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ought. I never missed her that night because I’d gone to bed so early with a terrible headache. Then, when I found that dreadful note next day, I had such fearful palpitations and was so ill I couldn’t think at all, and with James away... Well, one cannot trust the servants, because they will talk and the scandal would kill me, I know it. So I kept to my room. But who could have imagined she would do such a shameful thing? Such a good, biddable girl she has always been.”
    “Never thought she had the pluck,” said Lord Browdie, half to himself. “Anyhow, where’s the scandal in it?” he asked his hostess. “Ain’t no fine Society hereabouts to be shocked. Just let on she’s sick.”
    “But the servants –”
    “Will keep their tongues in their heads if they know what’s good for them. I’ll talk to them,” Lord Browdie assured her as he dragged his gangly body up from the chair.
    “You are too kind. You make me quite ashamed that I did not confide this trouble to you immediately –”
    ‘Yes, yes. Just calm yourself, ma’am. Important to behave as though nothing’s happened out of the ordinary.”
    “But surely James must be told—”
    “No sense interrupting his bridal trip. By the time he’s back we’ll have Cathy home safe and sound, and no one the wiser.” He had no difficulty speaking with more confidence than he felt. Lord Browdie was accustomed to swagger.
    Miss Deborah sighed. “It is such a relief to have a man take charge. I cannot tell you how beset I’ve been, not knowing where to turn or what to do. Why, I’m frightened half to death each time the post is delivered, not knowing what news it will bring—though she did say she would be perfectly safe. But will not her friends wonder when she doesn’t answer their letters?”
    As far as Lord Browdie knew, Catherine hadn’t any friends. He pointed this out to his hostess.
    In response, and with much fussing and flustering, the lady drew out a letter from her workbasket. “It’s from Ireland,” she explained, handing it to Lord Browdie. “I did not like to leave it lying about, because the servants—” She gasped as he tore the letter open. “Oh, my—I don’t think— it is hers, after all.”
    He ignored her twittering as he scanned the fine, precise handwriting. Then he folded the letter and stuffed it into the tail pocket of his coat. “Good enough,” he said. “Won’t be no wild goose chase after all. She’s gone to London.”
    “Dear heaven!” The spinster sank back in her seat, fumbling for her smelling salts.
    “Now, now, don’t fuss yourself,” Lord Browdie said irritably. “There’s only the one place she can go, so there’ll be no trouble finding her. No trouble at all.”
    Miss Collingwood’s Academy had been squeezed into a tidy corner of a neighbourhood best described as shabbily genteel. Miss Collingwood catered to bourgeois families that did not yet aspire to the glory of housing governesses, but did wish to improve their daughters’ chances of upward mobility by means of a not-too-taxing course of education. While the training would not make a butcher’s daughter a lady, it might subdue the more blatant signs of her origins.
    The streets the hackney coach now traversed bespoke an entirely different social level. Here were trees enclosed in tidy squares upon which the sparkling windows of elegant townhouses bent their complacent gazes. These streets were wider, cleaner, and a good deal quieter, their peace broken only by the rumble of elegant carriages and the clip-clop of high-stepping thoroughbreds. A gentleman stood at one doorway drawing on his gloves as his tiger soothed the restless, high-strung horses impatiently waiting. On the sidewalk, a neatly dressed female servant hastened along, basket in hand.
    Catherine surveyed the passing vista with confusion at first, then growing anxiety as her companion replied that, yes, they had long since left the City proper and were now in Mayfair. She