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ma’am,” she whispered. “That’s Miss Becky Whitby.”
    “Whitby?” The old lady flicked the songstress a skeptical glance. “I never heard of anyone called Whitby. Where do her people come from?”
    “She hasn’t any people, ma’am.” Payton had to lean close to the old woman’s shoulder in order for her whispered responses to be heard. “Everyone in her family is dead.”
    “All dead?” The old woman raised her fine silver eyebrows. “How convenient. I expected as much. Well, marry in haste, repent at leisure, I always say. Go on. You seem to know all about it. Where did he meet her?”
    Payton did know all about it, much to her displeasure. She would have much preferred to have known nothing about the matter at all. It had occurred to her shortly after Ross’s wedding that her other brothers, and even their friends, might one day marry, as well. But it had never entered her mind that the next wedding she’d attend would be Connor Drake’s. Even thinking about it now caused an uncomfortable knot in her stomach that she was very much afraid might never, ever go away. At least, it hadn’t gone away, not even for a few minutes, since she’d first heard about the impending nuptials between Captain Drake and Miss Whitby. She’d even been to see the ship surgeon about it, and he, baffled, had declared the discomfort to have no physical cause that he could find. Wasn’t possible there might be an emotional cause?
    But Payton had indignantly denied any such possibility, and put it down to a bad batch of oysters she’d consumed in Havana. She would continue to do so too until the day she died.
    “We were in London,” Payton explained, keeping her voice low enough so that she would not be the recipient of any more disapproving stares from her sister-in-law. “We’d just got back from the West Indies run. Drake had—I mean, Captain Drake—had learned upon our docking that his brother had died, and he was supposed to meet some solicitors at an office near Downing Street. Well, no one liked for him to go alone, because it was such a sad thing, even though he hadn’t liked his brother much. So we all up-anchored and went with him, and as we were coming out again from the solicitors’ offices, we heard some screaming, and saw that there was a great row outside this inn across the street. A woman—Miss Whitby, as turned out—was being shanghaied by some galley rats, and so of course we went to help her. I bashed a fellow flat on the head with a bagatelle cue—”
    “I beg your pardon?” The old woman raised her lorgnette to get a better look at Payton.
    “Well, there happened to be a bagatelle table in the inn—”
    “Of course,” the old lady said. “A bagatelle cue. How stupid of me. Do go on.”
    “Well, in any case, we managed to drive the galley rats away—well, except for that one Hudson killed—and then we took Miss Whitby inside, because she was fainting. When we’d revived her, she told us the men had stolen her reticule, which contained all the money she had in the world, because she’s an orphan and hasn’t any family.”
    The old woman stared down at Payton with an inscrutable expression on her face. Her eyes, behind the lenses of the lorgnette, were a very bright blue, and seemed strangely familiar to Payton, though she couldn’t, for the life of her, think why.
    “You,” the woman said, finally, “must be the Dixon girl, then.”
    “Payton Dixon, ma’am,” Payton said, extending her right hand amiably. “How d’you do?”
    “Payton?” the woman echoed. “What kind of name is that?”
    Used to the question, Payton replied, “The name my father gave me. He called me after Admiral Payton, ma’am. All of my brothers and I are named for seafaring explorers or naval heroes. Ross is named for my father’s good friend Captain James Ross, who was killed by hostile natives whilst he was looking for the Northwest Passage, and Hudson for Henry Hudson, who—”
    “I ought