Archive of Our Own

So it happened that Helen Walker was going to Mayfair with her itchiest, cleanest petticoat against her skin, hoping against hope to find something useful to do. Her aunt, an enterprising lady with three or four vicars at her beck and call, had found a new place for her, or at least the opportunity for one. Lady Trousdale of Brookings Park, Herefordshire, was looking for a lady’s companion for her only daughter, “a young woman of good breeding, sufficient education, and fine manners.” Helen had all three, if you squinted. 

“Lady Araminta Talbot,” Helen’s aunt had read out. “Her brother is the Earl of Trousdale. You are not acquainted, I presume.”

Helen had turned away swiftly to hide her scowl. “No, ma’am,” she said. She was unlikely to have met anyone named Araminta, since she did not spend her time frequenting Mayfair ballrooms or living inside Sir Walter Scott novels. “I assume you’ve made inquiries. What is said of her at the Society?”

Helen’s aunt tsk ed, chiding her. “There is no impropriety or gossip to be had at the Charitable Society of War Widows, Helen, dear, and you ought to know better than to suggest otherwise.”

“I apologise, ma’am,” said Helen without much contrition. She darted a look at her out of the corner of her eye. “I suppose we won’t know anything about Lady Araminta until I call upon her mother to apply for the post.”

Her aunt put the blotting paper down. “Well not quite.” She lifted her teacup, her thumb curling over the rim at the handle to hide the chip. “She is quite crippled, you know, the girl. She was born healthy but took a fever as a child, and hasn’t walked since. She’s quite sickly, an invalid, and though she’s only twenty her mother has said she must have a lady’s companion. She was supposed to go to Tunbridge Wells, but it was determined that she would not be quite safe on her own without a companion or a relation.” 

Helen smiled into her own tea. “She must be very stupid or very pretty. Possibly both.”

“Helen!” 

“Is the hired companion to go to Tunbridge Wells, then? Am I to take the waters?”

“You ought,” said her aunt sagely, “to train your wicked tongue enough to secure the position in the first place.”

Helen didn’t know if she had any particular feelings about invalid earl’s daughters or about Tunbridge Wells. She did know that if she was going to take a position, she preferred companion work, and its sidelines, a great deal to other kinds of work available to a woman in her position. She was going to learn to make herself pleasant, and obliging, and utterly anodyne. Her future depended on it.

Thus she arrived at Talbot House, a tall, stern building on a street so fashionable that its street urchins all wore livery. Standing at the front entrance, she was terribly aware that her skirts were an inch too long, which had been giving her a tendency to step on them and trip. Her pelisse had previously belonged to her cousin Mary, and then there was the petticoat so itchy she thought it might make her bleed. Be ladylike , she advised herself, and then wondered: were lady’s companions intended to use the front entrance or the servant’s entrance? She didn’t know the answer and was afraid to find out, in case it was an omen of some kind. Be ladylike, and be agreeable, and meek, and the model of… Christ-like compassion.

Good bloody luck , she reflected to herself, and tucked her hands demurely behind her back just in time for the door to open. It was operated by a housekeeper with a face like a front door and a bust like Queen Victoria. Against her will, Helen felt a bit impressed. 

“Miss Helen Walker,” she said, bobbing her head politely, “Here to inquire for the position as lady’s companion.”

The housekeeper regarded her: the borrowed pelisse, the wind-battered hairstyle hastily performed while trying to iron her frock simultaneously. “Lady Trousdale is expecting you,” she said. She led Helen through to the receiving room: sugarplum-flavored, sticky-sweet with lace and bows. She was greeted by Lady Trousdale, in a frilly bonnet and wide, floating hips that suggested the fashions of the previous century. Her nose came to an infinitesimal point, and she was clutching a lace-edged handkerchief in one hand. 

“Miss Walker?” She said, voice querulous. “Do come in, if that is your name.”

Helen curtsied, resenting the gesture as she always did. “I am Miss Helen Walker, ma’am,” she said, eyes on the scalloped Persian rug. She wasn’t sure she had ever spoken to a Countess before, Dowager or otherwise, but her aunt had taught her to keep her gaze lowered when she met those of higher rank. 

“How do you do,” said the Dowager Countess, in a way that seemed to be entirely vowel. “You are here to inquire for a position as a companion to my daughter. You have been a companion before?”

It was at this point that Helen first spotted the daughter in question, who was sitting on a chaise just behind her mother, listening and alert, while the Countess continued the interview as if she were not there.

“Yes ma’am,” Helen said automatically. “To Mrs. Huntington of Grosvenor Square. She gave me a reference when she went to America with her husband.”

“Mrs. Huntington…” Helen couldn’t tell if Lady Trousdale was trying to recall the name, recoiling at the title Mrs., or some combination of the two. “Perhaps she occupied a slightly different social milieu .” 

“Hello,” Helen said to the seated figure. “Are you Lady Araminta?”

The Countess bristled at the interruption, her mouth falling open.

The young woman seated on the chaise lounge started to attention, as if she hadn’t expected to be spoken to. “Oh,” she said softly. “Well, yes. If you allow me a moment, I will be.” She reached for a sturdy cane, polished wood with a thick, practical brass handle. The tip supported her weight as she got to her feet. Once upright, her legs held her with the aid of the cane, knuckles white on the handle.

“Araminta!” whispered the Countess in concerned frustration.

“There is no need, my lady.” Helen raised a hand as if to stop her.

“I would not be so rude,” said Lady Araminta with a small, self-deprecating smile. She was a pretty girl of 18 or 20 with abundant, glossy dark hair, bundled into an intricate style by a skillful lady’s maid. She was physically quite small, and her face was so pale that looking closely revealed the impression of violet-colored veins close under the skin, but she did not seem like an invalid or a cripple, precisely. She seemed alert and canny and… shy, Helen thought. So aware of everything going on in a room or a conversation that it made her shy. 

Helen curtsied again. “Miss Helen Walker, my lady.” She darted a look between Lady Araminta and her mother. “Perhaps once the introductions have concluded, we may all sit down. Only your part remains.”

The girl blushed, but it wasn’t like the blushes Helen had known before—hot and blotchy like a rash or minor pox. This blush was delicate, just tinged pink, and highlighting the crest of her fine cheekbones. Golly, Helen thought , they even blush different up there in their rarefied air.

“I think you know my name,” Lady Araminta said. Her voice was a bit lower than Helen had expected from her spritely appearance. “But I—I would like to engage you as my companion, and I would like for you to call me Minta, as my family do.” She sat down then, as Helen had suggested, an elegant little slump back to the chaise, a balloon of silk skirts puffing up around her. Her feet in soft calfskin slippers, one of them twisted inward, were just visible under her hems. She gestured for Helen to sit, and Helen did, on the settee across from her. Her own skirts were a bit too modest for a similar puff.

“That is far too hasty, child,” protested the Countess. “We have not written to her references, we have not asked about her tastes and abilities, we have not inquired about her willingness to live in Herefordshire for much of the year.”

“I’m sorry, Mama, but since she will be my companion, I think I ought to operate at least a bit on instinct. And I wi—” She stumbled over her words briefly. “I feel that she would suit the job admirably. Miss Walker, do you object to living in Herefordshire much of the year? It is a beautiful estate, and you will have your own rooms, full run of the house if you like it, lots of books.” She looked at Helen with wide, dark eyes, her expression evaluating and hoping, all at once.

Helen wet her lips. “I do not object, my lady. It is a beautiful part of the country.” (She hazarded, because she had not gone further than Wolverhampton before.)

The Countess sniffed, but something in her countenance softened. “She is obliging, which recommends her,” she said to her daughter. She turned to Helen. “But being obliging is not enough to guarantee your success, Miss Walker. My daughter is an invalid. She cannot walk, as you see, and she requires the use of a Bath chair to move about the house and grounds. She has the help of two lady’s maids, of course, but still, her companion must push the chair, fetch her things, remember her tonics, read to her when her eyes are tired, help her in and out of carriages. It is a physically taxing role, to say nothing in the social responsibility. I am away from Brookings Park for long stretches, and you will be Lady Araminta’s primary society until she marries.” 

Helen took in this speech with her eyes low, and then she looked at the girl, whose eyes were fixed on some spot on the carpet beyond her feet. Her blush had returned, fiercer now, and her mouth had compressed into a tight line. For the first time in her life, Helen felt a pang of sympathy for a titled lady. She turned her eyes away so that Lady Araminta would not feel watched. “I am physically strong, my lady, and quite capable of helping Lady Araminta get about. I am fond of reading, to others and alone, and I will be happy to help Lady Araminta with anything she requires. I believe that Mrs. Huntington would say the same. I have her reference here.” She set down the envelope on the corner table; even Helen knew not to hand something directly to a lady. 

Araminta’s eyes flashed up to look at Helen, and then at her mother. She opened her mouth to say something, and then closed it again.

“Well, that is a comprehensive accounting,” the Countess said. “But I will read your reference.” she plucked the envelope Helen had sent. “You will hear from me shortly if it is satisfactory.”

Helen rose, as she surmised she was being dismissed. “I do look forward to it,” she said, with her final curtsey of the day, and somehow managed to mean both.

She received a letter a few weeks later informing her that Mrs. Huntington’s recommendation had been sufficient, and that she was invited to Herefordshire to accompany Lady Araminta for the summer, with an allowance of five guineas per month. 

➤➤➤

Minta had resolved not to be over-spirited about the new companion’s arrival. She herself had only arrived at Brookings House a few days hence, but already she was restless and anxious for company. When her lady’s maid, Molly, told her that the mail coach from London had arrived, she’d asked to be taken to the receiving hall at once, plucking at her hair. She was using the Bath chair, which disappointed her, but she had been limping and using her crutch too long yesterday in the garden, setting out her birdseed and sugar syrup. She’d had to do it furtively, while Molly was running an errand into town and the housekeeper was down in the kitchen. They would have stopped her from walking quite so much, and Minta did not want to stop. 

For some reason she wanted badly for Helen not to think of her as an invalid. This was a foolish thing to worry about, because Helen would see , soon enough, would see her stumble and limp and catch chills and go to bed with a backache. She’d always been delicate. It was pointless to try and hide this from her companion. Helen would probably resent her for being titled and indolent when Helen was compelled to be a companion—a thinly veiled replacement for work . Helen would possibly not like her at all, but be forced by the constraints of propriety to pretend she did. She would playact that she liked to spend her time pushing Minta’s Bath chair so that she might visit her garden beds and sketch the folly, pretend she liked pouring Minta’s tea and bringing her cakes and watching her embroider. As if anyone could like such an occupation.

She had been twisting her handkerchief in her hands when Helen came in, ushered by the housekeeper, Mrs. Trotter. She was a tall girl, much taller than Minta, and with a much more robust figure, almost plump. She had a kind of firm-jawed countenance that was more pleasing, more complicated, than prettiness. She was dressed in a simple muslin dress, grass-stained at the hem. When she removed her bonnet, a long, unraveling curl slipped from its pins and fell down over her shoulder. A piece of trim was coming loose on her bodice and her fingertips were stained with ink.

“I beg your pardon, my lady,” Helen said breathlessly. “I am—er—not a neat traveler.”

Something jumped up from Minta’s stomach and lodged itself in her throat; something worse than happiness. “Who could blame you?” She managed to say. “After I’ve been traveling I always look like I’ve been rolled down a hill, and not a short one. And please, I beg, you have promised to call me Minta.”

Helen smiled; it was a bit unnerving how much the smile pleased Minta. Helen said, “Then I will. And you will call me Helen.” She regarded Minta for a moment, just looking, and then she stepped forward. “And I shall clasp your hand, not curtsey.”

Minta could sense rather than see Mrs. Trotter’s expression of mild horror. She ignored it. “As you please,” she said.

Up close, Helen was warm-cheeked and hectic and smelled of grass and horses. Her hand, when she shook, was hot and a little sweaty, broader and more golden than Minta’s.  

“Mrs. Trotter will show you to your room,” Minta said, a little breathlessly. She tried to sit up straight. “You should take as much time to settle in as you wish. My rooms are on the ground floor, of course, so I’m afraid yours is too… It doesn’t make for the best view, but I hope you will be comfortable.”

Helen craned her neck up to see the ceiling, which had been painted by a foul-smelling Italian genius when Minta was thirteen. The borders were daubed in gold leaf and intricate plasterwork, and chubby cherubs adorned each corner. Then she looked across the front hall to the back doors, which opened directly onto the back grounds, with a view of the main fountain and the hedge garden. The doors were framed on each side by old, rusty suits of armor.

“Yes,” said Helen mildly, “I do hope I will be comfortable here.” Then she darted a sneaky look at Minta, and smiled.

Minta was not very often party to a private joke. She smiled back.

➤➤➤

Although she was only now twenty-two, Minta had had a companion before. When Mama had suggested it, Minta, then eighteen, had wrinkled her nose, thinking that companions were usually bored girls from poor noble families, forced to listen to the long, droning stories and muted snores of old, rich widows. Minta was young, and she didn’t feel that being crippled had given her an irrepressible need to tell long stories or have her pillows fluffed. Besides, she was still grieving the loss of her governess, Miss Crane, who had been her constant companion and playmate from ages twelve to eighteen. Miss Crane—well, privately she’d allowed Minta to call her Emily—was short and stout and always laughing. She spoke French “just enough to get myself into trouble,” she said, and could paint and draw tolerably well as long as the subject was dogs. She had known Minta for a year before her illness, and thus did not think of her first and foremost as a cripple. It was Miss Crane who had taught her about gardening and insects and birds. She had encouraged Minta to take her chair out to the flower garden and get in and out as she liked, letting her cane and the walls of the raised beds support her while she worked. She’d had the groundskeeper install decorative benches at the end of each row and grass pathway, so Minta could stop and rest. From the time Minta was fourteen and trying, with a great deal of suffering, to relearn how to walk, Miss Crane had had a particular favorite phrase, always said solidly and under the breath, without sentiment: “come on, old girl.” The silliness of calling a fourteen-year-old earl’s daughter “old girl” was not lost on either of them, but the phrase had come to be something of a scripture to Minta, something she repeated to herself for strength.

However, when Minta was eighteen, Miss Crane had been courted by Dr. Barnsford, the doctor from two villages over, and she had moved there to marry him Now they saw each other only a few times a year, whenever Minta was well enough to attend the assembly in Clehonger.

When Miss Crane married, Minta had felt a crushing, overwhelming sadness that she did not understand. The life seemed to have gone out of things. She felt absurdly hurt that Miss Crane had left her, and the lingering hurt made her embarrassed. It was not proper to feel so much for a governess. “It’s quite alright, dear,” Mama had said absently, “she was quite a fitting friend for you, and she did help you learn to walk again, but a governess will marry in the end.” 

Minta could not describe that it was not Miss Crane’s nursing skills that she missed. She did not need a nurse any longer, or a governess. The word friend was closer, but it was certainly inadequate to describe what Emily Crane had meant to her: her warmth, her presence: jovial, wicked, and private.

Mama had decided that the correct cure for Minta’s sadness was a companion, her first. Mrs. Standish was a widow of thirty whose primary interests were the Bible, “reducing” through a diet of lettuce and boiled eggs, and the dangers of damp. She was convinced that every foggy or rainy day would do immeasurable damage to Minta’s joints and lungs, and as a result kept her cooped up with smelling salts and improving sermons most days. It had taken Minta ages to convince Mama to dismiss Mrs. Standish, especially since “ladies who are neither in the school room nor married ought to have chaperones, or companions.”

Minta would have preferred returning to the school room, a place where she had spent countless happy hours reading natural history, French stories, and gardening pamphlets. She certainly preferred it to being married. It was obvious enough that no one was likely anxious to marry her, a cripple whose dowry would be managed by her brother Frederick, the Earl of Trousdale. Minta had known this long enough that it had ceased to vex her. More important was her own reluctance to marry somebody. Since neither the schoolroom nor marriage was possible, she wrote to two different vicars asking for any acquaintances who might be fit lady’s companions without telling Mama. Helen Walker had been the result. 

In the morning, Molly saw to Minta’s hair while they both sipped their first cup of tea, a ritual they’d had since they were both fifteen. “Mrs. Trotter caught the companion in the dining room last night, my lady,” said Molly with the air of someone presenting a great big diamond of a secret. 

Minta gasped, perhaps a bit theatrically. It had been so long since anything had happened to her. “Doing what?”

Molly bit her lip as she manipulated the hot tongs, careful of Minta’s neck. “Nothing Mrs. Trotter could see, my lady. Just looking around.” She curled a long strand of Minta’s hair around the tongs, watched it steam, and then released it. “Mrs. Trotter thinks she’s a thief and possibly a ruffian,” she added.

Minta smiled. “Did she—did Miss Walker, I mean—fondle any of the candlesticks?”

“I can’t be sure, my lady, but Mrs. Trotter says when you let strangers into your home, anything could happen, and that despite a reference we—” She stopped abruptly. “She would not wish her words to reach your ears, milady.”  

Minta bit the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. “Despite her gruffness, Mrs. Trotter is correct, Molly. Helen is a stranger. We know very little of her reputation or her moral character.” She paused and then added, all casualness, “I invited her here almost as soon as I saw her. Without a reference, even.”

Molly was pleasingly shocked by this. She didn’t respond at once, however, just blinked furiously with high, arched eyebrows. Then she said with great severity, “I trust your ladyship’s judgment entirely.” She giggled. “But what if she is a ruffian?” 

Minta sighed. There was a dull, persistent ache on one side of her back and hip from working in the garden, and pins and needles in her right foot. “Oh heavens, Molly,” she said. “I can only hope so.”

