It didn’t.
“I like Libba,” she finally admitted. “My brother picked it.”
“Your brother is very special, Libba,” the baroness told her. “I have been hoping to talk to him, to ask him if he has considered studying under a mathematics master and honing his gift. Do you think he might like that?”
For a moment, Libba considered lying. She considered shaking her head and shoutingno.
But she didn’t.
“I have already spoken to your papa about it, truth be told,” the baroness continued. “He seemed surprised to learn of his son’s talent.”
“He doesn’t see,” Libba said with a shrug. “He is looking inside, not at us.”
“Is that so?” the baroness said with a little frown. “Well, then I expected he would have trouble delivering your brother to lessons with any regularity, much less keeping up with his studies at home. Perhaps a boarding situation would be more amenable, hm?”
Libba only stared. She didn’t know some of those words.
It made the tall woman smile again. “Would you like to come too, Miss Elizabeth? Little Libba? I couldn’t rightly take your brother away and not offer you the same courtesy.”
Libba hesitated, looking over her shoulder at where Mal and Jasper were currently locked in some sort of game, flipping the red hat that they used to collect tips toward a rock and trying to land it just so. “I can get him,” she said. “You can ask.”
“I will,” said the baroness, putting her hand out and onto Libba’s shoulder. “But right now, I am asking you whatyouwant. Would you like to come live in my house and learn new things alongside your brother? You can still visit your father and the wharf as much as you like, of course.”
“Why?” said Libba, tilting her head. “You already have children. I’ve seen them.”
“That is true,” she said with a little titter. “I am not seeking to collect children for the sake of it. My own father taught me that talent must be fostered, lest it wither, and that talent will always outweigh pedigree. I suppose in my own way, I am honoring that lesson. Your brother’s talent deserves to be planted in fertile soil; otherwise, we might never know what could blossom from it.”
“And you want to put me in soil too?” Libba asked, wrinkling up her brow.
“Yes, I think I should,” the baroness answered, straightening. “You’ve a spark to you, my dear. You are a prism, I think, with many facets.”
Again, Libba could only blink.
Her vocabulary, she suspected, would be the first thing this lady would wish to improve.
“Can we still see Jasper?” she asked, pointing to the red-haired boy. “Can we still come to the pavilion and listen to the bands? See the plays?”
“You can do all that and more,” the baroness promised her, “if you decide to come with me.”
Libba took a deep breath, glancing up at the sky, which was bright and blue just now, slashed through with thin wisps of cloudy lines. “Which girl do you want me to be?” she asked, staring up at the way the clouds moved slowly in the wind, grazing over the sun like someone had thrown crop rows onto the sea. “I can be whichever one is best.”
“Libba,” the baroness said. “You must only be who you wish to be. No one who truly cares for you will ever attempt to fashion you into anything else.”
She shivered, dropping her eyes from the sky down to the toes of her shoes, scuffed and buried in pebbles and grit. “What if I wish to be more than one girl?” she asked quietly.
“Then be all of them,” the baroness answered. “Or be none of them, if it pleases you. It will not change what I am offering to you now.”
“None of them,” Libba repeated, looking up in surprise with a little laugh. “That would really be something, wouldn’t it?”
“Perhaps it would,” the baroness agreed, offering her gloved hand to Libba’s grubby, bare one. “Shall we go ask your brother what he thinks?”
She only considered it for a moment. Only a short little gasp of breath.
And then she took that hand.
And everything that came with it.
Chapter One
