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“Here’s our strategy,” Fanny said to Stella. “We’ll take on the duke. He’s old, so he won’t run as quickly as Thomas, and besides, Thomas will be afraid to hit the dowager duchess with his sword. He’s silly like that.”

“Well, she is an elderly lady,” Stella pointed out.

“But she’s fierce,” Fanny said. “Just look at the way she’s holding her sword. Mother shouts a lot, but she hardly ever hits anyone with her sword. That’s why Thomas always wins the laurel wreath, except that one time when Mr. Addison played. He swatted everyone, including Mother.”

“We must win,” Stella confirmed.

Fanny nodded. “The dowager is going to take Thomas down, and our job is to kill the duke.”

“I am ready,” Stella said, practicing a few swings with her sword. If she thought about the way that Silvester stared longingly across the ballroom at Yasmin, she could definitely thwack him.

“Lieutenant general, are you ready?” Fanny shouted at her mother.

Merry took the dowager’s arm and then raised her other arm in the air, waving her sword. “Non ducor, duco!”

“Let’s go!” Stella cried, grinning at Fanny. “I’m behind you!”

With a bloodcurdling scream, Fanny sprung out of the shadow of the gazebo. Stella ran after her, sword in hand, feeling her hair streaming behind her like a Valkyrie. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the dowager tottering across the lawn, looking as if she’d lost twenty years in the last ten minutes, leaning heavily on Merry’s arm but flourishing a sword with her other.

Fanny dashed forward and tried to poke Silvester from behind with the point of her sword. He whirled around from talking to Thomas and blocked her sword.

“Noli me tangere,” Silvester growled.

“I know what that means, and I’ll tread on you if I want to!” Fanny cried, darting in to try again.

Thomas knocked her sword aside, and the siblings began energetically whacking away at each other, shouting in Latin.

“Semper primus,” Stella said, clearing her throat as she pointed her sword at Silvester.

Silvester’s eyes seemed to be intent on her toga, perhaps due to the fact that only the shortest stays worked with the design.

Her aunt’s insistence that lust unsettled male minds could be useful. Stella moved a step closer, and then another, until she was so close that she could smell snowy rain. And starched linen.

“Stella,” Silvester said, his voice deep. “I missed you in the last month.”

“You missed chess?” she said, raising an eyebrow. “So did I.” She took another careful step. She was almost close enough to poke him. “I was very sorry to hear that your heart was broken.”

“What? Oh, yes. Quite.”

She took a final step and gave him a lavish smile, swinging up her sword and poking him in one leg. “Number one!” she called, leaping out of reach.

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Don’t count on victory. As Thomas’s lieutenant general, I can’t let him down.”

Stella danced from foot to foot, realizing she was grinning like a fool and not caring. Silvester didn’t look as if he were heartbroken. Surely heartbroken men didn’t have that greedy look in their eyes.

“How in the bloody hell am I supposed to strike a woman?” he asked.

Thomas clearly had no such qualms; behind Silvester’s shoulder he scored a point against Fanny, who started screaming at him in English, not Latin.

The dowager drifted closer to the two children, held out her sword, and spanked Thomas on the legs. “Strike one!” she observed when Thomas spun about.

“Ha!” Fanny shouted, and the dowager, Merry, and Fanny surrounded Thomas, moving in a circle like the three witches in Macbeth.

Thomas managed to whack his sister on one leg. “You’re dead!” he shouted.

The dowager chortled. “You are soon to die!”

Stella looked back at Silvester. “In my opinion, Thomas will soon fall to the sword, so to speak. Your team will lose.”