When her hair was finished, Molly brought the Bath chair to the vanity table and accepted half Minta’s weight as she stepped from her stool to the chair, collecting her skirts around her so they did not catch under the wheels. Then she went to the corridor to call for the west wing footman, James, to push the chair. It was too heavy for tiny Molly to push. This was one of Minta’s least favorite bits of the morning.

“James isn’t here, milady,” said Molly, wringing her hands. “He must have gone out to help with the kitchen delivery. I can go and find Timothy, but he’d have to wash up first—”

“I don’t suppose I could be of help,” said a new voice from the doorway.

Minta turned to see Helen standing there, arms raised over her head to fiddle with her hair—she hadn’t finished dressing properly. She was wearing a simple day dress, sprigged with flowers, and her face was slightly wet from washing. Before Minta could answer, Helen came into her bedchamber, her skirts brushing the edge of Minta’s four poster bed. “I apologise for intruding,” she said, “but it is my duty to help you, is it not? Let me push the chair.”

Minta must have been furiously blushing. She felt small and infantile, legs unmoving in the stiff Bath chair. “It’s a terribly heavy piece of machinery,” she mumbled. “Molly can’t push it, so I wouldn’t imagine that you—”

“With all apologies to Molly—hello Molly, how do you do—perhaps I should ascertain for myself.” She stood just behind Minta now, looking in the mirror at Minta and herself staring back. Her eyes were keen on Minta’s face, which was as pink as she feared. “Do you object?” Helen said quietly.

Minta did not want to wait for James, stranded in her bedchamber. “No,” she said. “I don’t object.”

Helen put her hands on the handles and deftly pushed the chair forward, managing the thick rug underfoot with ease. There was a slight strain in the set of her jaw, but she seemed pleased with the effort. “There,” she said, “Now which way is breakfast?” 

The things Minta liked about Helen Walker were hard to categorise. Helen did not care for the Bible or for reducing, which made her an early improvement over Mrs. Standish. She listened to Minta talk about rose propagation for as long as she wanted. She had tawny golden-brown hair that was forever falling out of the styles into which she twisted it. She knew nothing of noble families and cheerfully said so to anyone who asked. Minta wasn’t sure how this was possible, since she’d been companion to Mrs. Huntington, a rich merchant’s wife who had doubtless kept her copy of Debrett’s under her pillow, but she didn’t ask. Helen laughed aloud when Minta made some half-hearted jest, and she spoke with forthrightness when she thought Minta misguided or wrong. When friends or tenants visited, she noticed when Minta was tiring or in pain and made excuses for them to break up a party without drawing any attention to her limitations.

“Thank you,” Minta said to her sleepily when Helen had pushed the Bath chair back to the west wing, where their rooms were. “I don’t know why I—my hip has been aching—I don’t mean to complain. I shouldn’t, really it only fatigues me.” When Helen didn’t immediately answer, Minta thought, she grew up darning her own socks—perhaps carrying her own water—and here I am, complaining about sitting down and making polite conversation. “I am so fortunate, and I ought not to complain. It doesn’t matter.” 

“Minta.” Helen’s cupped palm was on her shoulder. She was still standing behind the chair, so Minta couldn’t see her expression. “I am your companion. What service can I provide if I don’t know when you’re in pain? I need you to tell me such things. Take that apology and eat it.”

Minta’s chest felt hot and confused. “You’re very impertinent,” she said, the sleepiness showing in her voice.

“Yes, I know,” said Helen, and Minta thought she sounded a little sad.

Minta’s brother, the Earl of Trousdale, and her mother, the Dowager Countess, would be in Town for a month or longer for the end of the season. Helen and Minta had the estate to themselves. They lived very peacefully and without incident until rose-pruning season arrived. 

In the morning room, Minta waited until Mrs. Trotter had left before she said, “I’d like to spend some time in the garden today. The roses want pruning, and if I leave them the overall production will be reduced.”

“Of course,” Helen said, and then seemed to consider it. This was a bad habit, answering and then thinking, but Minta couldn’t find it in herself to be bothered. “I presume that the gardening staff could not be entrusted with the responsibility of pruning the roses?” She didn’t seem particularly hopeful.

Minta blushed. “You must find me ridiculous. This whole staff at my disposal, and still I want to hobble about making a mess—”

Helen’s frown had deepened as she spoke. “Hush,” she said rudely, “I wish you’d stop describing yourself that way. Of course you’re not ridiculous. And even among the hobbies that you t—nobility might have, gardening is a perfectly reasonable one.” 

“Aren’t I flattered,” said Minta, trying to make her voice flat and unaffected.

“I’ll call James to help us with the chair, shall I?” Helen wiped her mouth, which had been lightly adorned with jam and crumpet crumbs, as she rose from the table. “We’ll need him on the thick gravel, I think.” 

“No, don’t,” Minta burst out. “I—I never take James when I’m working in the garden. The beds are so close together, and there are so many benches, that I can get about quite well. Bring the cane, if you must, but I doubt I’ll need it.” 

Helen furrowed her brow in thought even as, automatically, she went to the ewer on the sideboard and poured Minta a cup of water, then brought it to her. “Are you quite sure?”

“I told you it was my rose garden, didn’t I? I planted them all myself, and cared for them too. You can come and supervise, if you like, but you needn’t bother James.”

Helen looked vexed, and it was an expression Minta knew well: the indecision of someone who wanted neither to insult a cripple by calling them helpless nor to abandon them to stumble about on their own. Minta didn’t want to see that look on Helen’s face, so she turned toward the doorway. “Well, we’ll need him for a moment, to get down the stairs. James?”

James, the ruddy-faced and suitably tall footman who occupied Brookings Park’s corridors, came in at once. “My lady.”

“Good morning, James. I was hoping to go down to the garden today. Miss Walker will assist me, but perhaps you might help us with the chair on the back steps.” She left the particulars vague—not that James would object, but she didn’t want him and Helen to compare stories. 

“Of course, my lady.” 

“Are you coming, Helen?” She did her best to sound brash, confident, unconcerned, but in reality she quite wanted Helen to come to the rose garden with her. Not only to show her the flowers, to trade little stories in the shade of the magnolia tree, but also because she had a carefully repressed fear of falling.

Falling, in front of Helen—best not think about it. The humiliation of it, the lurch of embarrassment and smallness. Worse yet, the thought that Helen might be… not kind, exactly. Something more formless and unexpected than kind. Something Minta was too nervous to name.

“Of course I’m coming,” Helen said, hands on her ample hips, “as if I would lose the chance to see these awfully babied flowers.” She snatched up Minta’s cane and put it in her lap.

“Ah,” Minta coughed, feeling the color rise in her cheeks again. “Alright, then.”

James pushed her in the chair through to the back veranda, and then with practiced skill, he pulled the chair backwards down the stairs, a slow bump for each of the five steps. The garden directly behind the house was Minta’s prized rose garden, with raised beds built up by three-foot stone walls trimmed with moss. Each bed contained not only roses but dahlias, delphiniums, snapdragons, yarrow, and butterfly bushes, each of them planted by Minta and her former governess, Miss Crane, with the supervision of Brookings Park’s head gardener, Keens. At the end of the garden, there was a stone fountain with cherubs carved of marble dancing under the water in a large, shallow pool in which lily pads floated.

“This is absurd,” Helen said, squinting in the sun. “Couldn’t there be a ramp here? Some sort of sloping pathway?”

Minta was certain that neither her mother nor her brother, nor her father, when he was alive, would have thought of something so minor and practical and ugly. She just shrugged. “Come down here and see them,” she said. “Thank you, James, we’ll be alright.” 

James’ eyes darted from the thick gravel to the clumsy Bath chair wheels and then to Helen. “Are you sure, my lady?”

She glared at him while Helen plucked at a weed. “ Yes, you can leave us.”

James was nothing if not polite. “Yes, my lady,” he said with a little bow, and went back inside.

“Alright, then,” said Helen, “What’s the job?”

“There’s a little box there, behind the planter, with my pruners and gloves in,” Minta pointed. “If you would just—”

While Helen was fetching them, Minta hurried to get to her feet, wanting to hide the awkward scramble. The petticoats and dainty boots didn’t make things easier. She managed to get herself upright, one hand around the cane and the other braced on the waist-high stone wall that signified the end of the house and veranda. She took careful steps until she could kneel at the edge of the flower bed, eyes washing over every detail of the closest rose: a blowsy, magenta perpetual bloomer that she’d had shipped from France, to her brother’s dismay. Ardoisée de Lyon , it was called. It had a strong scent, both sugary and fleshy, like burying your face against a warm dress-front. This one was also leggy and overgrown.

She could hear Helen approach, lugging the box of tools. “You’re going to ruin your dress,” Helen said complacently.

“When you discover how to grow roses without dirt, be sure to let me know.” Minta turned partway to look at her, ignoring the twinge in her spine.

Helen didn’t answer, just handed her the pruners. They felt heavy and cool in Minta’s hands. She used her cane, poked into the fluffy soil of the flower bed, to brace herself as she reached up to prune branches from the plant, letting them scrape her as they fell. 

“Tell me about this,” Helen said, her voice quieter than before. “I want to understand it, and clearly you do. Why do you have to take away perfectly healthy bits of the plant?”

Minta sat back on her heels for a moment to catch her breath. The sun was warm and constant overhead, the sound of the bugs and the birds enormous. Summer was always a noisy business, everything shrieking with its eagerness to grow. “The nature of most flowering shrubs is to throw energy into the development of new branches, new leaves,” she said, pointing out a sapling branch with no blossoms. “By cutting them back, we require the plant to push that energy into blooming. The result is more buds, more flowers, and a neater shape.”

“You are an expert,” Helen said, and the observation sent a shock of pleasure through Minta.

“I’ve always liked flowers,” she said stupidly. “If the yield is especially high, we could cut some for a bouquet.”

“I’d like that.” Helen hitched up her skirts until Minta could see the snowy dry sheath of her stockings, the taper of calf into ankle. She looked away. “There’s another pair in here, if you’ll let me help.”

To her own surprise, Minta did. They worked under the sun for half an hour or more without speaking, except to trade tools or for Helen to lend her shoulder so that Minta could limp across to the other bed. Eventually they had moved to the far corner of the garden, under the shade of the magnolia tree, its cover deep blue and cold.

“This is novel to you,” Minta said after a period of quiet. “Not this—well not this size, of course, but gardening at all, I think.”

Helen smiled to herself. “True enough.”

“Did you always live in London?”

“My whole life, yes.” She grimaced slightly. “It’s not the happiest of stories. You don’t want to hear my tales of woe, I assure you.” She put out her hand for the pruners before Minta could protest that she would like very much to learn about Helen’s life in London. She gave over the pruners. Helen moved elegantly, her knees balanced on the stone ledge at the edge of the formal flower bed. Minta admired her fluidity, her balance, the way her green-stained muslin skirt moved about her hips and legs. Minta suspected that she was only wearing one petticoat—her eyes darted up—in fact, she might not be wearing stays at all.

When Helen spoke, Minta’s face heated and she looked away.

“Here’s what I would like to know, Minta. Oh , bloody— . ” She cut off the curse abruptly even as she lifted her fingertip up for examination; she’d pricked it on a thorn. A little ruby of blood appeared on the pad of her index finger. “Can’t believe I haven’t done it till now,” she said quietly, almost to herself. She disturbed the spherical gleam of the blood drop by smearing it with her thumb, then, thinking better of it, she put the hurt finger in her mouth. Minta wondered about the taste of it: rust and rose together.

“Are you alright? Do you need a plaster?” She hated how breathy her voice sounded. Helen might think she feared the sight of blood.

“Hazards of rose gardening,” Helen said with a grin. Then, with a furtive, conspiratorial glance, she pressed the fingertip to a hidden fold of her skirt to staunch her bleeding.

Minta couldn’t help it; she laughed. No wonder Helen’s clothes and hands were always mysteriously stained. She’d never known somebody so messy.

“All better. Don’t start thinking I’ve forgotten what I was going to say.”

Minta felt dangerously comfortable there in her favorite place with her companion, this mysterious and irreverent person. “I haven’t forgotten,” she said, sliding down so she could sit on the garden wall, taking weight blessedly away from her legs. “I’d like to hear it, too.” 

Helen flashed her a smile. Then she said, “Why did you lie to me about gardening without your chair?”

Minta’s blood went cold. “W-what?”

“I don’t mean to be unkind,” Helen said placidly. “But I can see that this is uncomfortable for you—perhaps unsafe. James was confused too. Usually he stays to help you with the chair on the thick gravel, I can see that. Why are you causing yourself pain? I hope it isn’t for my sake. You know I wouldn’t mind pushing the chair myself, or having James help—anything that makes it easier. But I think it’s foolish of you to lie to me, not to mention inconsiderate.”

Minta’s face must have been just as hot. She felt the kind of humiliation that crystallizes to anger in a moment. She had a strange surge of offended power: how dare she speak to me, an earl’s daughter, this way! Later she would be ashamed of it. Now she could only say, “Your rudeness cannot always be charming, Miss Walker.”

Helen was still for a moment. Then she said, “Rudeness was not intended. It was a question, one that has implications for your care.”

Never in her life had Minta so longed for the power to rise and stand and flounce off, steps fluid with her feeling. Instead, legs hanging limp from the low stone wall, she said, “You are not employed to care for me. You are my companion. You are here to keep me company and tell me stories and pour more tea. You have no right to supervise my behavior, least of all when it comes to a deformity you cannot possibly understand. How I use my chair or my legs is none of your concern.”

Helen did not immediately reply. Minta could hear the pruners working behind her, the low slicing sound of metal on branch. Finally Helen said, “The rudest thing about me is that I notice when you are in pain. I want to mitigate it, not ignore it. I fully realize the horrible impropriety of such an instinct. Nevertheless, I won’t suppress it.”

“It’s wrong ,” Minta burst out. “You are right, it is rude. It is for me to say when I need—” 

“Yes, I know,” Helen interrupted. All at once she jumped down from the bed in a movement that would have been graceful if she hadn’t had four pruned rose branches tangled in her skirts. “I’m telling you, I know. But I can’t stop it. It’s a domineering, possibly unchristian impulse: to keep you away from pain. What will we do about that?” She didn’t wait for an answer, stalking to the end of the bed for Minta’s cane and coming back with it.

Minta’s lungs felt constricted. She was terribly afraid that she would not be able to hold onto her anger, that she would fall deep into the visegrip of someone who—into Helen’s grip. “I don’t suppose I can stop you. I am a cripple, and an invalid, and it is fruitless to protest against your machinations of power.”

Helen’s hands were on Minta’s waist then, lifting her down from the garden wall and holding her up even when her feet reached the gravel. When she found her footing, Helen shoved the cane into Minta’s hand and her own shoulder under Minta’s other arm. “Correct,” she said through her teeth as they made their way, painstakingly, toward the abandoned Bath chair. “You can’t stop me, and you needn’t try.”

Minta hated the way those words warmed her. She’d let a potentially dangerous person into her home, she realized, someone who knew what propriety was and threw it away. Instead of feeling afraid, she felt warm and light and potent, like something kindling. 

➤➤➤

Helen and Minta had a game they played on certain quiet evenings. Minta would provide an item of clothing she hated “for mending,” and Helen would mangle it. This worked well for both, as Minta’s chest of drawers was full of pinching underthings and beaded fans and garish bonnets, and Helen was wretched at sewing. She did not bother to hide her delight in ruining expensive and ugly things. She made long, snagged stitches across a bonnet’s ribbon and ripped out seams only to repair them with old black thread. This practice made for perfectly functional and visually ruined garments that Minta would never be expected to wear. Helen was becoming especially good at installing wobbly loose buttons.

They were engaged in this hobby one warm evening when they heard carriage wheels on the drive out front, and before they could speculate, Minta’s mother was coming into the drawing room, a fur-trimmed cape swirling about her shoulders. “Girls,” she said, “Mrs. Trotter ought to have drawn the curtains after dinner was served. Did you not remind her?”

“Oh, yes,” Minta said, flustered. She’d been sitting with her legs stretched out under an Afghan, reading to Helen from The Mysteries of Otranto . She had a nice voice for reading, mid-pitched and clear, with an instinctive feel for the rhythm of the sentences. When her mother came in, she tucked the book under her skirts in a hurry and smoothed the throw over her lap. She reached up to her hair, as if to rectify her lack of front curls, and then snatched it back down again. There was a sudden nervous brightness in her face. “Mama,” she said, “We weren’t expecting you, but—what a delight to see you so soon.” She dipped her head in simulation of a bow. 

Helen figured she ought to get up and really curtsey, and she did so, hiding her resentment. “Lady Trousdale,” she said, trying not to let on that she had two straight pins still between her teeth.

“Ring for Mrs. Trotter, would you, Miss Walker?” The Dowager Countess took off her bonnet with a flourishing tug of ribbon. “We ought to have tea if we are to manage this issue tonight.”

The issue, as it happened, was “Araminta’s maidenhood.” Helen wanted to tuck away the phrase to tease Minta with later, but Minta’s face was so stricken that she knew she would have to tuck it away for a long, long time. 

  “I am pleased to know that Miss Walker’s companionship has been so amiable,” Lady Trousdale said. It was half past nine and she was drinking strong black tea brewed with tiny jasmine petals and purified white sugar lumps, stirring it in an anti-clockwise motion. “But you are indeed an eligible young lady, and marriage to a fine young man will bring honor to both yourself and the Trousdale estate.”

