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“ O f course, I cannot help but feel responsible for this,” said Dot Cain, heaving a sigh as she set her copy of the published letter onto the coffee table between them. “Someone I allowed into my home has betrayed my trust and, as a result, I have betrayed yours.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m the one who took it out of the study.” Millie sighed, rubbing her fingers over her eyes in an attempt to keep them open. “I’m the one who left it there for anyone to find.”

She hadn’t slept a wink. And was entirely sure she would never be able to do so again.

Dot’s study was somehow even more disheveled than usual this morning. The light coming in through the crack above the curtain rod was harsh, creating a veritable shadow puppet theater from all the dust that had been kicked into the air when Dot had torn the place apart looking for the letter.

She’d left a basket of mending overturned near the fireplace, and the cushions that had been restored to the little circle of seating were all mismatched and askew.

“Millie, no one knows it was you,” Ember said, glancing up from her own copy, where she’d clamped her fingers to keep her place. “As of right now, nothing at all has to change for you.”

“I’m surprised you haven’t already read it,” Millie muttered, sinking back into the cushion of her chair. “Everyone else has.”

“I’ve gotten a healthy gist from the gossip at the club, dear,” Ember replied with a wry curl of her lips.

“The gentlemen of the ton are quite distressed about the entire business, though none of them will admit to having actually read it for themselves. It’s a shame you didn’t publish it yourself.

You’d have made a double profit from all the women in England buying it outright, and then all the men buying it in secret. ”

Millie rolled her eyes. “Well, then I suppose I’ve made the thief a wealthy one.”

“Indeed,” replied Ember airily without looking up again. “Much better than jewels, I say. Cleaner. Cheaper up front.”

“They caught that thief, at least,” Dot put in, taking up another scone to anxiously nibble upon. “It was in the papers yesterday. I suppose it was too much to hope that the ballroom crimes would cease for even a single night.”

“They didn’t,” Millie said under her breath, though apparently not quietly enough, because the other two women were staring at her again. She sighed and shrugged, averting her gaze from their curiosity. "They arrested the wrong man."

Dot paused, her scone hovering an inch from her lips, her brows rising above incredulous green eyes. "Oh? And just how in the devil could you know that?"

Millie narrowed her eyes at her friend. “Why, because I am the criminal, of course! How else?”

“Ooh,” said Ember with a grin, “touchy!”

“Unusually touchy,” Dot agreed quietly, but did not press the matter further.

Millie pressed her knuckles into her temples and sighed. She shouldn’t have said that. And worse, she knew if the shoe were on the other foot, she’d be pressing Dot for an explanation as hard as she could. “Apologies,” she said weakly. “I am … not myself.”

The clock on the wall ticked by the next few seconds louder than Millie thought strictly necessary, as though it wanted to emphasize all the space in the room that was pressing down on her.

She eyed the plate of scones, but her stomach had been unsettled since this unpleasant discovery, and while the distraction was tempting, the consequences were not.

Ember gave a low whistle, setting her copy of the letter in front of her and blowing out her cheeks.

“Well?” Millie pressed, too tired to play coy.

Ember’s eyes rose to meet hers. “Listen,” she said, “it’s the truest thing I’ve ever seen. It’s brilliant and compassionate, and I wish I’d had a copy as a girl, but Millie … this is a declaration of war.”

“War?”

Ember nodded. “They are going to do whatever they can to track down the woman who dared say these things out loud. When Dot took to the gossip sheets against Freddy, she was tracked down in a matter of days, and that was just a cry against one man. You’ve challenged all of them.”

“I didn’t say a single thing about men,” Millie protested, gripping the arms of the chair. “Not a single thing.”

“Well, yes,” Ember nodded. “They can’t abide that. ”

“Ember,” Dot said in the same tone a governess says shush .

“What?” said Ember, scoffing. “It’s true.”

“But not helpful,” Dot said, finally abandoning the scone to its plate, pockmarked by her nibbling. “We would do well to remember that the last time we went to war, we won.”

“Last time, you wanted revenge on a man who had demonstrably done us wrong,” Millie said miserably. “I’ve apparently attacked everyone and no one all at once. There’s nothing to gain or to win this time.”

“Infamy is not nothing,” Ember said, tilting her head thoughtfully. “Indeed, you could play it to your advantage if you were suddenly known to every important person in London.”

“I would rather not, Ember.”

“You might not have a choice,” Dot said, not unkindly.

“Or you might have to choose quickly,” Ember added. “It would not surprise me if someone else took credit. There is a lot of speculation going around, and it has only been a day.”

“Who would do that?” Dot demanded, clearly shocked by the suggestion.

“Anyone with enough status and security to entertain the gamble,” Ember replied easily.

“Audacity is a privilege few can afford, but there are enough mediocre poseurs flitting through London today who would jump at the chance for an ounce of recognition, earned or not. Think of all the failed poets and weak-chinned second sons out there, desperate for a moment to shine.”

Dot grimaced, her eyes dropping back to the temptation of that scone.

“You said there was speculation. What are they saying?” Millie asked, the dread of knowing almost drowning her resolve to ask. Her stomach gave a sickening roil, thudding back into place like an internal round of applause for her foresight in declining that scone.

“Oh, all manner of nonsense.” Ember flicked her hand like she was swatting at a gnat. “I’ve heard it's a satire, a clever attack on bluestockings and emancipation, or that it is a ploy by the Tories to destabilize the realm.”

