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Only her hair and eyes resembled Mitchel's. Her mouth curved softer, and her chin lacked his sharp angles. Just yesterday, she plucked two gray hairs from her right temple. Though vanity did not drive her, she refused to accept gray hair just yet.
The knocker clapped again.
“Coming,” she called, hurrying toward the foyer.
A happy smile of anticipation arching her mouth at seeing one of her dearest friends, Roxina swiftly opened the door. Her gaze immediately dropped to the young boy standing there.
The lad, barely ten years old, grinned up at her with an impish gleam in his eye, his expression alight with mischief. Tilted at a cocky angle, his hat cast a shadow over his freckled face. His nut-brown, moth-eaten wool coat sagged on his narrow frame, the sleeves swallowing his thin wrists. Scuffed and battered, his boots had endured too many miles and too little care.
“Good afternoon, Miss Danforth.” He extended a crumpled envelope toward her. “You have another letter.”
TWO
In the cottage entry
A half-dozen startled seconds later
“Frankie?” Roxina muttered stupidly.
Assuredly not who she had expected to see when she opened the door.
Gripping the envelope tightly with dirt-smudged fingers, he dipped his head and bent into a bow that would have made a duke proud.
Another letter?
More to the point, likely more anonymous money.
Blast Aubriella Matherfield for being as obstinate as I am.
Roxina had repeatedly asked her friend not to keep sending her funds, and Aubriella adamantly denied doing so. Nevertheless, another envelope had arrived, and Roxina would bet her new sunny gown, it contained money, just as the others had.
A gentle breeze ruffled the boy’s Irish-black hair lying across his forehead.
Despite her discomfit, Roxina could not deny that springtime in Blackheath possessed a particular charm. The cobbled streets, still damp from an earlier shower, glistened beneath the midday sun. Pale pink petals from the flowering cherry trees drifted lazily in the breeze, gathering in delicate drifts along the road’s edge.
London had never held this bucolic appeal.
Pedestrians bustled about—gentlemen in well-tailored greatcoats and ladies in colorful gowns and bonnets, their gloved hands lifting their skirts slightly to avoid the uneven stones. A fishmonger pushed his cart past, calling out his wares, while a pair of nursemaids corralled their young charges away from the muddied gutters.
Its thatched roof darkened by age and damp, Roxina’s cottage—a modest but sturdy affair of whitewashed brick—sat nestled between two larger homes. Ivy climbed one side, creeping toward the upper windows, while a profusion of daffodils, hyacinths, jonquils, and tulips, remnants of Miss Penford’s once-pristine garden, brightened the small front patch of earth. A wrought-iron gate needing paint and slightly rusted at the hinges marked the entrance to the narrow stone path leading to the Brunswick green door.
Perhaps ten or eleven years old, Frankie thrust the wrinkled, stained rectangle toward her.
The sixth since Roxina came to live in Blackheath.
“Is there…?” she began.
He shook his head in anticipation of her next question. “Nay, there isn’t a return address.”
Of course not.
There never had been.
Mrs. Eunice Beale, the ever-watchful busybody two cottages down and across Montpelier Row, stepped onto her stoop, her shrewd eyes narrowing at the sight of the exchange.
The plump woman, rigid with judgment, had a mouth perpetually pursed tighter than a goose’s hind end. She twisted her graying blonde hair into an unyielding bun, not a single strand daring to stray. Her four temperamental tabbies lounged in the cottage windows, flicking their tails in disapproval.
She glared at Frankie and shook a finger toward him. “You there, lad. Any correspondence for me today?”