Helen thought: she is a better con artist than I ever will be.

Minta was much reduced in her Mama’s presence. “If you believe that a marriage will benefit us,” she said, her face white. She began again, more slowly. “I was previously… I had previously believed that my condition would be a hindrance to a marriage.” 

Helen squeezed her teaspoon in her fist until the silver started to bend.

Lady Trousdale nodded, considering. “It may,” she said in her peculiar querulous voice, “but you are also an earl’s sister, with a considerable dowry and good training. And,” she added, “rather a beauty. There is no indication that you could not bear children.” 

“Your ladyship is too kind,” Minta said, and Helen thought she could detect an edge of irony in her voice. Perhaps that was the true upper-class training: to keep the defiance at the very perimeter of your voice. 

“There remain a few opportunities to pursue, although you came out in society a few years ago,” the Dowager Countess continued. “Of course the options are most pleasing in Town, but if you will insist upon remaining in the country…” 

“It’s only that Town is rather harsh on my lungs,” Minta said with an air of apology.

“In that case, there is Honsford Manor only a few miles away, and I do know that Lord Peter is in line only for a viscountcy, but the Honsfords are so comfortable what with the size of the estate and the mines on their land. He’s said to have a very pleasant manner, and to enjoy children. Then there is the matter of age, Araminta, and Lord Peter is not yet forty.”

Helen was endeavoring not to stare at Minta, or furthermore to scream at them both that this conversation was monstrous, absurd, a caricature of a caricature.Minta, meanwhile, was looking at a landscape painting hung in the dining room behind her mother. It had been painted by a Dutch master, Minta had told her, in about the 1650s, and hid in an attic until Minta’s grandfather had discovered it and had it hung in a gilded frame. They’d discussed it the previous night. “I bet he stank,” Helen had said, momentarily forgetting herself, and Minta had said, “My grandfather?”

Probably , Helen prevented herself from saying, and responded, “No, the Dutch master. Never enough hot water in the 1650s, especially not in Holland.”

Minta had said, “At what hour did you become an expert on seventeenth century Holland?”

If only she knew. Helen had said, “While you were taking your nap.”

For a minute they’d simply looked at each other.

Minta stared at the painting now: the low, muddy landscape that was worth thousands of pounds. Her lips were thin. Then she said, “Yes, Mama, I have met Lord Peter on many occasions, and found him amiable indeed.” 

Helen bit the inside of her cheek.

Lady Trousdale nodded. “Very well. Perhaps I will assemble a hunting party. Or—or a ball.” She frowned, as if she were performing mental calculations about the social occasion that would display Minta to the best effect. Since Minta neither danced nor hunted, her present ideas seemed unlikely.

“Perhaps a garden party,” Minta said, “Where the guests might play croquet.”

“Oh,” Lady Trousdale cooed, “That would provide excellent opportunity for conversation. And for the guests to see your roses.”

For some reason, this made Minta blush. She did not reply.

Lady Trousdale gave a gusty sigh. “Travel has exhausted me, Araminta. I will retire to bed. I shall see you at breakfast.” With that, she sailed from the room without a backward glance.

Minta and Helen sat there without speaking for a long moment, Helen working hard not to speak first. Finally Minta said, “James can push the chair, he’s probably just outside.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Helen said, and both anger and softness showed in her voice. She took Minta to her room, both of them quiet. 

“Good night, Helen,” said Minta when they reached her room. When Helen didn’t immediately answer, she said, “She won’t stay forever.”

“I know,” Helen replied at once, but she was thinking: neither will I. 

  Helen said it would be alright if they had to miss it, but Minta was adamant that the two of them would keep their appointment for garden maintenance regardless of the Dowager Countess’s arrival. “If we do have some sort of grim premarital garden party,” Minta said with false lightness while Molly did her hair and Helen lazed on her bed, “At the very least the peonies will be properly staked.”

Helen found this sort of silliness—a kind of silliness that she associated with Minta—to be unavoidably charming. It was inconvenient. “Very well,” she agreed.

But when the hour came, Minta was in bed with a splitting headache, the kind she had a day or two before a thunderstorm began. She seemed sheepish when she told Helen she couldn’t work in the garden, and Helen told her that she would stake the peonies herself, brooking no arguments. 

It was foolish to stand in a flowerbed on a hot June day with a bouquet of wooden stakes in one hand on behalf of a silly noble-born girl. Here she was anyway, however. She was stooping in her day dress, face crushed against a rosebush, when she heard prim footsteps and the drag of a long train on gravel. When she looked up, she nearly got a thorn to the eye. “My lady,” she said. “Good morning.”

It seemed incredible to Lady Trousdale that Helen was in the flowerbed, despite the fact that gardening was her daughter’s most treasured pastime. “Molly tells me that Lady Araminta has taken ill,” she said.

“She has a headache, that’s all, my lady.”

Lady Trousdale nodded. “Perhaps I might beg a moment of your time away from your… current occupation. I was hoping to have an interview with you, and the garden seems an appropriate setting, don’t you agree, my dear?” 

Helen knew it was not a question. She put down the stakes and carefully removed herself from the rose bush. Then came the more difficult task of jumping down from the garden bed in two petticoats, an overskirt, and high-buttoned boots. She managed it, however. As they stood shoulder to shoulder in the garden under the sun, Helen had the unhelpful desire for a cigarillo.

“My daughter is happy with your companionship,” the Countess began. “I can see that. She was effusive in her letters.”

Helen swallowed. “I am pleased that Lady Araminta is happy with my services. She is a kind mistress.”

The Dowager Countess nodded with a little sigh. “She has been weak all her life, even before the fever came, you know, and it gave her the kind of forbearance that most girls never develop. Her lady’s maids adore her. Her tutors and governesses did too. The Earl of Trousdale dotes on her, of course.”

It took Helen a moment to realize that by “The Earl of Trousdale,” the Countess meant her son, Minta’s brother, Frederick.

“She’s kind to servants and to the tenants. Perhaps a bit too kind, however. There is something I want you to understand about my daughter, Miss Walker, if you have not discovered it already.”

Helen’s stomach lurched. Araminta will not live until winter. Araminta wishes you to go. Araminta will be married on Thursday next. Araminta was made wrong .

“My daughter,” Lady Trousdale continued, “is an affectionate creature, and I have always encouraged that trait in her. However, she has grown up largely in confinement, with servants and governesses and a few local friends. She cannot claim a varied acquaintance. She has never been abroad, nor met with many young gentlemen. I ought to claim some responsibility for this lack of variety, but I was occupied with the loss of my husband, you see, and it was difficult for Araminta to travel. In consequence, I fear she has… grown odd, in some respects. In respects you ought to become aware of.”

Helen felt her blood churn in every artery. “Odd.”

The Dowager Countess dipped her head in confidentiality, and the single feather atop her hat bobbed with her. “You are probably aware that my daughter had a longstanding governess,” she said in a whisper. “Emily Crane, a doctor’s daughter from Hereford. A kind and clever girl who helped Araminta a great deal after her illness. Araminta became… attached. ” 

Helen’s face was very hot. “I see.”   

“It was perfectly natural, of course. They were here on their own a great deal of the year, and Miss Crane was terribly nurturing, and skilled in French, and they became bosom friends. However.” Her chin nodded seriously as she surveyed the garden, and then Helen. “It was very distressing for Lady Araminta when Miss Crane became engaged to be married. Within a few months, she had moved to the village, and Minta was quite inconsolable. The servants were worried about her. I was worried about her. She grieved the loss far longer than was quite appropriate. I was sympathetic, of course. I cried myself when my governess married. But I have remained aware of Araminta’s attachment. I hope that she will not be so heartbroken again. Do you understand my meaning?” 

“You hope that I will not marry,” Helen said without thinking.

The Countess reared back in surprise, governed herself, and sniffed. “Impudent, but amusing. I can see why Araminta is fond of you.”

Helen didn’t dare reply. All the things she didn’t dare say were crowded in her mouth.

“My only hope, Miss Walker, is that you will remember—that you will help my daughter remember—that a lady’s companion is an occupation. In polite society we pretend otherwise. You receive an allowance, instead of a salary. But we must remember that you are a paid friend to my daughter. And your services will no longer be required when she marries.”

Helen was beginning to wonder if Lady Trousdale could summon a headache, or indeed a thunderstorm, from thin air. “I understand, my lady.”

The Dowager Countess regarded her with a prim, keen expression that Helen realized was not entirely ridiculous. She felt an amorphous surge of nerves. Finally the Dowager said in her waspish, too-observant voice, “Yes, I see that you do.” 

Helen went back to her room after that strange interview, her hands still smelling of rose sap. She was about to pass Minta’s closed door when a familiar head peeked out through the door jamb. “I beg your pardon, ma’am.”

“Molly, I’ve said that you needn’t call me ma’am…” She trailed off as she saw Molly’s furtive expression.

“Her ladyship would like to speak to you, if you wouldn’t—” She reached out one hand, as if she wanted to tug Helen inside but couldn’t find the boldness.

“Let me in, let me in,” Helen whispered, instantly adopting the mystery of the thing. Molly did, and Helen found herself in Minta’s bed chamber again, this time lit only by two or three candles, all the curtains drawn. 

Minta was sitting on her bed, half-obscured by the bed-curtains, which featured embroidered birds of paradise. “Is that Helen?” Her voice was soft and sleepy enough that it made Helen’s throat clench.

“Of course it is.” 

Minta’s eyes opened wider. She was wearing her dressing gown over her chemise, her thin shoulders straightening. Her hair hung in a thick, glossy plait over one shoulder, her front curls in rolling paper. “Has Mama gone to bed?” 

“I think so.” Helen had already resolved to keep everything she had learned to herself. For one, she was a collector of secrets, but for another, the Countess’s words would humiliate Minta. “How is your headache?”

Minta yawned. “Better, now. Head all muzzy from staying in bed. Thoroughly bored of myself.”

“You’re familiar with the cure for that particular affliction?” Helen vaguely heard Molly stoke the fire, then slip out of the room behind them, but she didn’t turn to watch her go.

“What’s that?”

“Sleep.” 

Minta snorted, an unladylike sound that contrasted with the arc of her neck against velvet and lace. “I had another cure in mind. You’re coming with me.”

Helen blinked. “Am I, now. And where are we off to?”

“If I don’t go outside, I’ll scream.” Minta slid both feet onto the floor, then groped in the bedclothes for her cane. “Can you manage the chair?”

“Are we taking it up a mountain or only through a stream or two?”

Minta sighed. “Thought you might say so. Look I—I’m aware it’s nothing but foolishness. And if Mama heard—but that’s why I have to do it. Even if we only get to the back veranda. We can look at the stars. Something. Sorry, I’m sure you want to go to bed, and here I—”

Helen contemplated, not for the first time, what it would be like to need help simply to feel fresh air in her lungs. “Hush,” she said. “Have you got stockings on?”

“Don’t need them.” 

“If you catch cold under my supervision—”

“Oh, fetch some from the drawer, then.”

Helen fetched them, the stockings of fine linen and ribbon feather-light in her hands, and averted her eyes as Minta lifted one unsteady leg, then another, to put them on.

Suitably attired, Helen helped Minta into the chair, and they made the heart-pounding journey from her bed chamber through the grand hall and toward the back veranda. It had been a hot day, the first truly hot day of June, and even now the warmth hung in the air, sweet and heavy. 

Minta let out a noisy gust of air. “I can’t imagine what I’d’ve done if you weren’t here. Molly can’t push the Bath chair, but she would be too frightened even if she could. And sometimes I’ve just got to go out of doors. I would have had to lower myself out the window in the bedclothes.”

“I must remember to affix a net underneath your window, then. Although I don’t doubt you could do it.” She smiled. “I did a bit of work on the peonies today after all. I hope that’s alright.”

Minta’s eyes went wide with enthusiasm, but then she bit her lip. “We’ll make a gardener of you yet, Miss Walker.”

For some reason, this easy confidence from so unlikely a source made Helen’s chest ache. “Wait till you see the staking I’ve done. I’m sure I’d embarrass you. Your mum certainly didn’t look impressed when she found me standing in the rose bush with my skirts around my waist.” 

Minta huffed a laugh. “I don’t doubt you would do that. She’s bowled over by you, I think. Doesn’t know how to…” She broke off. “I wish I could see. I wish I could—.” She shook her head, gathered herself. Her hair was falling free of the plait, spilling across her back. “In the morning, when James is about, I will. It’s late, now, and we couldn’t see anything anyway. You may take me inside again, if you don’t mind.”  

“I’m not done taking the air, am I?” Helen was not polishing her vowels properly, nor scouring her syntax. It was too late, the air too warm. She felt a little giddy and a little angry, all at once.

Minta gave a strange laugh. “Alright then.” She put her hands on the arm rests of the Bath chair to haul herself forward, craned her neck to see as much of the garden as possible in the light of the veranda torches. Above the neckline of her dressing gown, Helen could see the branch of a slender tendon, pulled taut.  

Helen’s resolve broke. “Very well,” she said. “You’re simply going to have to climb on my back. I’ll take you down. Won’t take but a moment.”

Minta’s eyes widened. “What could you possibly mean?”

“You put your arms around my neck, legs around my waist, I hold onto them, we go merrily on our way down to the garden, perhaps sit on the edge of the fountain. Would that—oh, I didn’t think—would that hurt you?” 

Minta huffed. “Would it—no, not particularly. It might hurt you , carrying a grown woman on your back. I know I’m crippled but I’m not a child , Helen.” 

Helen saw that she had indeed hurt Minta, in a different sense than she’d feared. “I know. I am making a claim to my own strength, not your stature. I shan’t drop you, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

Minta’s chin jutted out. “I’m not afraid. I’m simply bound by the facts.”

“Funny you should say so.” Helen leaned down and offered her hand. “I don’t think I’ve ever been limited by them.”

“You’re dangerous,” Minta said, plain as day, and it had a curious little edge to it. “Alright. If you really think—”

“I do.” 

“If Mama gives you your notice, you can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“I know all the reasons it’s a bad idea,” said Helen, a little too honest. “Come along, now.” She helped Minta stand, then turned her back, pinning Minta between her body and the chair. She reached over her shoulders and felt Minta’s hands reach back: small and smooth, as cool as a fresh pillow. “Grab around my neck. Your own hand, not my neck, please.” It was strange to teach a grown woman to ride on her back: Helen had spent her own childhood exclusively on piggyback, it seemed like—always crawling aboard one brother or another. Did earls not play with their sisters

“I shan’t strangle you, despite the temptation,” came Minta’s voice, very close to her ear.

“Aren’t we droll? Now, knee up, right leg first.” That was the weaker, and it couldn’t have held Minta’s weight even with Helen steadying her. Minta lifted it, a bit feebly, and Helen looped her wrist around it as carefully as she could. “Now,” she said, breath coming a bit short. “I’m going to—how to explain—bounce you a bit, and you’ll jump—”

“Do I look like someone who jumps?” Minta sounded outraged and delighted.

“Well that’s where the bounce comes in, now, don’t think too hard, hold on—” Helen gave an ungainly jostle, and leaned forward with force, and Minta’s stronger leg left the ground. She hitched it up around Helen’s hip, and Helen grabbed for it. She was wearing stockings, yes, but apparently only the sort that came to above the knee and needed delicate ribbon garters to stay aloft.Minta had not worn the garters, and Helen realized that she had her hand wrapped around a slim thigh. Minta’s chest was against her back, warm and solid. She’s not insubstantial at all , Helen thought. “Alright?” 

It took a moment for Minta to answer. “Yes,” she said, mostly breath. “You’re mad.”

“Does it hurt?” 

“No! I ought to ask you .” 

Helen did not know how to explain that Minta felt just the right amount of heavy on her back: solid and healthy, not frail at all, but not too much to carry. She said nothing, other than, “Down we go.”

They took the veranda stairs at a staggering walk, Helen placing each foot on the same step before managing the next one. Then the gravel walk between the walled-up rose beds, the stones shifting under Helen’s thin-soled dinner shoes. Minta’s legs were going clammy under Helen’s hands. She didn’t speak, but Helen could hear the harsh excitement of her breathing.

“Just to the fountain, then, and there you can sit.”

“Alright.” 

They made it to the marble rim of the large fountain, which made the only noise of the night other than Helen’s scrabbling footsteps, their breath, and a distant owl. “Left leg first,” Helen said, and then felt foolish. 

“My thoughts exactly.” Minta didn’t sound as sarcastic as perhaps she meant to.

Helen twisted as she let her down, steadying her with hands about her waist, pleated fabric under her palms.  

“I’m alright, I can sit on the ledge.” She did so, her skirts giving an audible billow about her legs. Helen had only the dimmest impression of her face, but she thought it might be pink.

“There, can you see all the flowers I mangled?”

“I’m choosing not to. But yes—oh, you did stake them!” 

Helen felt an unwilling surge of pleasure. “I did say.”

“It’s too dark to really see, but I suspect you’ve done a fine job.” Minta, balanced nimbly on the edge of the pool, twisted to look towards the dimly lit house, and in the opposite direction, where the hedge maze was fully shrouded in darkness. She dipped two fingers in the fountain. 

“Cold?” Helen was getting her breath back; she could feel sweat drying on the back of her neck.

“Not at all.” Minta leaned forward and stripped off her slippers and stockings, revealing slender, pale legs. She spun herself around on the ledge and plunged her feet into the water, tucking her toes under the nearest lily pad. Her nightdress and dressing gown were tugged up on her lap, but the hems floated in the water.