“Well, that’s dramatic,” Dot muttered.

Ember nodded with a chuckle. “And of course, many of the patrons at my club refuse to even consider that something so articulate was penned by a woman. The few who do consider it assume it has to have been the queen herself, or else some unhinged dowager looking to sow discord.”

“Oh, of course,” Dot replied with a curl of her lip. “Almost as though the very premise of a letter to and for women requires itself proven.”

Ember only shrugged. “Well, you know what they say about a fool and his gold. It wouldn’t suit me to have clients who were wise, would it?”

Touché, thought Millie, her thoughts rustling and colliding together over the murmur of the conversation as it continued around her. She looked down at the circular, upside down from this vantage, but with the title still bold and large.

They had changed wildflower to wallflower , she realized. Was it her poor penmanship? Or had they knowingly denigrated her message before it could even be spoken? Had they assumed that no one would choose to be a wildflower if they could be a rose instead?

It made her want to cry.

Dot and Ember were arguing about the best path forward, and somehow, she could not focus on a single word in the murmur of the exchange. She knew what they would be saying, anyhow. Caution and subterfuge or boldness and risk.

It was a collision of two maps, written for sea and sky when Millie herself was quite firmly limited to land.

She watched them, marveling at the fuzziness of the reality around her as Ember left her seat and began to pace and Dot snatched the scone back up and went hunting for a quill to plan their stratagem.

Nothing at all was clear to Millie.

Well, not nothing, she supposed.

The shock of it all had stuck in her mind like a wedge, preventing rest and reason from following their natural paths. But somewhere in that discomfort, somewhere beyond the sharp splinters of horror and fear, something else stirred.

Absurdly, she wanted her mama in this moment. She wanted to be a child again who thought her parents were titans and could fix anything.

She almost laughed. Lacey Yardley would be so aghast by this situation that she imagined they would just sit in silence until her mother collapsed to her doom.

Still, the instinct was there. And, oddly, it reminded her of something her mother had told her many years ago, as though predicting that one day she could take comfort from it.

Lacey Yardley had grown up in the piney wilderness of Whinlatter Forest. In her childhood, there had been a disastrous fire that had ravaged a path through the pines, driving the surrounding villages from their homes for over a week in its fury.

She told stories of her family’s flight from this fire and the sadness they’d felt upon returning to their homes, finding the horizon stripped of its beautiful giants and the wind unaccompanied by chipmunks, birds, and deer.

The blaze had been worse than any fairy-tale monster. It had taken everything and left a blackened expanse, all beauty razed to nothing by the fury of one little flame that had grown out of control.

She had cried when she told this story, silent tears betraying the steadiness of her voice. She said that it was the day her childhood had ended and she had learned the pain of loss.

But then, something miraculous had happened.

As autumn descended on the forest, rain and chill blew away the ashes, revealing that the green of a forest is not so easily defeated.

Plants no one had ever seen before had begun to push up through the ash and bone of the forest floor. These curly ferns and prickly bushes and alien flowers had slept for centuries, nestled in petrified husks.

They might have slept forever. But the might of a raging fire had roused them from their long sleep, the heat cracking open their tombs and the flames clearing the brush to give them room to emerge.

Their tender shoots had been nourished and nurtured by the remains of the common trees and roots that had fallen to the blaze.

Those noble plants had been reborn as something very old and yet, completely new.

The Yardley women visited the forest when Millie was sixteen.

They had walked the path that had once been nothing but ash, and her mother had pointed out strange and beautiful growth that now lived and flourished in this place and beckoned back the birds and chipmunks and so on to a new and glorious future.

She could see Claire so clearly in her mind’s eye, stroking the petals of a yellow flower that had grown around a young tree’s roots while her mother pointed to a family of starlings up above.

It was silly, but somewhere in the choked air and sizzling pain of her panic, Millie wondered if underneath it all, there was a garden awaiting its chance to blossom. She wondered if she could brave this blaze if there was a promise of new life at the end.

She had written that letter in the hopes of helping one or two girls out there in an unforgiving world that seemed far more rigid than it had to be.

They would read it. Their mothers might snatch it from their hands and send them to bed without supper, but by then, it would be too late. Those girls would read it, and if it was forbidden, they would doubtless find a way to read it again. Their mothers, in secret, might read it too.

And maybe one day, if Millie managed to escape censure and disgrace, daughters who had not yet been born would be brought up knowing their own power and potential. If the letter survived, then the knowledge survived, which was all she had wanted from the beginning.

It was a heady imagining of the future, one that soothed the sharp edges of the wedge in her heart, but it would not be possible if someone else took control of the letter’s intention.

It would not empower if it became perceived as satire.

It would not embolden if it were mistaken for criticism.

And it would never survive if it were claimed by an imposter.

Was it worth a war?

Millie did not know. She had certainly never considered herself a warrior or a strategist, or even particularly bold. She did not know if she could withstand the disapproval of Society or the consequences of becoming a pariah.

But she did know that she couldn’t leave her creation at the mercy of the powers that be. She knew better than anyone how wild things could grow when left unattended. Ignoring a weed only allowed it to spread.

If Millie was a weed, then so, too, was anything penned by her hand.

For once, she thought, cultivation would be necessary.