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seen the acclaimed actor in a play. She gleaned everything she knew from reading the papers and from what her aunt occasionally revealed about her one short season there.
    “I’ll start, shall I?” She withdrew another, small battered book from her basket and opened it in the middle.
    “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?” Harriet stood in order to speak more easily. “It is the east and Juliet is the sun!” She paced amongst the children as they sewed.
    “That I might touch that cheek.” Harriet blinked and backed away from Janey, who looked at her, spellbound. Harriet dropped her outstretched hand to her side and plumped back down on her stool. She coughed, as the children stared at her open-mouthed, their lace forgotten on their laps.
    A hot flush coursed up her neck. Harriet dropped the small book onto her lap and rummaged in her bag.
    “Coo!” uttered the little boy. “I thought you were a man then.”
    “So did I,” said Janey’s sister. “I thought you were going to kiss Janey!”
    The laughter broke Harriet’s embarrassment.
    “I thought so too,” Janey said quietly. “If only there was a man to speak like that about me.” She sighed and bent back over her work.
    Harriet agreed silently. She had never experienced love, not in the way that Shakespeare described. She knew her parents had loved each other. Her breath caught as it always did when she remembered the accident that had taken Mother and Father away. She had been only six, but the memory of being in the carriage, her father smoking a cheroot, and her mother gently telling her a story was still vivid. And then the crash, the carriage tipping on its side. Her father crushed as the carriage crumpled, and her mother silenced forever by a jutting-out spar.
    Sitting up straight, Harriet pushed the Shakespeare book roughly into her bag. Perhaps Lord Stanton spoke like that in such a way to his ladies. She doubted it. Even sat on the floor after she had tripped him up she had seen that he was no longer a lean youth; now he was powerful, muscular and fierce . She shuddered. It was hard to imagine him needing to woo a lady. She wrinkled her nose. And certainly not a mere village school miss such as her. Lord Stanton did not seem to be the easy James that he had once been. That look on his face when she had suggested she might have been able to help him… she had shriveled inside.
    Harriet sighed and hugged her bag. “I suppose I had better take the lace to Edgar’s.”
    Janey looked up from the lace on her lap. “It’s alright, Harriet. We should have done it in the first place.”
    Harriet groaned. “It’s no use. Someone in Ottery will have told him that I took the lace there to sell. It’s my fault. I should be the one to do it.” Putting up her hands to quell any more protestation, Harriet bent to pick up her bag. “Remember everyone, the rehearsal at the school tomorrow. It’s the grand attack scene so I need all available hands to help me make the props beforehand.”
    The excited response carried her on her way all the way back home and into the stable where Isabelle cropped her hay patiently in the dim light. Pulling the reluctant pony onto the track next to the cottage garden, Harriet hitched the cart to Isabelle’s harness and heaved the deceptively light bale of lace from the cottage onto its wooden boards. Heart in mouth, she clambered onto the seat and set the pony off down the hill in the direction of the sea.
    Edgar’s shop was set in a low lying cottage, the last on the lane before it sloped down towards the beach. Leaving Isabelle outside, Harriet peered in through the uneven glass of the bay window, her view distorted. She really did not want to go in and she couldn’t see Edgar; only the corpulent bulk of a large lady leaning across the marble topped counter was visible.
    Harriet delayed her entrance, moving Isabelle and the cart so that they were not blocking the lane. She told herself firmly that it