“Heavens!” Helen realized too late that she sounded like her aunt.

“Don’t tell me that you’re shy now.” Minta looked up all at once, hair falling in her face. One of her curling papers was coming loose, barely clinging to a bobbing ringlet against her cheek. Her shoulders hunched. “It’s not because—. I know they’re not pretty, but you don’t have to look .”

Helen could have cursed herself.  “Don’t insult yourself for me, Minta.” She toed off her own shoes, then fumbled with her stockings. “There’s nothing that’s not—.” She couldn’t finish; she wasn’t quite stupid enough. “Your legs don’t make me nervous. I was just surprised to see you take to the waters like a duck.”

Minta laughed, awkward and quiet. “I like the water. I’d swim, if I could. There’s no pond at Brookings Park, and even if there were—well. You know what Mama would say.”

“Just the fountain for us and the ducks, then.” They sat for a few minutes, toes skirting the gritty bottom of the little pool.

  ➤➤➤ 

A garden party was held at Brookings Park two weeks after Mama’s arrival. Minta’s brother, Frederick, was in attendance with his wife, along with a host of other acquaintances from the surrounding county. The guest of honor, of course, was Lord Peter Honsford, the heir to the neighboring estate and to a viscountcy. “You will make yourself very cordial to him, Araminta, dear, won’t you?” said Mama that morning. Molly was buttoning the row of tiny buttons up her spine with a buttonhook, only occasionally slipping and jabbing Minta in the back. Helen wasn’t present. She couldn’t laze about on Minta’s bed and talk nonsense the way she usually did when Minta was dressing, since Mama was at home.

“Yes, Mama.” She couldn’t be sure, however. Minta had not known very many men, and she was shy around them—not in a coy, pretty way, but ordinary, blank-faced shyness, the fear that she seemed as dull to them as they were to her. 

“And you will walk a bit—if you could—and show him how well you are. Show him your roses, but take care not to appear too attached to Brookings Park. It gives the appearance of spinsterhood.” 

“Ought I to be writing this advice down?” Minta looked up in time to see Molly hide a smile in her sleeve.

“Your good memory shall suffice,” said Mama with a sniff, and glided out of the room.

The wardrobe for the day, chosen by Mama and Molly together with very little input from Minta herself, was designed to put her in the most marriageable light imaginable. The pale blue dress displayed the top edge of her meager bosom. It was trimmed with a thick, frilly lace ordered from Paris. Molly curled her hair until they were both sweating. “Do you think Gemma’s getting on alright with Miss Walker?” Minta asked. Gemma was the second lady’s maid at Brookings Park, loaned out to guests and, recently, to Helen. 

Molly bit her lip. “I don’t mean to talk out of turn, Miss, but Gemma did say that Miss Walker insisted on doing her own hair.”

When Minta saw Helen, as the garden party was just beginning, she saw that it was true. Helen’s front curls were already growing limp and her bun looked awfully precarious. Most noticeable, there was a fringe of short, slippery hairs at the nape of her neck that had fallen from the bun, a fine sheen of nearly blond strands that hung down against her skin.

Minta’s mouth went dry, and she stared down at her lap. She couldn’t be caught staring. But the image had already burned itself into her mind: not just Helen’s neck itself, but the phantom picture of her own paler hand touching it, catching the fall of Helen’s fluffy tendrils in the breadth of her palm, feeling the warmth of the skin beneath.

It was not the first time she’d had the thought, but the feverish intent of it was new.

“Where’s James?” she said to Molly. “I’ll need a good shove, I’m afraid.” She couldn’t ask Helen to push the chair. She half-hoped that Helen would sense her immobility and offer, smoothing things over with her cheerful rudeness like she often did. But Helen, with her light-spangled wisps of hair and slightly too-small party dress, was standing against the stone railing overlooking the garden, speaking to one of the village spinsters who had been invited.

“Araminta,” said Mama through clenched teeth, suddenly right behind her. “The Viscount has arrived and would like to see your roses. He’s just over there.”

“Yes, mama, I saw him, it’s only that I’m looking for James, or for H—Miss Walker.”

Mama was plucking at the ruffle on Minta’s shoulder. “Perhaps you might stand, my dear, long enough to point out the shrubs—lean on the railing, and oh—here he is—” Mama’s fingers were prodding now.

“I don’t have my cane,” Minta hissed, all of a sudden furious to be made to hiss. It was humiliating. She glanced helplessly at Helen, her rescuer, who was standing on the second-to-top step with Miss Cranford, nodding and smiling with a little China cup of lemonade in her hand. In the other direction, Lord Peter Honsford was approaching her with a bright smile on his face, the kind that signified, I am trying awfully hard not to regard you with pity.

Minta braced her hands on the arms of the Bath chair and, trembling, found her feet, a little lance of pain traveling through her right calf as she stood. It was far more difficult without the sturdy cane. She nodded her chin to her breast, waiting for Lord Peter to speak first. The knuckles of her right hand were white around the arm of the Bath chair, pressed straight down in the hope it would not roll. Since its wheels were stiff at the best of times, she might succeed there. She was aware, dimly, that she was perspiring. 

“Lady Araminta,” he said at last with a little bow. “What a pleasure to see you again. And in such a pleasant setting. This is your garden, I understand?”

“Lord Peter.” She managed a tiny curtsey that made the Bath chair lurch. She smiled at him helplessly, aware of Mama hovering close by. Lord Peter was a friendly, slightly stupid man of about 38 with thick colourless hair and a high, constrictive collar. Minta had met him at assemblies and weddings since she was about 12 and he 28, and she’d known since age 16 that she might have to marry him. This inspired not so much dread as a vague kind of weariness.

She’d said to Helen the day before, I’m too young to feel so tired. 

Because of the pruning? Or Lord Peter? Helen had asked. 

“My lord, might I possibly give you my hand?” She felt the flush in her face, the horrible awkwardness of it. She didn’t want to fall.

“Of course.” He extended his forearm, and she grasped it, the slight steadying presence overwhelming her with relief.

Minta had been sitting in a heap at the base of a rose bush, a pile of pruned thorny branches in her lap, and she’d answered Helen, I’m tired because I’m not brave enough to be bad, like you are . 

“I’m sorry,” she told Lord Peter, feeling her face heat. “I ought to sit down, or I might—but perhaps I could prevail upon—” She looked helplessly around for James, for another servant, even for Mama, but the Dowager Countess had skillfully disappeared. “P-prevail upon you, my lord, to push my chair to the railing, and I can tell you all about the garden, if you like. My mother says you like cultivars.”

Lord Peter looked a bit flummoxed, but not, at least, disgusted. “It would be my honor, Lady Araminta.”

She tried to flop back into the chair with as much grace as possible, but she could feel the hem of her gown catch on the foot rail, and her hip jarred against the stiff wooden side of the chair.  

Helen had flashed her a smile. I don’t think it’s that you’re never bad. I think you simply plan further ahead than I do.

“Are you alright, Lady Araminta?”

Minta felt the bright spread of a bruise blooming over her hip, and she smiled grimly. “Very well, my lord. I might show you the garden from this vantage point, if your lordship is agreeable.”

“Very agreeable,” said Lord Peter, putting his hands to the back of the Bath chair. Minta had forgotten this: how much of Lord Peter’s speech was repeating the last few words of one’s own with the addition of an emphatic adverb. 

They made a careful path to the railing that overlooked the garden. “These are the roses I planted two years ago,” Minta told him, listing the varieties on the small chance he was interested. “These, here, Helen and I planted only a few weeks ago, but you can see they look well enough already.”

“Very well indeed, milady. Did you—Helen, you said? Is she a friend of the family? Your ladyship is not blest with a sister, if I recall correctly.”

God blast this stupid formality, Minta thought, this is prison this is penury. “Helen is my companion, and now my assistant gardener. She’s here today, if I—yes, there she is. Miss Walker!” She leaned forward in the chair, craning her neck to catch a glimpse of Helen’s face behind Miss Cranford.

Helen was flushed from the warmth of the sun, and she was listening to a doubtlessly endless story with performed fascination, the rim of her teacup pressed to her lower lip. Dreadful manners indeed. She looked up when she heard Minta call her name, and her features rearranged themselves twice: once in alertness, interest, and then in calm. “Hello!” she called with a wave of her hand. “Beautiful party!”

“Ah, yes,” said Lord Peter.

“Well,” Minta managed, “she’s kind to everyone, you see. She was a companion to a Mrs. Huntington, an American living in Grosvenor Square, until she was chosen to stay here with me.”

“How nice.” Lord Peter sipped his lemonade delicately. “Mrs. Beatrice Huntington, is it? I do believe I know her people.”

Helen was politely leaving Miss Cranford with a hand on her shoulder and a terrible curtsey. She looked toward the refreshments table, now festooned with petit fours, then a canny peek for the Countess. She flashed a neutral look in Minta’s direction, her look so blank that it made the tug behind Minta’s breastbone more like a lurch. Then she went to stand beside James, the footman, beside the doorway.

“Very nice people, I’m sure,” said Minta.

“Lady Araminta,” Lord Peter began, a stitch of uncertainty in his voice, “I hope I may prevail upon your kindness long enough to inquire whether you would be—whether you are hospitable to the notion that I may call upon you again. I sense that a further acquaintanceship between our families would be… would be very amiable.”

Minta looked up at him, his neck chafed raw from the starched edge of his high collar. He had no sense of economy and yet he did not understand abundance. She felt the prickle of eyes watching her on the back of her neck, or perhaps she only wished she did. Her hip throbbed hotly, and her feet were compressed in her unscuffed, unsoiled shoes. “I am very much obliged, Lord Peter,” she said. “I would be very honored if you would be good enough to call upon me again soon. We might—” She stopped, flushing. She had been about to say, We might take a walk. He would not understand that phrase when she used it. 

He bowed his head, clearly pleased. “I will come to tea if her ladyship welcomes me one afternoon next week. Thank you, Lady Araminta.” He bowed again and quickly disappeared, leaving Minta stranded with her chair facing the spreading gardens of Brookings Park. 

It was past nine when the party was well and truly concluded, Minta bundled up by James and Molly and taken back to her rooms so she might bathe and rest. Mama, Frederick, and Eliza would stay at Brookings Park for a week. Minta spent an unhappy hour in her room, tending to her sunburn, making a list of letters to be written, brushing her hair one hundred times. Finally she gave in, her weakness winning.

She rang for Molly and said, “Would you summon Miss Walker to my room?”

Molly, bless her, showed nothing of surprise or knowing in her expression.

Helen was there in a minute, wearing a thin muslin nightgown with a wide, fraying neckline that slipped over one shoulder. Her hair was unbraided, loose and bone-straight down her shoulder, two distinct kinks in it from a long day in pins. “How are you?” she asked without preamble, swallowing a yawn. “Couldn’t you sleep?”

“My leg hurts like the devil,” Minta snapped. “You might stretch it for me.”

Helen sucked in her lips a bit, tilted her head. “Of course,” she said. “On the bed?”

“I fail to see how you might stretch my leg while I sit in the infernal chair again.”

Minta could hear the rudeness in her voice, the petulant childishness of it, but Helen only hmm ed. “Of course you’re right. Budge over, then.” 

She pulled back the bedclothes to reveal Minta’s shriveled, twisted leg in its thin stocking. Minta had never allowed Helen to study her legs before, let alone touch them, but she felt a curious indifference now. Helen had said, Your legs don’t make me nervous. Not precisely the kind of praise and reassurance she craved from the woman. It would have to do.

“I’ll begin slowly. Tell me if it’s too much. Should we ask Molly for a tisane?”

“Don’t bother Molly. If I’d wanted a tisane, I’d ask for one. I wanted your help, thus I asked for you.” 

“Naturally,” said Helen, tipping her head up just enough to catch Minta’s eye, half a smile in her eyes. It made Minta miserable.

“Did you find the garden party a perfect bore, then?” she asked. “Insipid as usual, don’t you think?”

Helen bit the inside of her cheek, creating a little hollow above her jaw. “I suspect the party was not intended to divert me. How did you find it? Lord Peter paid you particular attentions. I could not help but to notice.”

Sometimes the blaze of embarrassment was indistinguishable from the blaze of anger. “Lord Peter is very kind. Dashing, too. He asked to court me. I said yes.”

Helen’s hands hesitated for a moment on Minta’s ankle, then kept moving. “I heard Lady Trousdale say as much earlier,” she said. Loose hanks of hair fell forward over her shoulders and cheeks. “The endeavor was successful then, I wager.” 

Minta sucked in air through her teeth as Helen flexed her foot, pushing her toes toward her shin. Pain lanced through her leg from hip to toe. She could feel the back of her neck go clammy. “Be careful, you brute, don’t you know I’m crippled? I’m not an athlete in the practice of calisthenics.” She felt the kind of misery that led to hysterics. A swallowing blackness of endless boredom, of aches and pains that made her dull and snappish and unlovable. How dare you, she wanted to screech at Helen, how dare you, the phrase a hateful inheritance from her Mama, the best weapon a noblewoman has.

“Hush,” Helen said quietly, and her hands gentled. She was just rubbing now, not stretching at all. It had no therapeutic purpose. She would give Minta unthinkable ideas. Her hands were warm.

“I suppose you think I’m a horribly spoiled brat.” Minta’s face felt hot. “You’ll tell your friends what a fractious, horrible, cruel little cripple I am. I know how you hate to hold back your true feelings, so you ought to audition the script you’ll give, one of your little performances—”

“Minta.” Helen’s voice was rough and hushed. Minta looked at her through thick, boiling tears. She waited for the brisk asperity that Helen used to ward off all unpleasantness. She would be handled. She couldn’t bear it. 

“I wish you’d called for me earlier,” Helen said, her fingers making long, slow channels of pressure on Minta’s calf. “You must be in horrible pain. The heat of the day, the sun—and I saw how she made you walk without the cane.”  

Minta blinked. “Yes,” she said, a little shocked.

Helen tucked her hair behind her ear. “And in those pinching shoes. I did try to suggest the slippers, but I see I couldn’t succeed, there. I’m sorry.” She cuffed Minta’s ankle with her hand, a quick little squeeze. “Let me see if there’s any of that posh ice left over from the party, shall I? I can crush it in a cloth for your hip.” She rose, and her nightgown slipped to reveal even more of her shoulder, a sliver of her upper bosom, the swell there. Minta looked away.

“Stay.” Her own voice was harsh and small, the tone of a sickly child. She hated it. “Perhaps later, but—I need the stretch more, I think. And the company of someone who will not ask about my brother’s family, and my father’s family, and the tenants, and a million other trifling things before asking me to pass the butter.”  

Helen regarded her for a moment, and then sat back down on the edge of the bed. “These parties are dreadful, aren’t they?” Helen’s hand was stroking so persistently that Minta’s skin felt hypersensitive, almost painful through the thin stocking. “Poor girl.” 

Minta’s body was heavy, syrupy in the bed. Slow building pressure in every soft place. “Don’t be kind to me,” she murmured. “It’s horrible.”

Helen gave a near-inaudible snort of dismissal. Minta opened her eyes, but she couldn’t read Helen’s expression. “I wasn’t ignoring you, today, little fool. I was only endeavoring to make—” She broke off, swallowing the rest of the sentence. 

“You should not be obliging to spoiled noblewomen, not by your principles,” Minta said, no longer sure whether she was nearly asleep or nearly on fire. “It gives them devilish ideas about how they might take advantage.” 

Helen huffed. “You propose to take advantage of me, Minta? Only a moment ago you were a cripple, immobilized by pain.” There was a small mole on Helen’s upper arm, only just revealed by the sliding neckline of the gown. Minta wondered if it tasted of soap. 

“You don’t know what cripples are capable of. We can be capricious. Cruel. Quite conniving.”

Helen smiled. “In generalities, perhaps.” She rested the heat of her palm on Minta’s knee. “You could never be cruel, however. I know you too well. I see your goodness.”

Oh stop , Minta wanted to say. This was cruel, this endless renewal of false hope. Helen was never going to feel the sort of capricious greed, the wholly inappropriate longing, that Minta did. Asinine for Minta to pretend otherwise. Cruel for Helen to let Minta pretend. “I’ve had enough stretching now,” she said, her voice cold. 

Helen removed her hand in a flash, as if she had been waiting for the rebuke. “Goodnight, Minta.” She got up with her typical indecorous grunt (sounds of a warm working body moving) and went to bed.

➤➤➤

Helen had been a con artist for a number of years, but even she couldn’t hold a candle to an Earl. Minta’s brother Frederick walked into a room and the people in it—the furniture in it, practically—reoriented it around him. He had a silent way of holding himself that made him seem important, regal, more than other people. It was spurious nonsense, Helen knew. It was the thing she had always believed most about the aristocracy: that their power was imaginary, a collective delusion that would be better off punctured. And yet she could not deny that Frederick Talbot, the Earl of Trousdale, had power, and that he could use it. 

She’d barely spoken to him before the garden party the day before, a hasty introduction, which he had initiated by saying, “You must be Araminta’s new governess.”

Helen, confused, had looked across at Minta, fully two-and-twenty years old, and said, “Ah—well—her companion, yes.” You probably oughtn’t to correct an earl, but this family made her observe all the wrong rules. 

“Her companion,” said Frederick. (She would not call him his lordship , over her dead body she would.) 

“We’ve spent a very pleasant summer,” Helen said, forcing herself to be bland. “Reading and gardening, mostly.”

