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door. Billy Bolt , Tigg mouthed, and Lizzie swept around the end of the bed to join him at the door, beckoning to Maggie.
    “I’ll just close up and meet you in the gallery,” she whispered. “I want to see the top floor, too.” Maybe paintings of disgraced daughters would be relegated to the servants’ rooms.
    Tigg and Lizzie vanished, the polished floors creaking a little as they beat a hasty retreat down the corridor.
    A board creaked under Maggie’s foot, too, as she stepped on it—a board between the closet and the bed with its cheerful flowered spread. It actually gave beneath her slipper. In her experience, only one kind of board did that: the kind that hid things a girl didn’t want other people to see.
    She knelt next to it and with quick fingers, she pressed and pried—and there it was. A pinhole. Clever Catherine. A board that tilted up could be discovered by anyone who stepped upon it the right way. But to discover a pinhole required powers of observation, and also a hairpin. She removed one of hers and bent up the tip, then inserted it in the tiny hole. With one quick tug, the board came up.
    Empty.
    Bother.
    Maggie leaned down, patting the dimensions of the dusty compartment, then reached further in. Still nothing. She changed position and tried in the other direction. At the very end of the compartment, her fingers met something.
    Paper.
    It was all she could do to stretch that far, her nose practically on the floorboards. She pinched the paper between her forefinger and third finger, and pulled it out.
    A letter, fragile with age and folded tightly to create its own envelope, as though paper were precious and not to be wasted. Upon the front was the direction, a single word in a masculine script: Catherine.
    Maggie held it to her nose. Dust. Ink.
    And fainter than memory, a scent, as if the paper had been clasped to a girlish bosom and had retained something of its owner’s essence.
    Maggie recognized it at once. No wonder it had always been one of her favorites.
    Lilac.
    She had become very familiar with the language of flowers during Emilie’s consultations with Claire on the composition of the wedding bouquet.
    Lilac, for first love.

6
    May Day 1877
     
    My dearest C—
    It has been two nights since we met at the sawan and I believe you must have bewitched me, for I cannot leave off thinking about you.
    I do not wish any harm or trouble to come to you on my account, so my head in all prudence advises me to go home to G.P. and take up my father’s work, which would delight him. But my heart cannot see its way to such a sensible view. It cannot see anything at all but your lovely face in the moonlight, and your eyes full of stars.
    Boscawen Trevithick tells me he can offer me employment as a stoker on the great steam engine at Wheal Porth. As long as I do not have to be a tin miner, I will accept anything in order to stay in the parish.
    Dare I hope you will be glad of this news? And if I should wander upon the strand, might a chance meeting occur again?
    I believe I am—
    Yours,
    K.
     
    “I cannot see that this course is a wise one.”
    Maggie jumped at the disembodied voice and came back to herself, the letter fluttering from her hand. She knelt to pick it up, and as she did, slipped the board that had concealed it all these years back into place.
    Who had spoken?
    “Have you had no sleep at all, Demelza? I cannot see that you have a choice in the matter,” Grandfather said on the other side of the wall. His voice was querulous, as though he had just awakened. “If you have agreed the visit is to be two weeks, then two weeks it shall be.”
    Goodness. The head of her grandparents’ bed must be right up against the adjoining wall. Had their whispers and creaking about awakened them?
    Maggie slipped the letter into her pocket to ponder later, and pressed her ear to the wall beside the dresser. The Lady always said that eavesdroppers never heard any good of themselves, and perhaps that was