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exciting tale she’d told was actually true.
    Judith was surprised, though, and as soon as the maid curled up on the seat opposite them and went back to sleep, the girl whispered to Katey, “Why didn’t she believe you?”
    “You don’t have to whisper,” Katey replied. “She’s a very sound sleeper. Shaking her is about the only way to get her to wake up. Shouting doesn’t even do it. But as to why she doubted me, well, that’s a bit of a story in itself.”
    “I’m not tired,” Judith said as if encouraging her to tell the story.
    Katey grinned at the girl. “Very well, where to start? I grew up in the most boring town you can imagine. It wasn’t even a town, just a small village. There were no shops other than the general store my family owned. There was no inn, no tavern. We had one seamstress, who worked out of her house, and one farmer who dabbled at carpentry and sold furniture out of his barn. Oh, and we had a butcher, though he wasn’t really a butcher, just a local hunter who kept the wildlife from roaming through the village.”
    Judith, wide-eyed with interest now, said, “Animals roamed your streets?”
    “Oh, yes. Nothing too dangerous, mind you, though a moose did tear down Mrs. Pellum’s fence one year. It probably would have left peaceably if she hadn’t tried to chase it off with her broom. But a village can’t be much smaller than Gardener. If someone needed a doctor, or a lawyer, they headed down the road to the town of Danbury twenty miles away. No new families ever moved to our village, and children left as soon as they were old enough to do so.”
    “Is that what you did?” Judith asked. “Left like the other children?”
    “Not as soon as I would have liked to. My mother was there, you see, and it never occurred to me to leave without her. She had no one but me after my father died. Well, she did, but her family had disowned her, so they didn’t count as family anymore.”
    “Why’d they do that?”
    Katey shrugged. “To hear her tell it, they were wealthy aristocrats and very concerned with social classes. They refused to let her marry my father simply because he was an American. Well, possibly because he was a merchant, too. ‘In trade’ was how my mother put it. They apparently objected to that as well.”
    Judith wasn’t surprised. “It’s a kind of snobbery that’s common among the gentry. Many of them look down on anyone in trade.”
    “Do they? Well, that sounds awfully narrow-minded to me. If my father hadn’t been a store owner, he never would have gone to England in the first place, wouldn’t have met my mother, and can you imagine, I never would have been born!”
    Judith gave her a look that said clearly, Please don’t talk to me like I’m a child . Katey almost burst out laughing. The little girl did really seem years beyond her age.
    “He came here to open a shop?” Judith asked next.
    “No, I doubt that ever occurred to him. You see, at home he had all the suppliers he needed for his store from the nearby town of Danbury, but he didn’t really sell anything interesting, just necessities and produce from the local farmers. He came here to England to see if he could find something more exotic to sell and found my mother instead. So she eloped with him, burned her bridges you could say, and she never saw her English family again.”
    “I thought I recognized your accent.” Judith grinned. “I have American relatives now m’self. But why didn’t your mother come home to England after your father died?”
    Katey sighed to herself. It’s what she had wanted her mother to do, and she’d broached the subject at least once a year for the last twelve years since her father had died, but Adeline Tyler despised her family for turning their backs on her, and she flatly refused to ever set foot in England again. Besides, she had taken over the running of the store and actually enjoyed the work. It was like a further slap in the face to the Millards,