“How nice for you,” drawled Frederick. “May I introduce my wife, Lady Trousdale, and you are—”  

Frederick’s wife Eliza, dressed in satin and lace, nodded her head. She carried a baby in an embroidered gown that obscured its feet—the next Earl of Trousdale, Helen gathered.

“Miss Helen Walker, my lady,” said Helen, and curtsied. She glanced up and saw Minta in her chair at the far end of the room, trying not to watch this introduction, and instantly felt bad for her crossness. It might not be her true purpose in Herefordshire, but she wanted to make Minta’s days as easy and happy as they could be.

She wanted to deny this to herself. There was no feeling as destructive as wanting to… make someone happy. Let alone a pampered, titled girl. It was a bourgeois impulse. A luxury. Helen could no longer deny it, however.

Minta said at luncheon, “When Freddy and Eliza are here, we all sit together in the drawing room after supper and play cards, or some sort of company amusement. You might—a companion is a perfectly reasonable party to accompany me, if you would like.” Minta wasn’t looking at her; her ears were turning pink.

I suppose you think I’m a horrible spoiled brat , Minta had said the night before in the low flickering light of her bedchamber, sunburnt and miserable. And then, moments later she’d basically admitted she wanted Helen’s company more than a parcel of ice for her aching hip. She was petulant, mysterious, in pain. Helen wanted to pour out her own strength and give it to Minta like a cup of tea. She couldn’t say, I was trying to let you alone, today, so that you could court that dreadful Viscount. I was trying to let you be a success without strongarming you, without busting in to ruin things.

“I don’t know how to play whist, if that’s a requirement,” she told Minta at luncheon.

“You don’t seem to know anything useful,” Minta said with a sigh. She was smiling. 

“Of course I’ll spend the evening with your family. It is, after all, the nature of my employment to provide you companionship .” She got up and poured Minta a glass of water from the ewer. Minta’s smile disappeared. “You’ll do well to remember it,” she said with faux sternness, but all the light had gone out of the joke.

Helen watched her all that day, looking for signs of heat exhaustion or a pulled muscle. Minta had told her that she’d hurt her back badly a year before after trying to walk down two flights of stairs. Helen didn’t think that seeing Minta in that much pain would be good for her ability to be diplomatic or polite with the Talbots. It was for her own self-protection that she watched Minta’s posture and complexion. She seemed alright, however, her strange dark mood of the previous night gone. 

After dinner, the ladies had tea and Frederick had port, and they settled in the drawing room, lit to blazing with fine, odorless white candles. It was the strangest luxuries that vexed Helen. She imagined she could still smell the stinking tallow candles that had been on her own table as a child.

The Countesses, current and Dowager, were settled into the room’s largest settee, plucking at needlework, and Frederick was paging idly through a tome of Adam Smith without much interest. Helen said to Minta, “Would you like the chaise?” 

The room’s occupants looked up at her in surprise.

Minta was looking fixedly at her hands in her lap. “I would, if it’s not too much trouble.”

Helen shook her head, unable to speak. This family filled her with rage. She crossed her hands, wrist over wrist, the way she always did when helping Minta out of the chair. Minta grasped them and stood with Helen’s tug. Helen caught her by her waist (little scent of roses and clean bedclothes) and eased her down into the well-cushioned chaise longue. Minta stretched out her legs and pulled a silky throw over herself; once Helen would have assumed she was cold. Now she knew that Minta did not want anyone to see her feet, emerging crookedly from the edge of her skirts.

Helen sat on the stiff little armchair beside the chaise, determined not to speak again until spoken to. Making things easier for Minta did not mean compromising her own ends, not in the least. Only quelling her stupider impulses. 

The Dowager Countess was recapping the finer points of the garden party for her son and daughter in law. “Araminta was much admired, as you no doubt appreciated,” she fluttered. “ Several of the ladies commented upon her healthful mien, and her smooth gait. Lady Trebuchet said she could not imagine cultivating such a lovely rose garden herself! Imagine .” 

“Minta has a very pleasing demeanor,” said Eliza agreeably. “And your flowers are gorgeous, darling,” she added to Minta herself, who smiled. Helen wondered what she was thinking.

“But the most pleasing news of all, I don’t mind saying, is that Lord Peter Honsford has asked Minta if he may pay her attentions. He announced his intentions to call upon her very soon. Very soon! It’s terribly exciting, don’t you think, Frederick?”

Frederick looked up from his book with a little sniff. “A great deal of the Honsford coffers come from trade , Mama, but I presume that doesn’t signify?” 

Helen found it strange and a little pathetic that the Talbots, whose house was filled with Dutch Golden Age paintings and horrid faux-Caravaggio frescos, were so concerned about money and its origins. She watched with grim fascination for the Dowager’s reaction. 

“The Honsfords are a very old family,” she said, scowling at her son. “And we ought not to be so small-minded, darling. More members of our society than ever before come from… humble births, and through proper training, they can achieve the utmost in refinement. Why, Miss Walker herself served as a lady’s companion to a Mrs. Huntington in Grosvenor Square. An American, whose husband once served as the governor of Massachusetts! Is that correct, Miss Walker? Do I have the correct state?” 

Helen blanched. “Yes, my lady,” she said automatically. “She and Mr. Huntington returned there before I came to you.” She wracked her brain. Was Boston in Massachusetts? New York? She ought to brandish a detail, but her mind was blank. “She was a very kind lady and was happy to give me a reference.”

Minta had taken up a mangled knot of embroidery thread and was detangling it with extreme patience, her fingers precise and dexterous on the gnarled thread. She pulled sections of it free and wound them around a wooden bobbin in her lap. For a moment Helen just watched her do this, the turns of her narrow wrists.

“I say.” Frederick lowered his book a fraction. “I thought I hadn’t heard the name, but Honsford mentioned he knew their people. They’ve done a fair amount of trading in the West Indies, as I have, in sugar and textiles. Antigua, was it? Or Jamaica?” He asked Helen. 

And god, that revolting earl power. With his cravat and his pince nez and his ancestral lands staring at her, Helen’s brazenness evaporated. She was embarrassed with herself. “I—er—I couldn’t be sure. Geography was never my—my strong suit.” 

Frederick frowned. “I was given to understand that it was the core of their enterprise. A wealth in sugar, Honsford said. Did the woman never mention it?”

A wealth in sugar . Helen should have done further research on that particular form of barbarism. “I do believe it was Antigua,” she said, carefully pronouncing the unfamiliar word. “But Mrs. Huntington was not very involved in her husband’s business. She was a very devoted mother, and committed to charity.”

Frederick removed his pince nez. “Did she mention any charitable endeavors in particular? I am active in many of the London charitable societies, and I have never seen or heard of her presence there.”

Helen felt like a pot of water on the hob boiling down to nothing: hot and frantic. “She did not often discuss her contributions with me,” she began, face aflame. “I was more of a domestic companion.”

“My lord, you can’t expect Helen to know everything her mistress did out of the house,” Minta said suddenly. “Helen, dear, I do believe I’ve forgotten my tonic in the bedchamber, would you mind fetching it for me?” 

Helen flashed a look at her; Minta was serene, pale-cheeked, cool, and composed. The loosening strands of indigo blue thread ran like drops of water through her fingers.

“Of course,” Helen said, and rose from the chair.

As she left the room, she heard Minta say quietly, “You ought to let my companion alone, Freddy. Have you no compassion for low-born girls who know little of high society? What a brute you are.”

To her surprise, Frederick laughed indulgently. “Such fierce talk from the little changeling,” he said. “Of course you’re right. She’s perfectly genial, but she clearly knows nothing of the world.”

Helen lit a candle and went down the hall to Minta’s bedchamber, which was dark and clean and smelled of the rose sachets that Molly tucked in her wardrobe and bedclothes. Upwards of thirty times she’d lain, without decorum or care for it, on this bed while Minta dressed or read or had her coiffure fixed by Molly. All this time she had thought herself the wiser, the cannier. How stupid she’d been.

She had a little fantasy of climbing between the clean, cool sheets on Minta’s bed and creasing them with the movements of her body, tossing this way and that, until Minta was brought to bed and got in. And then what? She might tell the girl that she had underestimated her once again. She could mention Minta’s impressive capacity to maneuver important and autocratic men, one Helen had never quite mastered. Or she could say nothing at all; merely lay next to her, absorbing her nearness as eloquence itself. 

In the end she obtained the tonic and took it back to the drawing room to deliver it. She had become a nursemaid, as she’d always feared she might, and found it far more agreeable than she had thought possible.   

The Dowager Countess and Lord and Lady Trousdale stayed a week at Brookings Park, and Minta and Helen spent little time alone together during the visit. Helen avoided the issue of Mrs. Huntington—in truth, she avoided many topics, fashioning herself as an eager helpmeet to an invalid. She fetched handkerchiefs and adjusted the fire screen and got rid of blotting paper. She helped Minta in and out of the chair, each transfer a brief clutch of fabric, arms around a slender waist, Minta’s blushing face close to hers.

She wondered if Minta were in more pain than usual, if her leg or her back was hurting her, but could find no opportunity to ask.

She woke in the morning to the sound of men’s voices and the thunder of hammers on rock. She went to the window in her night rail, pulled aside the thick damask curtains, and blinked at the light. When her eyes adjusted, she could see Hawkins, the junior groom, and Joseph Jenkinson, a tenant farmer a mile down the road who often helped out at the manor house with handiwork, since Brookings Park had a relatively small staff. The two men were building something; Helen couldn’t quite see what, but it was at a corner of the back veranda of the house, a place where Helen had stood with Minta a dozen times. She had a sudden suspicion.

She dressed quickly, forgoing her stays although the house was still crawling with Talbots, and twisting her hair back into a bun that would make Minta’s lips go thin with disapproval (endearing, horribly pleasing: a stern frown on the face of a porcelain shepherdess. Helen loved to provoke that look).

When she went out onto the veranda, she could see that they had removed a portion of the veranda wall and were replacing it with a ramp that extended from the raised platform to the garden. Once completed, there would be a smooth masonry path at a gentle slope. 

It was for the Bath chair—it was the ramp Helen had long thought necessary. With this amendment, she could easily take Minta to the rose garden herself.

But the ramp had not been built for her own perambulations with Minta, she realized. In a sense the contraption had not been built for Minta at all. The Dowager Countess had commissioned the setting for a proposal of marriage. 

The two men, already sweating under the sun, straightened up when they felt Helen looking over them. Hawkins removed his hat. “Can we be of service, miss?” There was a familiar weariness in his face: a what-now look that Helen knew from giving it herself countless times. She swallowed.

“No indeed,” she said, and turned on her heel to go inside.

She went to Minta’s bedchamber to take her to the breakfast room, as she always did at this time of day. When she arrived, she found Minta still dressing—in fact, Minta was braced against the foot of her bed, one hand on its carved wooden column, one hand on her cane, while Molly fastened her stays. She was weaving a fresh ribbon through each grommet, tightening as she went. “You’re breathing too much,” Molly said, leaving off the “my lady.”

“The moment I contrive to stop breathing throughout this process, I will inform you of it,” Minta said, and then, “oh, hello,” because she’d seen Helen. She tugged the ruffled top of her chemise up, fruitlessly because it was trapped under the stays. “Forgive me, I am clearly unready for company.”

Helen looked at her, perplexed. She had sat with Minta while she was dressed countless times.

Perhaps she was preparing herself for the level of modesty appropriate for a Viscountess.

“No matter,” Helen said. “May I come in?”

“Of course you may, I’m nearly ready, if Molly will cease her strangling mission.”

“Well, miss,” Molly said, “The Dowager Countess did say that since today—” She broke off. “Never mind.” She cinched the ribbons tight and tied them, then fetched Minta’s day dress—a cream-colored silk trimmed in burgundy with a high-waisted sash and long, floating skirt. They finished the dressing in a few moments, working together with practiced techniques to support her weight. It was a kind of dance, Helen thought. One she was learning, although she might never know it as well as Molly did. “Did you see what is being built out back?” 

Molly and Minta looked up at the same time. “Not another folly, I hope,” Minta said, a little breathless from the dressing ritual. “I did tell Frederick that the name has a clue in it—”

“It’s not a folly,” Helen interrupted, repressing a fond smile. “Take a look, you should see it out the window.”

Minta huffed, pretending offense. “I would, if you would take me.” She was still half-standing, half-sitting against the corner of her bed, stockinged toes barely visible beneath her hem. She could have made her way the four steps to the window, Helen thought, with the aid of the cane and furniture to support her, but she wanted Helen’s assistance.

Helen thought she might be losing the battle to hide affection from her face. “Come then, little tyrant.” She rolled the Bath chair from its place beside the dressing table and prepared it next to the bed. “Here,” she said, and slipped her arms around Minta’s waist, feeling the smooth, slippery fabric of her skirts, the warmth of the flesh underneath.

As she settled into the chair, Minta gave a tiny grimace of discomfort—Helen couldn’t be sure of the cause, but she disliked it. She pushed Minta to the window and drew back the curtain. “Can you see it? It’s a—”

“Yes, I see,” Minta said. Her face was unreadable. “It seems your architectural demand has been met, Miss Walker.”

“Demand!” Helen said, with more humor than she felt. “I don’t think I am in any position to be making demands.”

Minta glanced at her, eyes sharp and strange. “No,” she said, “perhaps not.”    

The ramp was finished that very afternoon, just before Lord Peter came to tea. Minta, Helen, and the Dowager Countess were sitting in the morning room, working on samplers when Lord Peter was announced by James. He came into the room, lightly mashing his hand in his hands. He had clearly ridden here from his estate, and his cheeks were ruddy with exertion.

“Ladies.” He bowed so deeply that the front bit of his hair flopped forward into his face. “How do you do?”

“Lord Peter,” said the Countess. “You are very welcome. A pleasing day for a ride, I hope?”

Helen couldn’t help a glance at Minta, to see if she found the conversation as stultifying as Helen herself did, but Minta was looking up into Lord Peter’s perspiring face.

“Very pleasing,” said Lord Peter, looking at Minta. Helen tilted her face away so she could roll her eyes.

“Would you care for a cup of tea, my lord?” said Minta.

“Indeed, I—or in fact, I would like to have a private interview with your ladyship, if you would be so kind.” He glanced at the Countess as he said this, as if to ensure that permission had been given. She nodded emphatically. 

Minta, strangely, looked at Helen—perhaps to garner some permission of her own. Helen, mouth dry, nodded too.

“I do believe,” Minta said quietly, her voice steady, “that we have a new addition to the back veranda that would make our perambulations easier to manage. Perhaps I might show you? If—” She blushed crimson “—if you would be kind enough to push the Bath chair, of course.” 

“Of course, my lady.” James appeared at Lord Peter’s back to take his hat and riding gloves, and he was taught to maneuver the chair through the crowded ornate furniture of the morning room, putting Minta’s ankles and table legs alike at risk. As they left, Helen could hear him say to Minta, “I would dearly like to see the tree peony, indeed.”

The greatest injustice was Helen and the Countess being left in the room together. They stared at each other for a moment. Then the Countess slumped back in her chair in an uncommon display of… slackness. “Thank God,” she said at last, with evident sincerity. 

Th ink of twenty thousand pounds for a single Dutch painting , Helen told herself. Think of the money to go to Italy at last. “Thank God,” she echoed. 

She excused herself after another moment in which it had become clear that the Dowager Countess did not care whether she remained or not. It was a near thing, forcing herself not to run down the corridor.

She dashed into Minta’s room, taking a tremendous risk that Molly would not be there, and found it empty. Silent and still and smelling of roses. Minta had left out one volume of Clarissa and a hairpin on her dressing table. The candles were burned down low from when she must have stayed up late reading the previous night. To be alone in that room felt more illicit than some of the downright illegal transgressions she’d enjoyed.

She went to the window, the same to which she’d taken Minta a few minutes earlier, and peeked out from behind the gilt-tasseled drape. She just glimpsed the figures of Lord Peter and Minta as he pushed her down the ramp and out of sight. In a moment she could see him from the neck up; Minta, sitting down, was obscured by the veranda railing. This vantage point was worse than useless. How Helen was meant to discern anything interesting from the face of the Viscount Honsford was beyond her. 

He was wearing his tall, narrow-brimmed hat again, his head no doubt boiling under the beaver fur, and he was squinting and nodding as he regarded a rose bush. Helen could imagine the botanical lecture Minta was giving him about imported French blooms and grafted hybrids. 

He was speaking now, his eyes cast down at her, and Helen was much too far to make out the words. She didn’t need to; she knew what he was saying.

Your Christian charity, your pleasing countenance, your aptitude for the natural world, your humble spirit, recommend you to become my wife—would you like to be a Vicountess, Lady Araminta—would you do me the honour—even if we do not have children, but I do believe we will—I shall be very fortunate if you would do me the very great honour— tripe, tripe, tripe.

Helen hated him. The way she hated all titled men.

She could hear her aunt’s voice in her head: if the job comes to a natural ending, end it yourself first. 

And the voice of the Dowager Countess: you are a paid friend to my daughter. And your services will no longer be required when she marries.

Helen forced herself, with a great effort of will, to block out this cacophony of imagined voices and focus instead on Lord Peter’s face. After a long moment, her stomach dropped. Blood was rushing in her ears.

He had begun to smile. 

Helen and Minta had no opportunity to speak alone until late that night, when the impromptu celebrations of the engagement had concluded. Lord Peter would return on the morrow, bringing his mother and sister by carriage, to begin planning the wedding and Minta’s move to Honsford Manor. Helen felt a low, roiling sickness as she endured all of this, and she was furious with herself.

