Papa had even promised that Georgie’s scientific illustrations of the otters would be part of the book, which was simultaneously thrilling and disconcerting. In the wake of her father’s unexpected death, she had not thought to look for the manuscript until well after John had arrived to take possession of the house and its contents. She feared it and her illustrations had been consigned to the same bonfire where her cousin had burned her father’s scientific notebooks, which he found to be useless.
Anything of her family’s that John could not sell for ready cash or use immediately had been deemed useless.
She ought to have known her cousin would be able to devise a torture for her worse than merely killing her pets. He probably planned to have the clergyman send them back once he was done so she would have to look at them on the mantlepiece, dead and posed into a hideous semblance of life. Sloane wouldn’t even know the proper placement of Bonny, the matriarch.
No. She could not allow it to happen.
Georgie set her jaw. She would rescue her otters rather than stay here and accept their fate. Even if she arrived in Yorkshire to discover she was… was too late, she would never willingly return to her cousin’s house. There was nothing for her here but drudgery and cruelty. There certainly was no loving family remaining for her.
Traveling alone as a young woman would leave her open to insult, or worse. And it would limit her options when it came to retrieving her otters. No gentleman would be willing to turn valuable animals over to a strange woman who arrived on his doorstep.
But if a youngmanarrived, and had impeccable proof of being the owner of said otters …
It wastime to cut her hair.
It had required three precious days to prepare her escape. Freddy’s trunk was easily retrieved from the attic where she had packed and placed it after his death. He had been tall for his age, only just beginning to sprout up into adolescence and overtake his elder sister in height. His clothes fit her with only a few additional stitches, and wearing clearly secondhand clothes made her disguise more convincing.
As she contemplated her image in the mirror, dark braid pulled over her shoulder for easier cutting, the red thread bracelet on her right wrist caught her eye. Freddy had been meant to leave for Harrow to begin the Michaelmas term the year he turned thirteen, so Georgie and her mother had worked together to make a rakhi—a red thread bracelet—to ease Freddy’s homesickness while he was away as a symbol of the unbreakable bond between a brother and sister.
It lay half-completed on her wrist, the second half of it merely string. The day they had buried Freddy and Mama, Georgie had tied it to her own wrist in its unfinished state. Now faded to a dark pink, she still could not bring herself to break the last tie between herself and her younger brother. She rubbed one finger over it in remembrance.
She ran the thick braid through her hand one last time. She had her mother’s hair, black and glossy as the Indian night. She remembered her mother brushing it for her when she was a child, listening to Georgie’s chatter with an indulgent smile as her loving fingers braided it for the night. Even when Georgie had her first and only season in Bath, they had continued the ritual so they could gossip about the parties and gentlemen.
Until the fever had taken her mother and Freddy both, within days of each other.
Stop delaying. Do it.
Taking a deep breath, Georgie raised her scissors and began sawing through the braid as high up as she could so she could clip the remaining locks into a reasonable facsimile of a young man’s short hair.
She would leave the braid behind for her cousin. One last thing for him to sell.
Her only fear was that she would arrive too late to save her otters, but she had to try. There was nothing left for her hereanyway. She would decide her next step once the otters were back in her care.
She could only pray she would arrive before Sloane had the opportunity to execute her pets.
2
Aletter from his mother always made for a terrible day.
The Reverend Lord Peter Avondale turned the folded paper over in his hand, examining the dowager duchess’s seal as though he didn’t receive a letter from her at least once a week. The one advantage to his current exile in Yorkshire was that she could only berate him in writing and not to his face.
Her letters never told him anything he wanted to hear—how his siblings were getting on, how his nieces and nephews were growing, what was happening in London or on the family estates.
The letters were always about him, and how he had disappointed her. How he continued to disappoint her with everything he did.
With a sigh, he broke the wax of the seal and unfolded the letter onto the surface of his desk. One would think a dowager duchess would be willing to use an extra sheet of paper so she could berate her youngest son over two pages—especially when her eldest son the Duke of Livesey could frank the letter for her—but she always crossed and recrossed her lines so he had to spend time deciphering them.
A few words jumped out as he skimmed it—words likemortifiedandfoolhardyandmarriage—and Petee re-folded the letter. Once she had accepted the necessity of this temporary exile to Yorkshire, his mother had begun talking about his need to marry in a way that would boost his ecclesiastical career. She still refused to accept he had no interest in becoming a bishop or moving up in the Church for the glory of the Avondale name.
He wished only to do good as best he could, in all the ways he could. For him, that way was clearly to return to London and his work with the poor as soon as his brother calmed down and found someone else to act as the temporary rector. Kilbythorpe was a lovely and peaceful village, to be sure, but these people did not need him the way the poverty-stricken denizens of London did. He could make so much more of a difference in his parishioners’ lives there than he could here.
A crash rang through the hallway outside his study, and loud voices caused him to rise from his desk and cross to the door to open it. His housekeeper, Mrs. Barwick, seemed to be trying to push a young man holding a large basket out the front door, and the young man pushed back, shoving his foot into the door to prevent her from closing it.
“What’s all the racket?” Peter asked, and Mrs. Barwick whirled on him. The young man took the opportunity to slip through the half-open door and stand in the hallway with the basket balanced on one hip, snatching his cap off as he did so.
“Oh! I’m that sorry to disturb you, Lord Peter, but this young ruffian is trying to deliver something that don’t belong here.”
As the racket died down, Peter realized the basket was… squeaking.
