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at her, wide-eyed. She topped up their pottery cups. “You lived in a manor house?”
    “What? Oh, Blytheby Manor. Yes, but not as you think. My father was the librarian there.”
    “How the ’eck did you come to be ’ere? A manor house. Only think on it!”
    Prudence did, too often. She thought of the suite of rooms in which her family had lived, and the estate on which she’d been free to wander. She remembered the feeling of belonging there, almost as if part of Sir Joshua Jenkin’s family, and her comfortable acquaintance with the daughters of nearby families. She’d seen herself as part of their society.
    After all, though she’d not been born at Blytheby, she’d known no other home. Her parents had moved there when she was two years old. When Sir Joshua had gambled away his money and shot himself, and her family had had to leave Blytheby with only days’ notice, it had felt like being cast out of paradise.
    She couldn’t bear to relive all that, however.
    “How did I come to be here?” she asked. “A series of misfortunes.”
    “How old were ye when this all ’appened?”
    Disaster hadn’t been completed in an instant, but Prudence said, “Fifteen.”
    Old enough to glimpse a happy future but not old enough to have embarked on the path. Sir Joshua had promised to hold a party for her when she reached sixteen. Not a ball, of course, but there would be dancing. He’d arranged dancing lessons for her. . ..
    She drank some more cordial, swallowing some tears.
    Hetty said, “It must be hard to live so grand and ’ave it all taken away. Easier to be where you’re born to.”
    Prudence wasn’t convinced that being born to White Rose Yard was an enviable fate, but Hetty had a point. Prudence didn’t envy the great of the land—the dukes and earls with their mansions and vast estates. That wasn’t her place to be any more than Hetty’s would be Blytheby Manor. She simply wanted, needed, to return to her rightful level of society, comfortably one of the middling sort, as her parents had been. If she were a man, like Aaron, she could achieve that through the right employment, but for a woman it must be marriage. The only employment open to her would be the genteel servitude of governess or companion, with no time or place to call her own.
    “This is no life for you,” Hetty stated. “So what’re ye going to do?”
    Prudence sighed and stood. “Wash my blankets, maybe.”
    “I don’t mean that! You don’t want t’live your life’ere and it’s not right that you do. So what’re ye going to do about it?”
    “There’s nothing I can do.”
    “There’s always summat. Why not go to Darlington and talk to your brother face-to-face? There’s many a man who’ll slide by what’s right until brought face-to-face with it.”
    Prudence remembered thinking the same thing.
    “It’s sixteen miles. I can’t afford the coach fare.”
    Hetty screwed her face up over this. “Will’s uncle Frank drives a cart up there and back three times a week. He’d take ye along for a couple of pence.”
    “I couldn’t. . ..”
    What if Aaron rebuffed her? She wasn’t sure she could survive such heartlessness, such obliteration of hope.
    But she suddenly remembered the Burgoyne man rushing at her attackers. Then later, the way he’d swiftly opened the door to her house and pushed her in, thus avoiding their being caught whispering together in the street.
    Fearlessness.
    Prompt action.
    Attack.
    Her innards quivered, and it was probably the cordial speaking, but she said, “I’ll do it, then. I’ll go to Darlington. I will have my justice.”
    Hetty grinned and toasted her. “That’s the way of it, Pru. You go and tell ’im wot’s wot.”

Chapter 3
    Darlington
     
    I t rained on the way to Darlington. Not heavily, but enough to dampen Prudence’s spirits and her clothes. Frank Jobson gave her some sacks to cover herself, but rain spotted the skirt of her blue gown.
    Prudence had thought carefully