She went to Minta’s bedchamber after nine o’clock to borrow a roll of ribbon that Minta had said she might use to trim an old and rather dowdy bonnet. When she came in, Molly was already gone for the night, and Minta was tucked in bed, plait sliding over her back and candlelight flickering on her thin cheeks. “Oh, hello,” she said. She sounded immensely tired.

“Don’t get up,” Helen said with a little smile, although it wasn’t exactly a joke. “I’ve only come for that ribbon that is supposed to save my sartorial life.”

Minta smiled. “You underestimate the effect of small gestures of polish. I keep telling you this.” She rubbed her eye with delicate fingers. “It’s in the top drawer of the vanity, right side.”

Helen found it and then sat on the trunk at the bottom of Minta’s bed. “I haven’t offered you any proper congratulations as of yet. Lady Honsford, I believe it will be? Viscountess Honsford? I don’t even know what to call you.”

Minta’s expression went flat for a quick moment. “Minta, you lummox. But yes, I suppose I will be the great Viscountess Honsford, goodness. May you all cower with fear.”

“Did he do a fine job of it?” She imagined Lord Peter’s earnest, sweating face, rambling in the garden.

Minta bit her lip, looked at Helen and then down at her hands. Her expression changed. “As a matter of fact, yes. He was quite—demonstrative. He said that he had often been arrested by my beauty but did not feel emboldened to act until the garden party. He—he made me blush.” Minta looked up as she said this, staring directly at Helen.

“Goodness. You must be overjoyed with happiness.”

Minta swallowed. “I shall be. I am. I shall be even more when I am the mistress of Honsford Manor. I will greatly like the ability to make my own decisions, and to have the affections of such a kind husband. He does not see me as a mere cripple, I think. I do believe we will make each other happy.” 

Helen received this statement as cruelty. This version of Minta was a stranger, and Helen felt frantic ( give her back). “I shall miss you,” she said. 

Minta blanched, her eyes wide. “There is no reason why you might not continue as my companion when I am the Viscountess.”

Helen shook her head even as she spoke. “Your mother made it very clear that I was to be employed as your companion until the event that you married. So unless—”

“Unless what, Helen?” Minta’s voice was brittle. She looked as though she were near tears, and perversely, rather beautiful for it.

She had been about to say, unless Lord Peter will pay my allowance . She could not say this—could hurt neither Minta nor her own plans with such brutality.

“When you marry, it will form a natural ending to my tenure here, and I shall return to London, to be near my aunt,” she said instead.

Minta’s eyes closed, and when they opened again all proximity to tears had gone. “Yes,” she said after a moment. “Perhaps that would be best. I will be dreadfully busy starting my life as Lady Honsford.”

Helen got up. “I imagine you will. I’ll bring the spool back as soon as I’ve cut enough for the bonnet, dear.”

She went back to her own bedchamber with her stomach spinning and lurching over and over, and the very clear thought in her head: everything is going according to plan. 

In her room she wrote a letter to her aunt but did not send it, tucked her letter knife back into the special pocket in her best overskirt, took a bit of snuff, washed her face, stared out the window and tried not to think about anything at all, used the chamber pot, cut a length from the spool of ribbon and left it on the writing table without affixing it to her bonnet.

She took the spool back to Minta’s room and, since she had not properly latched the door a half hour before, pushed it in quietly again. Minta might be asleep. She had looked so tired, before: the dim light not hiding the pallor of her face, the purple veins that branched at her temple and over her eyelids. Helen hoped she wouldn’t have another migraine.

She had taken two steps toward Minta’s vanity when she heard a small sound from behind the bed curtains. She stopped, not wanting to alarm the girl, but it sounded like a whimper of suffering. Helen had heard her make that noise before, the night she had stretched her sore leg, and another night too, when Minta had worked too long in the garden, causing her back and hip to seize up. It had been awful to see her that way, eyes shut tight against the pain, lips drawn and white, her voice small and childlike. 

It was remembering Minta in pain that made Helen enter the room, despite their recent quarrel. She did not speak, in case Minta was groaning in her sleep. When she stepped in, footsteps silent in her night slippers, she could see the twitching and twisting of the bedclothes from the corner of the room. Minta’s body was hidden by the bed curtains. It was very dark; only the moon through an open window and a single low-burning candle illuminated the room.

Minta’s breath caught—a hushed little gasp or a grimace. Helen winced at it, knowing the look of pain that might accompany it. But she might still be asleep. Helen wavered ten paces from the bed. Even if she were awake, Minta might not relish being visited by her erstwhile companion. What could Helen do to ease her pain?

Minta’s groan was softer this time, sustained and gentle. Like the groan of pain being relieved—a thumb pressed to a tight muscle, a piss after you’ve been in a carriage for eight hours, the weight of a hand on a jiggling knee. She sucked air in through her teeth, resettling her limbs in the bedclothes, making them tilt and shift.

Helen’s body went very, very hot. 

She took two steps backward toward the door and a floorboard creaked.

All sound from Minta’s bed stopped at once. Then, a little whine: “Helen! It hurts .” 

How had she seen? Helen could not see her. Only hear those sounds . “Minta,” she whispered. 

“Helen?” 

“Are you alright?” 

“My—my leg is cramping—that’s all.” She gave a little gulp, reorienting herself. “I didn’t know you were there. Simply whingeing, I didn’t mean to alarm you.”

Helen took a few steps toward the bed, and Minta came, disastrously, into view. She laid on her back in the lace-edged bedclothes, her spread and bent knees creating tents in the sheets. Her hair had fallen loose from its plait and spread in sweaty, mussed waves across the pillow. There was a touch of sweat on her brow and on her collarbone that created the dimmest sheen in the moonlight. The thin fabric of her nightrail, tacky with sweat, clung to her chest, over the slender mound of a breast with a pointed tip. Her eyes were soft and sleepy. Her hands were tucked into the sheets too.

Helen felt like burning. 

“I came to return the ribbon,” she said, her voice hoarse. “I shouldn’t have disturbed you.” She set the ribbon down on the vanity. “It’s not—” her mouth was dry and she had to wet her lips. “It’s not whingeing to groan with pain in the privacy of your own bedchamber, is it?” 

Minta huffed, but it was tighter, unhappier, than a laugh. “It is not very private, I think.”

“I’m sorry,” Helen said. “I thought you were—.” She pressed another way: “Would you like me to stretch your leg for you?” 

“No! That won’t be—it’s better now, you see. You’ve distracted me.”

Yes , Helen thought. That, I am good at. That, Lord Peter Honsford could not do for you. “I would hope I could do more than distract you. I ought to be a better nurse.”

Minta sighed. “On the contrary, I think. Distraction has great medicinal use to me. You have always—.” She sighed again. “It’s nothing of concern, Helen, just a cramp. Do not fret over me.”

Helen swallowed. “The trouble is that I rather enjoy fretting over you.” There, she had been too honest by half. “Sleep well, Minta. Call for me if you need me.”

➤➤➤ 

Over the next few days, the wolves descended: the vicar, asking Minta to select verses for the wedding ceremony, the Dowager Viscountess, Lady Honsford, inviting Minta to tea and hinting that she would like to remain living in the Manor, rather than moving to the Dower house, once Minta and Lord Peter married. More daunting still was the supreme London modiste making a rare visit to the country to fit Minta for a trousseau. It was the sort of ritual Minta had long ago stopped expecting for herself (stopped wanting for herself), and it was a bit surreal to stand there on one leg while a pretty, raven-haired woman in her early forties with a Town accent and a daringly bright green dress took measurements of her upper thigh, then her lower thigh, then her calf. It was clear that the modiste had never fitted a crippled girl before, and she watched Minta with an appraising look as if preparing for her to slump over onto the floor. But her hands were soft, excepting the fingertips, callused from pins, and her voice friendly and brisk. 

“Will you be requiring a honeymoon wardrobe for the Continent, my lady?”

Minta snapped back to attention. She had been thinking, predictably, of Helen. (Helen’s hands on her, Helen’s scent of peppercorns and grass.) “I beg your pardon?”

“I create lightweight gowns and petticoats, shawls and nightgowns, for ladies if they honeymoon on the Riviera, my lady. The temperature is quite warm, and you would not want your robust English garments.” 

Minta had often daydreamed about Italy and France, about warm evenings loud with the sound of the ocean tides, dishes bright with tomatoes and fresh fish. Roman ruins and hot sun. It was painful to imagine it with Lord Peter Honsford by her side. More painful still to know she would not have it at all. She could not mount the steep cobblestone steps of cliffside towns, and she would not want to sit in a seaside sanatorium with the consumptives and dream about those steps. Not alone.

“No, I shan’t be requiring that sort of wardrobe,” she said, face hot, “my condition makes it difficult for me to travel. My fiancé and I will take our honeymoon at home. The only special garment I shall need is extra-warm stockings for the wintertime in Town. My circulation is rather poor.” She looked up at the modiste as she said it. She refused to be ashamed of needing help.

“Of course, my lady.” It seemed as simple as that. “If you would like to sit down, I’ve finished the gown measurements, and it will take me a moment to prepare the last set.”

“Thank you.” Minta eased herself down onto the side of the bed, her good leg trembling a bit with the effort. She was tired from several poor nights of sleep and days of wedding planning. She wished that Helen was here, so that she might—. She cut herself off. She always wished Helen was here beside her, possibly always would wish that. Her wishes were inappropriate and a bit unholy, but worse, they were impractical. She could not live with a companion forever, and furthermore Helen would not wish… 

“The last step is for the private garments,” the modiste said. “You will have your choice of silks and lace for the wedding night. I understand it is an awkward subject, my lady, but no doubt you will appreciate being properly attired to please your husband. I suspect that your complexion will look very fine with a light blue silk like this one. It is dyed with grape hyacinth in France.” She held up the scrap of fabric to Minta’s shoulder, then her cheek. “Yes,” she said, appraising. “It suits you very well.” 

Minta’s mouth went dry, desire and dread all tangled together. She did not have the energy to protest. “Yes,” she said, “Whatever you think—I trust your judgment entirely.”

The last day before Mama, Frederick, Lord Peter, and all the rest were due to arrive to prepare for the wedding, Minta felt bored and frantic at once. Helen was scarce; they had hardly spoken all day. The day was still and hot, buzzing with insects and heavy with sunlight. Minta could not bear to be shut up in her bed chamber or the morning room anymore. Ordinarily she would have called for Helen to take her out of doors, and they would have spent an hour working in the rose garden or lazing under a tree, but now she felt shy and angry, both hurtful and hurt.

She called for James and had him take her outside to the roses. “Where would you like me to position the chair, my lady?” He asked.

“I shan’t need you, James. I will use my cane and sit on the edges of the beds, as I have been all summer.”

James looked uneasy. It went unsaid between them that Minta had managed this only with Helen’s help, and still each time left her exhausted and sore. Well. Helen would be leaving soon, perhaps only days after the wedding, and Minta could not depend on her if she wanted to move about freely. She would have to walk more and be unafraid of pain.

“It is alright, James, I promise. When I am ready to come in, I’ll send in a groom for you, or have him take me himself. You needn’t stand out here in the sun waiting for me.”

Especially when her only purpose in standing out here in the sun was to crush the small, grasping, soft-skinned thing inside of her that had to die.

James, clearly fighting his own training, bowed his head. “Very well, my lady.”

Then Minta was alone with the roses: a position she had forgotten how to cherish. She pruned and fertilized halfheartedly for a few minutes, feeling the house leering down at her, and felt a restlessness that was worse than pain. She needed to go further away. 

She turned and sat heavily on the walled edge of the flower bed, cane in her already smarting hand. There was a low throb in her bad leg, nothing unmanageable, and a strip of irritated heat on the back of her neck. What did it matter?

Letting the cane absorb the impact, she slipped down off the wall, catching herself primarily on her good leg. She would walk , really walk, as far as she could, and when she fell or could not otherwise go on, she would lie down and allow herself to feel truly sorry for herself for a quarter of an hour. Then she would yell for a groom like the helpless, entitled Viscountess that she was to be, and be carried back to the house, scolded, bathed, salved, and put to bed. If Mama scolded her for having an unbecoming sunburn, she would simply have to bear it.

She began in the vague direction of the folly: a stone and plaster building devised by her late father and designed to look like a Roman temple ruin. As a child, she had envisaged the space as a rendez-vous point for secret love affairs with a hazy-faced person who would be struck dumb with adoration for Minta. When the hazy-faced person arrived, she was a female governess ten years Minta’s senior, a woman who was kind to her, loved her without adoration, and left her to marry a village doctor. 

The folly, in Minta’s adult experience, was in reality a home to spiders and storage space for gardening equipment during the winter. Frederick was always threatening to expand it and Minta always said, to house which pagans? And her Mama said, children, arguing about ancient Rome and landscaping are equally unbecoming.

As Minta took her first steps toward the structure, she realized just how long it had been since she’d walked without additional supports. Each step was a lurch, painful and unattractive, and the uneven ground did not improve matters. Her feet began to sweat and chafe in her slippers, and she had to rest every few steps. There was a kind of angry calm rising in her as she moved. She was alone, and lonely, and powerless, and impossibly privileged. Her life was narrowing, calcifying. It was right for her to labor for each step here under the sun, while she still could. Each flower she saw made her angry that she could not always see it.

The pain in her hip and back was steady now, a heavy throb, and her weak foot was entirely pins and needles. Her hand and shoulder burned from the use of the cane. She was distantly aware that she may be too far from the stables and house now to call for a servant. 

Then there was a rock under her foot, barely discernable, and she was crashing to the earth. Grass was under her cheek, wet and warm, strangely flesh-like. Ouch , thought Minta without alarm. 

“Minta?” It was Helen’s voice, sounding too bewildered to be a fantasy.

“Helen,” she tried, without much air in her lungs. Again: “Helen? It hurts .” 

“You imbecile.” The words were hissed, and Helen was beside her, the hem of her skirts brushing Minta’s shoulder. “Have you broken something?”

“Hardly.” Moving as if through deep water, she managed to turn and look up at the other woman. Helen’s face was flushed with sun and streaked with dust. “Just—god, it hurts .” 

“Did you forget you can’t walk? I wager you are the only invalid I know who goes exploring. ”

“I walked far enough, didn’t I,” Minta mumbled. She was more aware of Helen’s body than her own: Helen’s shabby dress and ink-stained hands, Helen’s knees against her side, Helen leaning over her with her rounded, heavy bosom. 

“Yes, I suppose you did.” Helen drew up Minta’s skirts to the knee, then squeezed each leg from ankle to kneecap, feeling for breaks. It hurt; Minta whimpered. Hair had fallen in her face and she did not brush it away. “You’re alright,” Helen said then, unexpectedly gentle. “You’re alright, my dear. Just stupid.”

Minta laughed, a sad little thing. Helen’s fingertips were on her forehead, her temple. She was very stupid indeed. “Helen,” she whinged. She waited for Helen to scold her.

Instead Helen gripped her skirts and the fabric against her back and used them to turn her body, so she was lying on her back. Then Helen’s strong arms were underneath her, in the too-swayed curve of her back and the two-sharp bend of her knees. She huffed a breath in effort as she lifted Minta from the ground and held her bridal-style against her chest. Minta’s head lolled against Helen’s shoulder, and she could not stifle her own soft sound—surprise and discomfort and wanting. 

“I’m going to get you out of the sun.” Helen’s voice—Helen’s mouth—was very close. “Can’t carry you back to the house, can I?”

“I imagine you could,” Minta said, her voice childish and small to her own ears. “You’re very strong, aren’t you?”

Helen snorted, dismissive. She muttered something that sounded like obviously not . “What were you doing walking out on the grounds, my dear?” 

“I couldn’t find you,” Minta said. She hid her face against Helen’s shoulder, inhaled her scent, let her fingers touch the ragged ribbon-trimmed edge of her bodice. She had resolved so many times to be needless, to admit no weaknesses save the one that everyone knew. She tried to say, It’s nothing, I’m perfectly alright, but the words wouldn’t come. “I couldn’t be in the house anymore.”

With Minta in her arms, Helen walked the handful of steps to the folly and inside the false temple wall. Inside there was a floor of simple stone paving, the cracks filled in with grass and weeds. The shade was immediate and powerful, as if the stone itself gave up its coolness. Helen’s arms were trembling with effort, but she laid Minta down on the floor with great gentleness. She pulled a cloth from somewhere—what kind of filthy fabric was lying around the inside of the folly, Minta couldn’t imagine—and propped up Minta’s head. “Don’t move, now.”

Minta gave a ragged laugh. “I don’t imagine I could move if I wanted to.”

Helen glanced at her. “But you don’t want to?”

I always want to be where you are. It didn’t bear saying. “The shade is a great relief,” Minta said. “For a gardener, I have never cared for the sun particularly.”

Helen was moving around near Minta’s feet; Minta’s eyes were closed. Then she felt the laces of her slipper loosen, and the shoe itself pried from her painful, throbbing foot. Then the stocking. The cool air felt marvelous. Minta was weak enough to have lost her ability to dissemble. “It’s ugly,” she whispered. “I’m sure it’s—don’t look.” It was difficult enough to be seen by Helen at the best of times. Now—sweaty, blistered, and swollen—it seemed unbearable.

“Hush,” said Helen. She lifted the misshapen foot in her cool hands, avoiding the blisters, and wiped it clean with the hem of her petticoat. “Does that hurt?”

“No.” 

“Liar.” She looked up for a moment, loose lock of chestnut hair falling in her face, and smiled. A heartbreaking smile. “Nothing about you could ever be ugly, Minta. If you don’t know I think so, you are even more foolish than I assumed.” 

