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her English relatives, that she was now in trade herself. Not that her family ever knew that, since she didn’t communicate with any of them, but she seemed to silently gloat about it.
    To the curious child sitting next to her, Katey said, “When my mother’s family disowned her, she more or less disowned them, too. And I think she despised England because of it.”
    Judith nodded. “But what’s all that got to do with your maid doubting what you told her?”
    Katey chuckled. She’d thought the girl had forgotten about that, but since she hadn’t, Katey asked her, “Have you ever been so bored because one day runs into the next, giving you no memories worth recalling?”
    “Never,” Judith replied instantly.
    “Then you’ve been very lucky, because that’s what my life was like growing up in Gardener. And I wasn’t the only one who woke up each day with nothing to look forward to. The villagers who were left were all old, and they all led uneventful lives. They didn’t seem to mind, but if something exciting happened, they certainly enjoyed hearing about it. So every once in a while I gave them something exciting to hear about.”
    “You lied to them?”
    Katey blinked. The child wasn’t only beautiful, she was intelligent and too perceptive by half. And while Katey would never dream of discussing such things about herself with a stranger, she felt an unusual kinship with the girl, probably because they had shared Katey’s first real adventure on her grand tour.
    “Goodness, I never thought of it as lying. I merely created minor fabrications, embellishments, really, about things I happened to witness. For instance, when I noticed Mrs. Cartley’s cat on top of her roof next door, it had seemed like the cat was stuck up there, afraid to come down. Now I love animals, and I wasn’t about to leave it up there. And I knew the Cartleys weren’t home because they’d left to visit their daughter in Danbury that morning and wouldn’t be back for several more hours. So I went over and climbed Mrs. Cartley’s rose trellis to get up on their roof, but by the time I actually got up there, the cat was gone!”
    “It got up the nerve to jump down?”
    “No.” Katey chuckled. “It got down the same way it climbed up, with a ladder! I forgot that Mr. Cartley had been repairing his roof earlier that week. He’d left his ladder leaning against the back of their house. The excitement was over, and very bland excitement at that. So instead of mentioning that to Mrs. Cartley later, I told her that her cat had got up on our roof, which was much higher, our house being two stories, and that my maid risked life and limb to climb up the old oak tree next to our house to save it. Grace ended up being the heroine for the month, which she didn’t mind one bit, and it gave everyone something to talk about instead of the weather.”
    “That sounds like my cousin Derek claiming the fish he caught this summer was two feet long, but his wife told us later it was only six inches. It was more interesting hearing that it was a big fish, but it was certainly funny when we found out it wasn’t even big enough to keep. So that’s the kind of tales you tell?”
    “Similar—but not exactly. You see, I was about your age when I started getting ‘creative’ sometimes in describing what I saw and did. I’d had a bad disappointment that year. I thought I’d be going to school in Danbury, where I could finally meet some other children my age, even if it did mean two long rides each day on my pony, there and back. But an old professor retired to Gardener the year before, and my mother managed to talk him into tutoring me instead. So when I saw a stranger stealing tomatoes from my mother’s garden out back while I was helping her roll out biscuits for dinner, I merely watched, figuring if he was hungry enough to steal them he was welcome to them. But when she came back in the kitchen, I thought she might blame me for the missing