Page 2 of A Duchess for his Family

Then laughter rang out. Sophia opened her eyes. It was not the laughter of the children from the house. This was nearer, lighter, and sharpened by secrecy.

A second voice followed it, lower and anxious. “You must come down. You said you would only go to that branch.”

“I said I would only go to that branch if the higher one was dull.”

“That is not the same thing.”

“It is very nearly the same thing.”

Sophia rose, with curiosity overcoming caution. She picked up her book and followed the sound around the far side of the oak.

There, in the mottled shade, stood a little girl of perhaps eight, gazing upward with her hands clasped tightly before her. She wore a pale muslin dress that somehow stayed tidy despite the grass, and her bonnet hung properly down her back. Her face was heart-shaped, fair, and solemn, with wide eyes that seemed to notice far more than they revealed.

Above her, on a branch much too high for comfort, sat another little girl with the same face entirely altered by mischief.

Sophia blinked. They were identical, with the same dark lashes, the same small nose and the same soft hair escaping in curls about the temples. Yet no one could have mistaken them. The child on the ground was still as a prayer. The child in the tree looked like a declaration of war.

“Oh,” Sophia gasped before she could stop herself.

The girl on the ground turned sharply. “I beg your pardon. We did not know anyone was here.”

The girl in the tree looked down and grinned. “I did.”

“You did not,” the one on the ground replied.

“I suspected.”

“You cannot suspect a person into existence, Marjorie.”

“I can if I am right.”

Sophia took one step forward, alarm stirring beneath her amazement. “You are rather high.”

“I know,” said the climber, with satisfaction.

“That was not praise.”

The branch beneath Marjorie’s shoe cracked sharply. Everything happened at once. The girl’s grin vanished. Her foot slipped. The branch snapped free and dropped through the leaves, striking lower boughs before landing with a terrible thud in the grass. The child clutched the trunk with both arms, her body pressed against the bark, one foot searching blindly for leverage and finding none.

The girl below cried. “Marjorie!”

Sophia dropped her book. She did not remember deciding to move. One moment she stood with her heart frozen in her chest, and the next she was at the tree, lifting her skirts with one hand and catching the lowest branch with the other. Bark scraped her palm. Her slipper found the ridge of the trunk. She had not climbed that oak since she was fifteen, when her mother declared such conduct unbecoming, but her body remembered what propriety tried to forbid.

“Don’t move,” she called upward.

“I wasn’t intending to,” Marjorie replied very quickly.

The answer might almost have made Sophia laugh if terror had not tightened her breath. She climbed higher, awkwardly at first, then with more certainty. Beneath her, the quieter twin made a small distressed sound.

“Please be careful,” the child whispered.

Sophia did not look down. She reached the fork below Marjorie and braced one knee against the trunk. Marjorie’s face was pale now beneath its freckles, though her chin retained a brave, foolish lift.

“I cannot find the branch,” the child said.

“I know.” Sophia swallowed. “Give me your hand.”

Marjorie hesitated only long enough to prove she possessed courage, then obeyed. Her fingers were small, hot, and trembling.