Minta felt the familiar wave of pleasure, the sort she needed to learn how to suppress. “Please stop,” she gritted out.

Helen’s hands, which had begun massaging her foot, stopped at once. “It hurts?”

“Not that. ” She closed her eyes again, felt them prickly with tears. “I will—I will not always have you near to say such things to me. I cannot become accustomed to it. You will…” She swallowed. “You will give me ideas.” 

Helen was silent for a long, terrifying moment. Minta heard birdsong and the whinny of a horse a long way off and the pounding of her pulse. Then Helen said, “Let me make you feel better.”

“You have done enough already. If you would have James bring out the chair—”

“Minta.” Helen’s voice was much closer now, and when Minta opened her eyes, Helen’s expression was strange and unreadable. “Forget about the chair right now. Let me make it better. I am in earnest when I say I wish to make you feel better.”  

Minta had to look away. She was sure that Helen knew what she wanted, that her own desire was laid bare in every expression and gesture. She could not ask for a kiss. “My back is the worst.”

“Turn on your side.” As she said the words, Helen came next to her to help her complete the action, her hands gentle and capable. “I’m going to unfasten your buttons.”

Minta had been undressed by a steady stream of nurses, governesses, and lady’s maids throughout her life. This felt nothing like that. This was Helen’s quick, clever fingers—thief’s fingers—plucking at the tiny buttons that fasted her bodice, then the stays. Only the thin fabric of her chemise separated Helen’s touch from her heated skin, and she could not help being aware of it, of desperately wanting the barrier gone.

Strong thumbs pressed into Minta’s shoulder blades, then the tense muscle of her midback, and she let out a yelp of pleased pain.

Helen stopped at once. “I’m hurting you.” 

“ Keep going ,” Minta gasped, not denying it.

Helen huffed. “Can you lie on your front?”

Yes, she could, the better to hide her expression, although the movement would be awkward. “Help,” she said meekly, and as she suspected, Helen helped instead of scoffing. “I never used to complain before I met you,” she said, “You have degraded my character and my elocution immeasurably.” 

Helen’s hand was on her hip, helping to ease her onto her front on the rough stone and old cloth. Minta’s skirts were up around her knees, her feet bare. “I bet you say as much to all the girls,” Helen muttered.

Minta hid her blush in the makeshift pillow, which smelt of dust and earth. Could Helen know that Minta had felt that way about a handful of girls, and admitted it to none before? “Don’t be cruel,” she said into the fabric. The stone ledge was hard and unyielding against her hipbones, her knees, her belly and breasts. An anchoring pressure against her desperation.

“You have never seen my cruelty, and you never shall. Now, tell me if the hurt is the wrong sort.” She set her hands to Minta’s back, rubbing and pressing in slow slides. The force pressed Minta’s breasts and the place between her legs more forcefully against the rock, and they throbbed in response, difficult to ignore. Difficult not to imagine Helen pulling up the chemise, exposing her pale thighs and backside and back to the cool air of the folly and to Helen’s hands. Perhaps Helen would say that all this, too, was not ugly. 

“It feels—mmm— good .” Minta’s voice was going slow and syrupy, and she was powerless to correct it.

Helen swore harshly under her breath. “That you think yourself ugly, or undesirable, makes me want to enact countless acts of violence,” she spat as her thumbs made gentle arcs over Minta’s lower back. “Everyone who has ever regarded you must be a perfect simpleton.” 

Minta knew Helen well enough now to understand these proclamations. She felt a shiver go down through her body, reaching everywhere. “And the sentence for idiocy is death, is it?”

It took Helen a moment to reply. “If I am honest, my lady, my feelings have been occasionally murderous over the course of this summer.”

She probably meant Mama, or boorish Frederick, or even Minta herself, with her fractious moods and endless demands. She could not believe that Helen was jealous of Lord Peter—certainly not enough to wish him ill. She could not let herself entertain fantasies of Helen’s possessiveness , of Helen wanting anything from her that could not be transported back to London in a mail coach.

“I did not think you a murderer,” Minta said lightly, her stomach clenching. “I thought your criminal activities only went so far as con artist. Forger, possibly. But I don’t think you’ve killed anybody.”  

Helen’s hands came to an abrupt stop on Minta’s back, and were removed. The silence was so complete that Minta could hear the horse whinnying again.

“It doesn’t matter, you know.” Minta’s voice was calm and detached, even to her own ears. “I think you could be guilty of anything and I’d still want you. Falsifying a letter of reference from an American diplomat’s wife is of no concern to me at all.”

Helen didn’t move, and then Minta could hear her swallow. Her voice was thin and bleak. “I was going to rob you, you know. The Van Dusen in the dining room. All the jewels in the house.”

“The Van Dusen? That landscape whose painter probably stank?” Minta was confused. An art thief in her house, in her bed chamber, carrying her bridal style to the foot of the folly. It was like waking up from a dream. Perhaps she was. 

  Helen huffed. “It’s worth twenty thousand pounds, Minta. And why aren’t you furious? If you knew that I was—why didn’t you say?”

Minta tried to breathe. She rolled over and laid on her back. She looked up at the plaster roof of the folly, rich and dark with cobwebs and rot. An ache started up again in her tailbone as it pressed into the stone floor. “Nothing in that house belongs to me. There is nothing you could steal from me, except for—.” She stopped in a rush, feeling her face color. “Don’t make me say it, Helen. You… you know why.”

Silence yawned for a long moment. Minta was waiting for her to run, to scoff, some horrible combination that would leave her alone. Her heart was pounding so hard that the folly itself might be shaking. She did not realize that her eyes were closed until she felt Helen’s warm, dusty hand on her cheek, and, as her eyes flew open, Helen’s lips upon her own.

The kiss was quiet and fragile, a press of lips and breath. Minta had never tasted anyone else’s mouth before. She could feel Helen’s eyelashes, her fingertips. Helen was trembling. That itself seemed like a miracle.

“You have ruined me,” Helen whispered, voice hoarse. “I am ruined.”

I was from the start , Minta thought. She pressed up into the kiss until Helen turned her face away.

Questions were crowding her mind; she wanted to beg for reassurance, to ask about Helen’s provenance and criminal plans, to request a kidnapping. Helen liked grand, unkind statements, but how was Minta to know what I am ruined meant? Possibly it did not mean what Minta hoped, what she herself felt—a disastrous, swelling, mauling love.

She was trying to shove the questions back in hopes of receiving another kiss when a voice came from outside. “Lady Araminta!” The voice was that of Hawkins, the groom. His voice changed, as if he had turned back to his audience. “She may have fallen! The chair is here!” 

Helen cursed against Minta’s temple, such a private little vulgarity that Minta shivered. “Later,” Helen hissed, and smeared a little kiss over the corner of Minta’s eye. “I will come to you, I swear it.”

Then suddenly she was rising, face too far away, and the grass-stained hem of her skirts floated over Minta’s shoulder. “I’ve found her!” She called to Hawkins. “I brought her to the folly, fetch the Bath chair!”

She turned back to Minta a final time, extended a hand to help her up to a sitting position, and helped her button her dress in a hurry. “Tonight,” she whispered, and then, as the groom and other male voices grew closer, she disappeared. 

Helen could not decide whether to ship the ivory carvings she’d stashed away in the folly under a tarp back to London, or to visit Minta’s room that night as she had promised. In the end, she did both.

She had long been accustomed to taking things that were not hers.

Without lighting a candle, she made her way down the wide corridor from her own bed chamber to Minta’s. Every step felt as loud as a musket shot. She should not be so nervous; she’d snuck around this house at night many times, learning its creaking floorboards and tight corners as she cataloged valuables that might be stolen or forged without attracting notice. Now, though—she had come for its treasure.

She opened Minta’s door without knocking and entered. A candle at the bedside was burning, a wealth of light to Helen’s dark-adjusted eyes. Minta was sitting upright in bed, a snifter of—was that brandy?—in her hand. She was wearing her nightrail with the bedclothes tucked up to her waist, and her hair was flowing in great spiraling curls over her shoulders and back.

When Helen got closer, she could see that Minta’s bottom lip was pink and wet from nervous biting, and she felt a simmer of helpless desire “Are you alright?”

Minta huffed, a little tremble in her breath. “I asked Molly to bring me a tipple, and I think it drove her quite mad, not knowing why.”

Helen put out her hand for the glass, and Minta surrendered it. “Ought I to ask why, as well?” She drained the dregs of the glass, clean smoke going down her throat, and put the glass on the night table.

Minta shook her head. “I suspect you know why,” she said, and even in the dim light, Helen could see her cheeks blooming pink.

She pushed back the arousal that was coursing through each vein. “You ought to interrogate me,” she said. “You ought to throw me out of the house. Really, you ought to have known sooner.”

Minta bit her lip again. “I know that now. I should—I should hate you.”

Helen, helpless to stop it, reached out to put her hand on Minta’s wrist. It was slender and cool. Helen wanted to pin it to the pillow and hold her down. “Let’s have it then,” she said, and heard a strange tendril of nerves in her own voice. “Do you hate me?” 

Minta sighed, and her blush deepened. “Helen,” she said, “won’t you—won’t you kiss me again?”

Helen swore under her breath. She grasped for a retort, a bitter little self-defense, and none came. She leaned forward and brushed her lips over Minta’s, senses overwhelmed by brandy, perfume, the brush of curls against her cheek. “Are you in pain?” She murmured. 

“Damn you!” Minta cried, more emphatically than Helen had ever heard her speak. Warm breath hit her cheek. “If you ask me again I won’t be able to bear it. You must—do you not want to—.” She swallowed. “Helen, if you feel anything for me at all, I beg that you would—”

Her tentativeness broke Helen’s resolve once and for all. “Are you simple-minded ?” She surged forward and trapped Minta’s body under her own, caged her hips between her bent knees. She grasped Minta’s chin firmly and drew it up until their eyes met. “You must be able to sense how desperately I want you, how I would ruin any scheme to elicit a smile from you, how your happiness is more important to me than endless stolen riches? Tell me you understand.”

“I don’t understand anything,” Minta gasped, but she was already tilting her head up to be kissed.

Their lips met this time in a crash, teeth in it, mouths parting and tongue sliding over Helen’s bottom lip. The softness of Minta’s skin could not be believed, nor the warmth of her body under Helen’s. Minta’s hands around her neck, grasping her hair at the root. She was tugging Helen down to meet her, fearsome now, the kiss deep and searching. She smeared her lips across Helen’s chin and under her jaw, imprecise and desperate. The throb in Helen’s groin was urgent and heavy, like pain. 

“Let me touch you,” she ground out. Every pretense of a clearer mind, a protective instinct, had fled. “Let me—I’m taking this off.” She plucked at Minta’s lace nightrail, which gaped over her sternum, the color of cream in the candlelight. 

“Yes,” Minta agreed, and then—heartrendingly—put her arms over her head to have the gown removed.

Helen did, completing the picture of the corrupting nursemaid. There was a swoop of expensive fabric over soft skin as she tossed it to the side. Minta was perfectly naked underneath: arc of collar bone, round filial of shoulders, a sternum that rose and fell with feverish breaths. She had small, pert breasts, white and smooth with narrow fawn-colored nipples that were sharply peaked. A narrow belly with a scar to one side, hips with the slightest flair, and a triangle of dark hair between them. Helen’s mouth was watering. 

She watched emotion flick across Minta’s face: a moment of terrified vulnerability as she was laid bare, a flash of hope, and then the settling expression of wanting as she gazed at Helen.

“Please,” she said, her voice rasping. It was lower than Helen had ever heard it. “You must— please , Helen, you too.” She reached for the hem of Helen’s skirts, yanking at the fabric, with the petulant greed of a rich girl who has always been indulged. 

Helen removed it, ignoring the pop of buttons as it flew over her head, and then her petticoat and waist belt and stays and chemise. There were rips and snags in the process, and Helen had only three good dresses, but she couldn’t have stopped for anything. Finally she was naked too, and she slipped down fluidly under the bedclothes so that their skins could touch. She pressed herself down on top of Minta, one knee between Minta’s legs, her arms on either side of her shoulders, belly to belly, and buried her face in Minta’s hair and neck. 

Minta gasped at the feeling of Helen’s body, gasped like going into cold water. Helen was tempted to do the same. There was so much skin touching skin, so much lovely pressure. Her breasts were heavy on Minta’s, and then Minta had her hands on her back, giving long silvery sweeps of her fingers and nails. Helen groaned, and felt, almost from the inside, Minta’s body react to her groan.

“Have you ever?” she whispered.

Minta shook her head, her lips crushed against Helen’s forehead. “I know you have,” she said, her voice only breath. “Would you show me?”

Helen could feel the courage it required for her to ask. She could barely speak. Not only desire, affection, but self-reproach. How difficult she was making things for this lovely girl. “Of course,” she whispered, “Kiss me again. Touch me wherever you like.” 

Minta gave a little sigh of anticipation, sweet as sugar, and put her mouth on Helen’s again. They kissed in long, gulping sessions, till their lips were raw. Minta’s small, talented hands—the ones that could cultivate fragile roses and untangle knotted thread—cupped her breasts between their bodies, rolling the nipples between her thumbs and forefingers. Helen had always loved that (how did Minta know?) and the sensation of pinching at those sensitive points made her moan, louder than she meant to, into Minta’s shoulder. 

“You can use your mouth there, if you’d like.” Helen’s voice was embarrassingly breathy to her own ears.

Minta swore—Helen had never heard her swear. “Christ.”

Helen smiled, but she could not laugh at her. She knew the delirious pleasure of getting what you craved for the first time. She propped herself up on her hands so that her breasts hung over Minta’s face, heavy and round. 

The girl’s kiss-swollen lips parted, her eyes dark. She lifted her mouth to Helen’s nipple and sucked , so sharply that there was a spark of pain, and Helen cried out. Minta’s hand came up to caress the other breast, squeezing and pinching, eliciting a tightening cinch of pleasure between her legs although nothing was touching her there. Helen thought she might lose herself to it without even a knee to rub on. 

When they stopped a moment to catch their breath, Minta huffed a rueful laugh into Helen’s chest, warm and humid.

“What is it?”

“Oh, nothing, only—” Her blush was barely sensible between the candlelight and the sensual flush of exertion already there. “It’s only that I’ve been staring like mad. And now—”

Helen tried to hide her surge of love with a chuckle. “And now you get your hands on me, little rakehell, so touch your fill.”   

“Don’t tease me,” Minta pouted, but then she applied her teeth to Helen’s nipple and won some authority back anyhow.

After a moment, she snaked her hand between their bodies, reaching for Helen’s cunny, but Helen stopped her gently. “I can’t let you simply service me,” she gasped, no matter how she throbbed. “Let me see to you first.” 

“You said I might touch my fill,” Minta whined, and to Helen’s dismay, she found she liked that petulant tone.

“Hush, little heiress, you’ll like this too.” She pressed a hasty kiss to Minta’s cheek, then her jaw, then her neck. Horrible sentimental lingering. Helen was doomed, she knew. She could not pretend otherwise, even to herself. 

Forcing herself to focus, she pushed herself down the bed, between Minta’s slender, much beloved thighs—soft, without much muscle, and tacky with sweat, and rather biteable. She looked up and saw the girl’s flicker of uncertainty. “You’re beautiful,” she said, matter-of-factly, and put her mouth to her.

Minta was salty-hot here, in the slick, private place where no one had touched her before, and she keened and sobbed until Helen raised her head to tell her to bite a pillow before she woke the whole house.

The look on Minta’s voice—the sound in her throat—told Helen that she perhaps liked to bossed about in that rude way. She’d remember that.

By the time Helen had wrecked her, Minta seemed to forget any self-consciousness about her legs. They were clamped around Helen’s ears, sweaty and trembling, as Helen wrung spasm after spasm out of her with her tongue.

Helen felt an uncompromised joy as she laid there between the legs of her employer, her heiress, in the estate house of the Earl of Trousdale.

“I don’t know how you did that, but I’d like to learn,” came Minta’s sleepy voice.

Helen laughed into her hipbone. “You’ve been a quick study so far.” She slithered up to lay beside her again, wiping her mouth as she went. “If I’m honest, I’d like something different, though. I don’t fancy that as much as I would you kissing me while you put two fingers inside me, in and out. Do you think you could?”

Minta blinked. “You want me to fuck you,” she said, as if she had solved a great puzzle.

Helen huffed; she almost felt a rare blush surface. “More than anything, my lady.” She took Minta’s lifted fingers and guided them to her entrance, teaching her without words to tease her, to gather the wetness there on her fingertips and swirl them about the opening and the bud just above it. Helen gave a little gasp as Minta got the hang of it, and her look of pleased concentration was enough to send Helen deeper into pleasure.

“Inside,” she said, ragged. “Don’t tarry.”

Minta didn’t; she breached her with two fingers, giving Helen that indescribable feeling of stretch, then fullness, then the glide. She hid her face against the impossibly soft skin of Minta’s chest.

“You are so vexing,” hissed Minta in tones of love. “You can’t know how I’ve wanted this. I think only of you, ever only of you. When you carried me down to the fountain—”

She thrust harder, and Helen sucked air in through her teeth. Something hurt . She wasn’t sure precisely what hurt, but it did. She clamped her eyes closed.          

When she came it was with a great roaring in her ears. All that was left in its wake was a joy that felt like terror.  Horribly human, horribly confined to her body, shipwrecked in the four-poster bed, a wreck of bedclothes and limbs. When she swam for the surface, she found one of her own shoes under her ear.

