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"You?"

"You appear surprised."

"I cannot imagine you frightened by anything so ordinary as an assembly. You always know the sensible thing to do."

Saye was silent long enough that she feared she had said something foolish. At last he answered, "I often know what I ought to do after I have done something else. I am merely less inclined than Richard to publish the discovery."

Elizabeth laughed. "That accounts for the difference between you."

"Partly. I am older, and I have been trained to expect that people will watch my decisions and mistake them for certainty. I wish they would sometimes allow me to be uncertain in peace."

"Then I shall never tell anyone that you confessed to being human."

"I would be grateful. It might disturb the tenants."

He looked at the little chain resting at her throat. "You wore your mother's locket?"

"Yes. I know it is rather sentimental."

"I cannot imagine why you would apologize for that."

She touched the pendant. "I sometimes fear I shall forget her voice. I remember how she sang when she thought no one listened, and the way she spoke when she was tired. But I am older now than she could ever have imagined me. There are things I wish I could ask."

"I am sorry," Saye said quietly. "I cannot answer them, but I can listen when you wish to ask."

It was a very characteristic offer. Richard would have set himself immediately to finding books about the origin of the locket, while Saye gave her space to mourn what could not be recovered. Elizabeth leaned her head briefly against his shoulder. He did not move until she sat upright again.

"I think," she said, "that if I ever become vain enough to believe myself impressive because I have met the Queen, I shall ask Richard to list my faults."

"That would be unwise. He would regard it as a commission requiring several volumes."

"Then I shall ask you."

"I would tell you that you have developed the deplorable habit of expecting people to deserve your gratitude before you bestow it."

She smiled. "I should hope to retain that fault."

"So should I."

When she rose to go upstairs, he offered her the folded letter she had left upon the mantelpiece. There was nothing ceremonious in the gesture, but Elizabeth carried it away with a quiet reassurance. She had not only a guardian and a kind aunt but two men who had made room for a younger sister, each in his own fashion. She wondered sometimes whether Minna had known what it was to be cherished by brothers. She could only hope so.

A week later, while Elizabeth and Frau Adler translated a German poem, the older lady mentioned a reception at which she had once met a court official from Mecklenburg.

"He spoke of home as though every path led to an ancestral park," Frau Adler said. "I imagine he had not been away long enough to miss ordinary streets."

"My mother might have come from that part of Germany," Elizabeth said. "Papa found her farther north, and she never remembered her home."

"Did she retain the accent of Mecklenburg?"

"I would not know. She sounded like herself to me."

Frau Adler smiled. "A sensible answer. It is easy to hear what one expects after being told where to listen. Your mother's diction was cultivated. That tells us of her education, but not the name of her birthplace."

Elizabeth looked down at the German lines before her. She had grown used to thinking of her mother's past as a locked room, no more accessible than a vanished landscape. Her presentation had stirred the old curiosity, but curiosity alone could do nothing. She translated the next stanza and listened to Frau Adler's corrections, grateful for a language that remained alive even when the woman who had given it to her was gone.

That evening she wrote to Jane that the Queen had been gracious, that the feathers had behaved, and that she was relieved to be finished with so solemn an occasion.

She did not add the question that stayed with her long after the letter was sealed: who had Minna been before she was Elizabeth's mother?