frightened wild thing, snapping at anyone who came too near.

Perhaps a gentle hand, belonging to the right person, might soothe her at last?