He was carrying his hat, and he looked at her across the width of the room with an expression she could not immediately read. "Miss Vane."

"Miss Vane," Alderton said with a precision that meant he had been told her name outside. "This is Mr. Whitmore. He has a matter of account he wishes to discuss."

She stood. She did not curtsy. She had not been introduced as someone who curtsied to strangers, and she was not going to start.

"I owe you two shillings," the man said.

"You owe me nothing. I left them on the table. They were for the innkeeper's wife. She earned them."

He looked at her. She looked at him. Mr. Alderton made a quiet exit in the manner of a man who recognizes a conversation he should not be present for.

"My sons," the man said. "I wanted to tell you that they are well."

"I assumed they would be. They seemed like sturdy boys."

"Edmund has not stopped talking about you."

She did not answer that. She sat back down and looked at the deed, then looked up again because he had not moved. "Mr. Whitmore, is there a matter of account you actually wish to discuss, or did you come to return two shillings I do not want?"

A pause. Something shifted in his face. It was not quite a smile. It was the thing before a smile, the warning of one.

"I came," he said, "to offer you a position."

The position was this: his sons required someone, not a nurse, not a governess in the conventional sense, but someone who could sit with them in the mornings and keep accounts with them in the afternoons, and who would not look through them as if they were inconveniences. He had made inquiries. Mr. Alderton had spoken well of her. The position was at Carne Park in Norfolk, sixty miles north, the wages fair and specific, the arrangement to last until Christmas and then to be revisited.

"Why me?" she asked.

"You sat with them on a cold bridge and walked them half a mile and left money you could not afford because it was the right thing to do. You did not wait to be asked."

"Anyone would have done the same."

"They would not."

"Then they were wrong."

He looked at her again with that expression she could not name. "Will you consider it?"

She said she would consider it. She was lying. She had already decided. She was going because Edmund had held her hand with the absolute trust of a child who has nowhere else to put it, and she had felt the weight of that trust and known that she could not put it down carelessly.

She did not say any of this to Mr. Whitmore. She said she would need a week to settle her affairs. He said he would send a proper coach. She said she did not require a proper coach.

"The roads to Norfolk are bad in November," he said.

"I am aware of what roads are."

This time it was fully a smile, brief and unpracticed, like a door opened in a house long shut. He closed it quickly, but she had seen it. She did not know yet that his name was not Whitmore.

The week passed. The coach came regardless. It was a very good coach with the kind of springs that meant the ruts did not find you, and she sat in it with her one trunk and her ledgers and watched the fens give way to the long, flat fields of Norfolk, thinking about what she was going into. She was practical by nature.

She had learned to be practical the way one learns anything one must learn, which is without the luxury of deciding whether one wants to. Carne Park was not what she had expected, though she had told herself she had no expectations. It was very old and very large, and it smelled of beeswax and old stone and the kind of fire that has been burning in the same grate for two hundred years.

The housekeeper who met her at the door was a small, dry woman named Mrs. Price, who had sharp eyes and a face that gave nothing away except warmth, which it gave away in very small, precise amounts. "You are Miss Vane," Mrs. Price said.

"I am."

"Good."

She handed Cesily's trunk to a footman and started walking. "The boys are in the east sitting room. Edmund has been there since breakfast. Frederick fell asleep at eleven, and I have left him because he needs it."

Cesily followed her down a corridor that smelled of lavender and something older underneath. "And Mr. Whitmore?"

Mrs. Price did not stop walking. "He is occupied. He will find you when he is ready."

She did not say it strangely, but Cesily noted it and filed it away.

Edmund was in the east sitting room with a piece of paper and a pencil, drawing something that might have been a horse or might have been a table. He looked up when she came in. "You came."

"I said I would consider it."

"You came," he said again, with the logic of a child for whom the result is the only fact that matters.

She sat down across from him and looked at the drawing. "Is that a horse?"

"It is our horse. Her name is Tempest, but she does not bite. Papa says the name was a mistake."

"Does she do anything that justifies it?"

Edmund thought about this seriously. "She is very fast."