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Elfreda caught her breath. So Papa wasn’t fooled.

Georgina didn’t have the grace to look sheepish. She looked amused. “Designing, am I? And what is my design?”

“My land, Major. You are after my land. I assure you, your money cannot buy the rest of it. Nor can you gain it by marriage. I would never consent to such a connection.”

Elfreda’s cheeks flamed and she made a choking sound.

Georgina’s cheeks had pinked too, but not with embarrassment, with anger. Even after all this time, Elfreda knew her expressions well enough to know the difference. The anger crackled around her for one long moment, and then she smiled, nonchalant.

“You will never have to consent. I am happily engaged. To a French countess. The adorable Marguerite. Marguerite Marie-Rose de Champagne. Her whole family was put to the guillotine, even the lapdogs. I am very much in love.”

Pure nonsense. Elfreda knew, too, when Georgina was poking fun. She was laughing now at Papa’s expense.

“That,” Elfreda spit out, “is the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard.”

Georgina studied her gravely. “I am sorry to disappoint you, Miss Marsden.” She paused and added, in an encouraging tone, “But I have no doubt that the right suitor will one day come along.”

That did it. She was going to scream.

“Tell Georgina,” she said instead, to Georgina, her voice impressively calm, “that I would rather eat a lapdog than sit at a table with any of you.”

She stalked off, head held high, but her sense of triumph faded with every step. She was itchy and damp and so bitterly disappointed. Today’s discovery should have changed everything. Instead, it had changed very little. And Papa’s dismissal had planted a seed of doubt in her mind. Maybe she had fallen under the spell of a funny little pebble and let her fancies run away with her. Now she’d never know for sure. She’d keep digging, of course. She’d dig on the bluff for twenty more years, if that’s what it took. And it might. Digging was slow work when you dug alone, and only during those hours you could rob from other tasks.

She risked a glance over her shoulder. Papa and Georgina had parted company. Papa was walking northwest, not toward Marsden Hall, but not toward the river either. The Empress Matilda penny was safe.

Georgina wasn’t anywhere. She was fast, though. Perhaps she’d already reached the lane, disappeared through the hedges.

Elfreda veered into the orchard, a sparse grouping of gnarled apple trees, more dead limbs than flowering boughs. Crows perched high in the crowns, pecking at last year’s withered pippins.

She sat on a stump by the old rabbit warren, brooding. Her grandmother had first taken her to the warren, opened it up with a shovel and showed her the tiny bones. It was her grandmother who’d made digging seem magical, a way to make time fold over, so that the past and the present touched. She never felt closer to Grandmama than when she was digging. Grandmama, Grandpapa, Mother—they were all in the churchyard. But when she had a shovel in her hand, Grandmama was digging with her. Grandmama had been an archaeologist as well, although no one ever acknowledged her as such. She’d accompanied Grandpapa to Stonehenge, and the drawers of her writing desk contained not only diaries but notebooks filled with observations in her own hand, some of which Elfreda recognized from Grandpapa’s published books.

“I wish we’d had longer,” Elfreda said to her, rupturing the orchard’s hush. “There are so many things I would have asked you, now that I’m grown.” Grandmama had died when Elfreda was ten, six years before her mother, whose memory had faded much quicker. Mother had been faded too, in life. Grandmama was vibrant, then and now. Elfreda could almost see her, between the trees.

“You would have believed me about the amulet,” she said. “You would have helped me figure out what to do next.”

A twig snapped. Three crows hopping around the stump flapped suddenly into the air.

Her skin prickled.

It wasn’t Grandmama ducking under an apple bough, coming toward her.

“Do you enjoy talking to yourself?” asked Georgina. “Is that why you scorn the very idea of friendship?”

Elfreda hunched on the stump, too tired for surprise, let alone outrage.

“Go away,” she said dully.

“What a lackluster retort.” Georgina plucked an apple, sniffed its wrinkled skin, and frowned. “Try harder. Tell me that talking to yourself is the only way to have an intelligent conversation.”

She gave a minimal shrug. “I wasn’t talking to myself.”

“Who were you talking to?” Georgina glanced about, intrigued.

It seemed wrong to let Georgina force her from her own orchard, but she’d developed a chill, and the stump had unfortunate protuberances, so she stood, ceding territory without any fuss.

“I’ll go, then. You can stay. I wouldn’t eat that.”

Georgie let the apple drop. “This orchard is a bit morbid. Crows. Dead trees.” She kicked the apple. “Mummified apples.”