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Benjamin was just here,” she
said. “We should invite him to the picnic.”
    Emma had just slipped into the room
and she took her seat.
    “Are we inviting Sir Frank and Lady
Ramsey?” she asked her mother.
    “Maybe we shouldn’t if you keep
making these outlandish and unladylike comments.”
    Amy wondered what Emma had said
this time that her mother felt was unladylike. Of course, her mother regarded
most everything that Emma said or did as unladylike. Emma and Lady Sibbridge
looked at this world from two entirely different and incompatible points of
view. Her mother almost immediately satisfied Amy’s curiosity.
    “Lord and Lady Ramsey were leaving.
They were in great haste to get back to London before dark. Dear Estella is so
afraid of the highwaymen that have plagued the London Road and other highways
of late. I don’t blame her one bit. These modern highwaymen aren’t like the
ones when I was young. They are so violent today. They think nothing of
assaulting their victims, even killing them. Quite unlike what they used to be.
Once, when your father and I were young we were confronted by a highwayman on
the Dover Road, and he was actually quite charming. He did take your father’s
medallion... And he did take my necklace, but he apologized profusely.”
    Amy glanced over at her father. He
seemed to be shaking his head as if he didn’t quite agree, but she couldn’t be
sure. There was no way of telling if he even understood what her mother was
saying.
    “Anyway,” her mother continued,
“just as they were leaving, what did Emma blurt out but that she wanted a
telescope and her father had consented to buying her one. Heaven knows that
your dear father can be led to consent to anything right now, but if he was his
old self I cannot believe he would ever consent to such a thing. It is
unnatural for a girl to be interested in such things.”
    Amy glanced over at Emma and feared
her sister was on the point of an act of aggression, at least a vocal one, so
she decided she better intervene.
    “I was out riding and encountered
Sir Benjamin. He seemed unsure if the old mill was on his property or not.
Doesn’t his property extend over to the London Road?”
    “I don’t know, dear,” Lady
Sibbridge said in a rare moment of thoughtfulness. And then moving the boundary
lines of the subject, “I remember his grandfather. And his father too. The boys
used to live up here all the time until they went off to school. After school,
Lord Caradoc, Sir Benjamin’s father, seldom came up here after he inherited the
title and the estate. And I’ve never seen Sir Benjamin’s uncle since he was a
boy. Lord Caradoc was involved in government affairs and then connected to a
trading company in India. I heard he has made a fortune.”
    Amy decided she had just
experienced her mother’s one lucid moment for this month between her many
flustered spells, although she had a great suspicion that her mother’s
flustered spells were not entirely genuine.
    “Mother,” asked Amy, “you will
invite Sir Benjamin to the picnic?”
    “Yes of course dear, whenever I can
find Mrs. Parkhurst. I need her help in making out the invitations.”
    Amy looked over at Emma, who shrank
down in her chair.
    “Would you excuse me?” Amy asked
her mother. “I will be right back.”
    Her mother didn’t seem to notice
the question but looked distracted over the matter of the invitations and whom
she should invite.
    Mrs. Parkhurst had not come to
lunch. This was not of itself unusual, but combined with her apparent
mysterious disappearance it called for an investigation, so Amy decided to go
in search of the missing governess.
    The first place she looked was in
the room where Emma took her lessons. The room was empty. Amy entered it and
looked around. As she was about to leave she thought she heard something, so
she stopped and listened. Muffled noises were coming from the cupboard where
the school supplies were stored.
    She went over to the