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"I hope it may mean something to you as well," Elizabeth answered.

"Naturally," Adelheid said. "We have been eager to hear all you can tell us of your mother."

Lady Matlock watched the exchange with the alert courtesy of a woman accustomed to drawing rooms in which no one said quite everything she thought. Nothing in Adelheid's manner was openly offensive. Yet the questions came sooner than the countess had expected, and Elizabeth had scarcely recovered from her introduction.

"There will be time for stories," Lady Matlock said. "Our guests have travelled a very great distance."

The gathering proceeded to tea. Saye came in from an appointment with his father's steward, and Richard, who had vowed to be properly solemn, broke that vow almost immediately by remarking that the household would now require another chair large enough for its collection of protective uncles.

"He considers himself among that number," Elizabeth explained to Albrecht.

"I am older than you," Richard said. "That has always been sufficient evidence of my authority."

"It has proved evidence of remarkably little," Saye returned.

Albrecht smiled, grateful for the diversion. Adelheid watched Elizabeth answer Richard's teasing with ease. The girl possessed a confidence no dependent orphan ought to have, Adelheid thought uneasily; she spoke as though she had nothing to fear from these people. Perhaps they had made her so secure that she would dare to repeat anything her mother had told her.

When the visitors withdrew to their lodging, Albrecht remained at the doorway a moment longer than etiquette required.

"You are not obliged to prove yourself to me every hour," he told Elizabeth. "I have come to learn who you are, not to demand that you become someone else."

"Thank you, Uncle," she said.

He looked as if she had offered him the world.

Three days later he returned without Adelheid, who complained of a headache and elected to rest. Elizabeth brought her mother's letters and a small box of keepsakes into the morning room. Lady Matlock had stationed herself with a book near the window, close enough to provide company and far enough to allow private feeling its proper dignity.

Albrecht studied Henry's handwriting. "He wrote of her with affection," he said. "Did he always make you laugh?"

"Papa? Constantly. Mama pretended he was shocking, but she laughed before I did. He once announced that he had married the most formidable woman in Europe because she corrected his table manners in three languages."

Albrecht lowered his head and laughed, not quietly. "That sounds precisely like Minna. She corrected Friedrich's French whenever she wished to annoy him. He claimed that as the eldest he ought to be exempt from instruction by his younger sister."

"Did she obey him?"

"Never where it could be avoided."

He showed Elizabeth a small watercolor of a garden at Falkenried. In it a pale stone balustrade bordered a terrace, with trees rising beyond. She studied the image, struck by the thought that her mother had known every turn of those paths.

"Is this where she played?" she asked in English for Lady Matlock's benefit.

"Among other places," Albrecht answered in English as well. "There was an eastern meadow where our father forbade us to race. Minna considered a prohibition an argument requiring immediate contradiction. Friedrich took his responsibilities seriously even then. He would tell us we must behave, and afterward invent a reason to accompany us so that no servant should be blamed for failing to prevent our escape."

"You sound very like Richard," Lady Matlock said.

"Then your household must have enjoyed considerable excitement," Albrecht replied.

As Lady Matlock became occupied with Saye at the other end of the room, Elizabeth and Albrecht returned quietly to German. Elizabeth asked about her grandmother, Princess Dorothea. Albrecht told her of a gentle woman with a strong will, skilled at music and devoted to her children. The portrait in the locket had been painted when Dorothea was younger. She died before Minna disappeared, and the gift had comforted her daughter through that first grief.

"Mama never knew whose face it was," Elizabeth said. "But she treated the locket as though she could not bear to lose it."

"She must have remembered love even when she could not remember the name of the person who gave it," Albrecht answered.

During this visit Albrecht had also brought a small packet tied with faded blue ribbon. He held it through much of the afternoon, touching the edge as though he had not yet decided whether he could bear to open it. When at last Elizabeth noticed, he looked faintly embarrassed.

"I carried these across the sea," he said in German. "I had thought I should know the proper moment."

Inside lay a tiny drawing of a dog, a pressed flower, and a scrap of paper covered with a child's uneven handwriting. Elizabeth smiled at the dog, whose legs seemed all the wrong length. Albrecht explained that Friedrich had drawn it for Minna and had insisted it was the finest hound in Mecklenburg. Minna had accused him of drawing a sheep.