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“She may, I grant, be enjoying a change of scenery. She may—or may not—be enjoying a wider cast of characters. But she most decidedly is not having a holiday. If she were, she’d be down here with us now.”

Archie looked aghast. “I should have thought. I will go sit with Mother so she can come down.”

“I can sit with your mother tomorrow,” Olive said. “We can divide the time.”

“A fine idea,” Archie said. “I shall go up right now and relieve Miss Brown.”

“Does anyone know what happened with Miss Brown’s family?” Simon asked. He hadn’t thought he would solve the Miss Brown problem so immediately and so thoroughly, and he wanted to tap into the collective knowledge of the group before the lady herself reappeared.

Everyone swung around to look at him, including Archie, who had risen from his seat but not yet left.

Simon added, “She mentioned in passing that she’d been living with her sister before she came to serve as companion to your mother.”

“You know, I’m not entirely certain,” Archie said. “My mother and Miss Brown’s mother were childhood friends. The Clarks—Clark was Miss Brown’s mother’s maiden name—lived in a town not far from Mollybrook, and I gather they used to see each other quite a lot in the summers, at dances and the like. I am afraid I lose track of the story at that point. Mother did used to tut about the circumstances the Brown sisters had found themselves in, but I am ashamed to admit that I never took care to find out the details.”

“Your father had recently died,” Effie said placatingly. “You were juggling a great deal, both in terms of the estate and of his more personal … legacy. I would imagine your mother asked you to engage Miss Brown’s services and you didn’t feel the need to delve into the particulars.”

“But oughtn’t I to have at some point subsequently?” Archie asked. “As my mother deteriorated, oughtn’t I to have learned more about the woman taking care of her so loyally?”

“I can assist.” Everyone swung their attention to Olive. “Why are you all looking at me like that?” She affected a wide-eyed expression of innocence. “Can I help it if people tell me things?”

Simon suppressed a smile. He had warmed to Olive over the past year or so. She conveyed a kind of blithe world-weariness he used to think shallow, but he was increasingly convinced he had been mistaken. He must have been—witness how close Olive and Effie were, and Effie was an excellent judge of character.

“After all that buildup,” Olive said, “I don’t think it’s that dramatic a tale—or a particularly unusual one, alas. Father gambles away the family fortune. Tries to hide it. Is discovered, and by that time owes a terrible sum to some terrible men. Tale as old as time.”

“We are talking of Jedidiah Brown, are we not?” Effie asked. “Did he not die under mysterious circumstances? I seem to remember hearing about it and thinking it terribly dramatic.”

“Yes,” Olive said. “It was never clear if he died by his own hand or fell victim to the aforementioned terrible men. Miss Brown’s sister married an older man, and Miss Brown went to live with them.” She shrugged. “And from there, I suppose, she came here. Miss Brown’s sister died, too, at some point, though under what circumstances, I don’t know.”

“Scarlet fever,” Simon supplied, though he regretted it when everyone turned to him. “She mentioned it in passing.” That was the second time he’d claimed Miss Brown had mentioned something to him in passing. He needed to be careful; he was making it seem as if he and Miss Brown were doing an awful lot of … passing.

He considered the downfall of the Brown family. Such a tragedy, the way the careless actions of one man could ripple through generations. Simon stewarded his estate with great vigilance. He wouldn’t call himself cheap so much as careful. He avoided extravagance, out of a generalized sense of the importance of conservation, but he took care of what—and who—needed looking after. He couldn’t imagine having a child and then gambling that child’s future away. Of course, he couldn’t imagine having a child and ignoring it utterly, either.

He couldn’t imagine having a child at all.

Although … what was he doing now with all his couldn’t imagines but a sort of imagining?

It took a while for Miss Brown to appear after Archie left. Simon had begun to think she wasn’t coming. By the time she arrived, the group had, as with the previous night, split into smaller conclaves. Simon was, again, reading by himself in a corner.

Everyone greeted Miss Brown. She was invited to play cards with Olive and Clementine, but she protested that she didn’t know how.

Effie said, “Miss Brown, perhaps you could settle a disagreement my wife and I are having regarding whether publishing a recurring feature entitled ‘Secrets of a Dressmaker’ in our magazine is tawdry and beneath us or thrilling and sure to be lucrative.”

Poor Miss Brown.

Simon stood. “Or, Miss Brown, you could join me in a discussion of literature.” He held up her book.

“I think I shall allow myself to be rescued by Lord Marsden,” she said with a laugh, and just like that, she was crossing to his corner of the room and settling herself on one end of a small settee that was placed perpendicular to his chair.

“What kind of pen is that?” she asked, nodding at the writing instrument he’d left on the side table between them.

“The nib is punched out of a thin sheet of steel. It doesn’t require sharpening as does a quill. This one is made by hand by a blacksmith near Galecroft, my country estate.” He handed it to her.

She turned it over in her palm. “How extraordinary.”

“I have heard tell of a factory in Birmingham beginning to produce them on an industrial scale,” he said.

“Are we on the verge of a revolution in writing instruments?” She smiled as she handed it back.