“Hush,” Minta said, and gathered Helen’s face against her bosom. Her fingers were in Helen’s hair. “It’s alright, hush.”

It took Helen a long moment to understand that Minta was comforting her because she had been making sounds. This was the kind of unseating that girls like her could not afford.

“We’re both criminals now,” she said. “Do you understand?”

Minta kissed her shoulder. “I understand, but not till morning.”

➤➤➤  

Minta awoke in the night with an ache in her hip; this was not new. The newness was in the warmth of the bed, the quilt pulled taut where it was weighed down by another body. The ache in her wrist and her inner thighs: all new. She lit a candle and drank from the cup of water at the bedside. She pretended that all could go on as it had begun: summer starting, roses blooming, Helen at her side, her mother far away. It had been like a Garden of Eden, she thought, and then had to roll her eyes at herself. To be lovesick was one thing, Biblical allusion another.

Helen stirred in the sheets beside her. Minta turned to look: her tawny hair was greasy at the roots and her face puffy with sleep. She was an imposter and a larcenist, Minta reminded herself, and, to her dismay, felt only a swell of pleasure at the thought.  

“I ought to leave before dawn,” Helen said quietly without opening her eyes. “Do you know the time?”

Minta lifted her candle to the bedside clock. “Only a few hours after midnight. Stay.”

Helen hesitated, considering. “I’ll stay, but I won’t go back to sleep.”

Minta felt a flush of pleasure. “Do you intend any further seduction?”

Helen laughed aloud and then pressed her face into Minta’s shoulder to muffle it. “Poppycock,” she said when she’d stopped laughing. “Absurd. It was you who did the seduction. I was rendered helpless against it.”

Minta bit her lip, relishing the privacy of her expressions. She wasn’t sure whether she was being teased. It was highly probable that all this wasn’t as serious to Helen as it was to herself. “It is the first time I’ve been accused of such.” 

Helen sighed and kissed her neck. “Not the last, I wager.”

That sent a twinge through Minta’s middle. She didn’t like to think about her life after Helen. After Helen there would be no seductions: there would be Lord Peter in a big house. That life was almost impossible to conceive. A household to run—a man in her rooms. His mother critiquing the dinner menus, perhaps, his sisters picking at needlework.  

“Would you like to seduce me again, little minx?”

Minta shook her head. “I want you to tell me the true story about yourself. I want to know about your life in London.”

Helen stilled for a moment, so still that Minta realized she had been moving before.

“You’re deciding whether to lie,” Minta said, stifling a yawn.

“No,” Helen said, the way a liar would.

“You know I’ll like it better if it’s small and unspectacular, don’t you? I’ll like it because it’s the truth. The more—” she yawned “—sordid the better.”  

Helen harrumphed and pinched Minta’s side, mumbling something about the most exasperating girl she’d ever met. Then she began to talk.

“I was born in Clerkenwell, east London. I have two elder brothers and two younger. My mother had been a lawyer’s daughter, very respectable, but she fell pregnant at sixteen and was cast out. She ended up with my father, a butcher, who was kind, and thoughtful, and got too many babies on her, but he died when I was seven. My mum sent me to live with my aunt, who could read and write and had two shillings to rub together.”

Minta smiled, absorbed in the listening. She rolled slightly to rest her chin on Helen’s arm. Their legs were tangled, her scrawny ones with Helen’s sturdy ones, but she didn’t mind at all.

“My aunt is a confidence artist of the first order,” Helen went on. “She looks like a little old matron, belongs to the war widows society and has tea with three different vicars. Every penny she’s ever had, she stole from someone who wouldn’t miss it. I have always admired that about her. She taught me lady’s manners, or at least she tried to. You might have noticed that they don’t come naturally to me.”

Minta couldn’t help it—she laughed. Long and breathless and giggly, muffled against the outside of Helen’s arm. “Your hair , darling,” she said, hearing the hopeless love in his voice. “It always looks like you’ve just climbed down an Alp.”

Helen laughed too, her arm reaching around to pull Minta into her side. “Hush,” she started, seeming to search for a defense and finding none. “Hush.”

“She taught you lady’s manners, and she helped you forge letters from American diplomats,” Minta said, finishing the story herself. “And when one of her vicar informants learned that a position as a lady’s companion was available, she helped you get the post.” 

Helen bit the inside of her cheek. “I thought it would be more difficult. I was prepared to discuss Plato and embroidery and The Mirror of Graces. I read that last one cover to cover, as a matter of fact, but I’m not sure a single word went into my head and stayed there. But yes, I came expecting to charm a difficult and capricious woman. Instead I—well, you know the rest. You hired me on the spot.”

“Yes, well,” Minta hid her blush against Helen’s shoulder. Being unclothed in bed together had not eliminated her shyness, at least not when it came to the softer feelings. She could not assume that Helen felt what she did; such a presumption would be far more destructive than any physical indiscretion. “Perhaps you do not understand how few people introduce themselves to me, rather than speaking to my mother or Frederick directly over my head. It is easy to charm me, I’m afraid. You managed it by asking me my name.” 

Helen stiffened for a moment. “Does Lord Peter speak directly to you? He must. He seems to be a very kind sort, despite his rank.”

Minta’s chest felt tight. “I don’t want to speak about Lord Peter, thank you.”

There was a pause, something reshuffling itself in Helen’s body. “Don’t you feel that we must? You are engaged to be married, Minta. Your fiancé is coming here tomorrow to speak to the vicar, and your mother to complete the trousseau. You will be married at the estate chapel in one week. We cannot wish that away.”

“You have been stealing from my family for weeks, and you are angry that I said yes to a proposal? For all I knew, each morning you might have been halfway to Dover with pockets full of diamonds.”

Helen huffed. “Yes. I don’t know where you picked up the idea that I am a rational person.”

“I have never labored under that misapprehension, thank you. But I do hope that you understand my predicament.”

“A predicament you chose !” Helen burst out. “You assented. He took you into the garden and you said yes.”

Minta was silent for a moment, rifling hopelessly through her thoughts. “I understand that I am a grotesquely privileged person, and I ought not to complain about my gilded cage. I am aware of the impoliteness of doing so, Helen, I really am. However, I cannot say that you understand the pressures placed on me to make this match. Without it, the estate’s finances will be in far greater trouble than you know, your little thievery notwithstanding. If I were not to marry him, I would be ruined. Conclusively. Both in this house and out of it. I would have—” she swallowed. “I would have nowhere to go. And without p-paid companions to push me, no way to get there.” Her heart throbbed in her chest. Stupid. 

Helen did not speak. There was the sound of trees rustling outside the house, and a beam settling within it. “I’m going to take the Van Dusen tonight,” she said at last. “My aunt is sending a coach, and I’ll be gone by daybreak, before your family and the Honsfords arrive. By dawn the next day I will be in London, and the day after that, the painting will be sold and out of our hands. There’s a chance that I will need to leave England. I was hoping that—. Well. You could come with me.” 

Minta stared at her. The revelations were coming too close together now. She’d had a whole summer of growing awareness, the dull ache at the back of her mind that told her everything that made up Miss Helen Walker was a lie. The knowledge had grown so slowly that it had not shocked her. But this: Helen’s long-planned final theft, her departure, her fleeing . Minta’s breathing was thin and shallow. 

“How could you ask me that?” 

Helen sighed; she sounded tired, as if she’d asked the question herself many times. “I’m aware I don’t have any right to.”

“Did you hear what I said about this match? About the necessity of the finances? My ruination?”

“Yes, I heard.” 

“And yet you asked.” 

“Minta, what would be the difference between being thrown out of this house and being free of it?”

She asked this devastating question so plainly that Minta’s brain stumbled to a halt. She could feel her blood seething through each vein, thundering in her temples.  

Helen blew air out through puffed cheeks. “I ought not to say that, it’s not kind. But Jesus Christ , my girl, they are selling you to that man to keep the estate afloat. They would sell you before they would sell an ugly painting. They speak over you, they keep you trapped in that house with that heavy, infernal chair, they treat you like an imbecile.”

“Do you not think you are doing the same by explaining all of this to me as if for the first time?” Minta was raising her voice. She swallowed furiously, and sat up in bed, turning her face away from Helen. She was humiliatingly aware that she sometimes liked when Helen said, hush, child , or told her what to do. Helen’s impertinence, her bracing, gentle-rude care, was better than freedom.

When Helen spoke again, her voice was strange and vulnerable, smaller than Minta had ever heard it. She sounded poor. “How can I trust that you truly care for me, when I am apparently the first person to treat you like an adult, like you have any value beyond her name? If you knew what you were worth, you would have left long ago.”

Minta, her eyes clotted with tears, spat, “If you do not realize that I love you as a woman should love only her husband, and with absolute certainty, then you are the imbecile.” 

Helen went slack, all at once. She pulled at Minta’s shoulder, tugging her down so they collided on the bed. Minta’s teeth clacked together as she fell, her skull bumping against Helen’s chin. It warmed her somehow. Helen’s fingertips found her cheek, her jostled head. “I’m sorry,” Helen whispered. “I have underestimated you before, and I vowed to stop it. Now I—I won’t do it again, Minta, I swear it.”

Minta could not explain to Helen that what she wanted most was not to be accurately esteemed, but to be loved. She said nothing. She thought of Lord Peter’s sweaty, smiling face, his sincerity and bleached-white manners. 

The silence between them took on a queasy, uncertain quality. All paths out of the quiet seemed equally impossible.

“I cannot stop what I’ve set in motion,” Helen said at last. “The coach will arrive at daybreak, and I will be on it with the painting before the Talbots descend. Unless you turn me in. I should consider that possibility.”

Minta choked on a breath. “Don’t be absurd.”

Helen turned to her, infinitely soft all of a sudden, and found Minta’s mouth with her own. The kiss was so gentle that Minta could nearly feel the invisible down over her philtrum caressed by a bit of papery skin on Helen’s upper lip. A kiss to burn a life down. “Come with me,” Helen said, her voice a sensation more than a sound. “We will get you a chair made out of cane and birch and go to the seaside. I will carry you on my back down to the water.”

Minta gave a little sob, more a clutch of air than anything. “I want to swim in the Mediterranean,” she said. “I’ve thought about it so often.”  

“Then come with me , Minta. We can live off the painting for a long time, and then we’ll—I don’t know, take in washing? Teach lessons? Steal the frescos off the walls of monasteries?” She laughed, a little desperate. “I want you to be there with me.” 

“It is impossible.” Minta thought about Helen dragging a flimsy Bath chair up the Spanish steps, down to a beach. Minta could not be a co-conspirator; she was a millstone.

Helen sighed. “I could beg. It is not in my nature, but I could beg, darling. Perhaps I have not conveyed how much I—well.” She shook her head a little. “Instead I will say: I will be on the coach to London in six hours. I could push the chair up to the main gate of the house, where it will retrieve me. If you have Molly bring you to the morning room before dawn, I will know that you want to accompany me to London, and then to the Continent. If you do not come, or leave me a sign—I will understand. I will try to understand.” Her voice wavered, and Minta’s heart with it. 

“Helen,” she said, and grasped at her arms, her back. “Helen.”

Helen mumbled something into her hair, something Minta couldn’t quite catch. She knew what she wanted it to be. Then Helen was squeezing at her, letting go, slipping out of the bed, going.

➤➤➤

Helen spent the night rolling small ivory figurines into her smallclothes. She felt the drag of day and night, secrecy and heartbreak, on her like grief. She had asked too much; she had been too honest; she had been so blind; she had not kidnapped the foolish, irresistible girl when she’d had the chance. 

She would not see Minta again, she knew. She would go to the morning room at dawn, but it would be empty, and Sam’s gig would pick her up, and she’d never see the girl or her garden or the creamy-pale insides of her thighs again. She deserved no better, either. 

The last order of the night was the painting itself. She crept into the dining room at 4 o’clock, trembling with fatigue, and simply… removed it from the picture rail. The chain was cool and dusty in fingers. The simplicity of the act made her angry, somehow. 

She slipped the painting between several layers of canvas and burlap she’d smuggled from the kitchens, tied it with twine, and packed it in her trunk between her knickers and her best dress, the hem of which was jammed full of mother of pearl earrings. Plunderer. 

As the darkness got stranger and thinner outside, she went at last to the morning room, planning to stay only a moment. She could not humiliate herself further, not to mention threaten her escape, by waiting for an arrival that would never come. 

The room, which was crowded with exquisite furniture, Persian rugs, and China figurines, was dark—not as dark as it should have been.

Helen stopped in the doorway, her heart banging horribly. Her own candle went out with the force of her breath (an amateur thief’s mistake).

The flickering orb of light from a small bedroom candle revealed Minta’s face. Her hair was drawn straight back against her scalp, and she wore her coat collar high around her cheeks. She was seated in the Bath chair with a valise in her lap, and she was alone. 

Helen’s stomach twisted. “Does Molly—”

“Molly won’t say a word.” 

“Minta.” Her voice was awfully tight.

“I ought not to—” Minta began, and hesitated. “Now is not the time for declarations. No, I have a demand.”

Helen could not help a witless smile. Oh, how she loved this girl. “Let us have it, then, little fugitive.”

“That’s just it.” Minta settled her shoulders. “You must kidnap me.”

Helen could only stare at her. “You realize that the plan is for us to run away together. I will not take you against your will, Minta, whatever else you think of me.”

Minta scoffed. “I daresay even you are too principled for that. No, we must make it a kidnapping. Otherwise I cannot accompany you.”

“You would lay all blame at my door. Protect yourself in case you wish to return. Send your family after us , in fact.” 

 Minta gave a careful glance at the door, and made her own voice quieter. “However we arrange it, Helen, I will be at your mercy.” She looked down at her lap. “If we ever parted ways, on whatever terms… I must have another means to protect myself from becoming an invalid, trapped in a single room, in a foreign land. I detest that I must make you the villain in this! You are more than a rescuer to me, I know that, and what I said about my feelings earlier tonight…” Her cheeks colored. “Staging a kidnapping gives us more options, both together and apart. I want you to make off with me, and make me your captive.” She gave a nervous laugh. “Do you understand?”

Helen thought that she did. “Put out your candle,” she said, voice clogged with emotion, and came to her and kissed her.

She pushed Minta out of the house as soon as it began to grow light in earnest, and carried her down the front steps before turning back for the chair. “I don’t suppose Bath chairs are meant to fit in two-seater gigs driven from London overnight,” Minta said, breathless, and Helen told her to hush.

They had left a note on the table addressed to the Earl of Trousdale: Send twenty thousand guineas by post to the Santa Chiara Hotel in Naples, or you shall never see Lady Araminta again. They had enclosed a lock of her hair, cut raggedly with Helen’s pocketknife. 

“Rather a halfhearted kidnapping,” Minta commented as they passed through the great medieval gates of Brookings Park.

“I’ll do better next time, with more planning.” With another thought, Helen added, “Don’t tell Sam I kidnapped you. He wouldn’t let me hear the end.”

Minta said she would not, and she kept her promise.

In London, they gave the painting and trinkets to the fence to be sold, which was accomplished in a matter of hours. There was no word from Brookings Park, although the Talbots and Lord Peter must have been arriving by that time. They traded in Minta’s Bath chair for a newfangled model, made of cane, which Helen could push without breathing hard and even pull up and down a few stairs. They sold their fine clothes (well, Minta’s were fine), and cut their hair, so they both looked like recent scarlet fever convalescents. Dressed in ragged linen gowns, they boarded a ship to Calais only three days after leaving Herefordshire for the first time.

It was not an easy journey to the Mediterranean, with the chair and their limited French and Italian. But in the end, they reached a hotel in Naples, studiously avoiding the Santa Chiara Hotel. They had no need of ransom funds, only of secrecy. 

Helen paid handsomely for a well-sprung coach to take them over the tiny dirt roads along the Amalfi Coast until they reached Marina del Puolo, where there was a convalescent hotel with vast, smoothly-paved courtyards overlooking the water. They booked in under assumed names, paid in advance for two weeks, and fell into the room’s one double bed, stinking and exhausted. In the morning, there were basins of clean water to wash in, and cornettos and espresso and long, coy touches at the mirror and the window, until Helen gave in and took Minta back to bed. They hadn’t touched this way on the whole journey, too exhausted and frightened of thin inn walls and Talbot-hunters. Now, anonymous in this shabby seaside town, they could take their time.

Afterwards, Helen took Minta down a steep, sandy path—the only one nearby without stairs—to the water. There were callouses developing on her palms from the handles of the chair, and Minta had kissed them this morning in bed. She stopped the chair at the overlook point over the water, where steep stone stairs marked the way down to the beach.

“It’s alright,” Minta said quickly. “Just to look at it here—Helen.” She swallowed. “I never thought I would see it. I shall never be able to repay you.”

Helen snorted. “I don’t want repayment , foolish girl. I want you to get on my back.” She gave Minta a hand out of the chair, helped her balance, and then held still while Minta climbed onto her back. A wave of pleasure went through Helen to feel the warm weight of her body. 

“You’re touched in the head, you know.” Minta’s voice was soft and breathy in her ear.

“And a kidnapper, to boot,” Helen said, grunting as she managed the first step.

“That was one of my favorite bits.” 

They got down the stairs, moving slow, and Helen staggered across the sand until she was knee deep in water. “It will be cold,” she warned. “And the current will push you around. Just sit, to start, and we can go deeper.”

“Yes, love, I know.”  

She helped Minta down, their skirts swirling in the foamy water. They both sat cross-legged in the rippled sand, cold waves sloshing around their waists, and looked at each other.