“Awful,” Edilean said as she looked about. “Why am I in your room?”

“You’ve been asleep for a couple of days and it was easier for me to watch over you in here.”

Edilean lay back against the pillows. “Why did I sleep?”

“I drugged you.”

“You-?” She sat up abruptly, but then it was as though all the blood rushed to her head and it felt like it might explode. She fell back against the pillows with a groan. “What happened?”

“What do you remember?”

Edilean turned and looked at her with eyes as hard as steel. “I don’t know what I remember. I want to be told the truth. What happened?”

Harriet sat down on the chair by the bed. “Do you remember Angus coming to your room?”

It took Edilean a moment, but then she remembered every second of that night, every word, every touch. Most of all, she remembered the way she’d begged him to marry her and take her with him. But he’d turned her down. Spurned her. Tossed her away, as though she were worthless.

“Yes,” she said at last. “I remember all of that. But why am I…?” She looked at Harriet. “I tore up my room.”

“Yes,” Harriet said. “You cut the bed to ribbons with your penknife and you broke all the furniture except for the big chest. You even cut up your pretty dresses.”

“Good,” Edilean said. “They were never mine anyway. Who brought me in here?”

“Cuddy.”

Edilean looked at her in question.

“Cuthbert, the second footman. I’m afraid I’m going to have to let him go. He enjoyed holding you to the bed much too much.”

“Don’t discharge him, give him a pay increase,” Edilean said. “It’s nice that some man on earth wants to touch me. I guess you gave me laudanum. Your brother was a master at passing it out.”

For a moment Harriet didn’t say anything as she looked at Edilean. “Please don’t let this make you bitter.”

“And what should it make me? Happy that I got away from a man who doesn’t want me? I could have married him and spent the rest of my life trying to prove to him that I was more than just a useless piece of fluff. You know what he told me? That he should marry someone like Tabitha.”

“And who is Tabitha?”

“A thief on the ship, one of the women prisoners. She told Angus a long story about how she’d been unjustly punished because she fell in love with her employer. She even said she’d given birth to his stillborn child. Oh! And having the baby was why she stole in the first place. According to Tabitha, the Holy Mother wasn’t as good as she is.” Edilean looked at Harriet. “You know what the truth was?”

“What?” Harriet asked, frowning, her worry about Edilean’s anger showing.

“Margaret told me Tabitha was one of the best pickpockets in London.”

“Margaret?”

Edilean waved her hand. “Another one of the prisoners. She did some sewing for me. Margaret told me that Tabitha had grown up on a farm, but she ran off because she wanted the excitement of the city, and that’s where she learned how to pick pockets.”

Edilean raised her fists in the air. “But Angus believed every word that lying woman said! She told him a sob story about her life and he swallowed it. He was like a fish taking the bait and waiting to be reeled in. Yet he never believed anything I said. I told him I’d had a difficult life and he said I’d always had the cushion of my father’s money to fall back on.”

Harriet put her hands on her lap and didn’t look at Edilean for fear she’d see the agreement on her face. Maybe Angus was wrong to believe a thief-if he actually did-but he wasn’t wrong in his assessment of Edilean. She took the way Harriet ran the household and looked after her in stride, never once questioning that these things should be done for her.

Edilean again tried to sit up on the bed but collapsed against it, as she was still dizzy.

“You still have the laudanum in your system,” Harriet said as she went to her. “I think you should sleep some more. Tomorrow will be soon enough to-”

“Start a new life?” Edilean asked, one eyebrow raised. “Another one? A new life when my father died, a new life with my uncle, a new life with James, and now I’m in a new life in a new country. What am I to do this time? Choose one of those namby-pamby men you introduce me to and marry him?”

Suddenly, Harriet had had all she could take. “If you don’t want a namby-pamby man, then you should stop being such a delicate lady.” With that, she left the room, closing the door loudly behind her.

“What does that mean?” Edilean called out after her. “I’m not delicate, I’m-” She started to get up, but her head hurt so much that she lay back down. She stayed in bed but she didn’t sleep. Later, she heard Harriet closing up the house before she climbed the stairs and went across the hall into Edilean’s bedroom and closed the door. She didn’t say good night.

“Why does everyone think I’m worthless?” she whispered in the dark. Angus said she was a woman who waited for a man to rescue her and that they always showed up. While it was true that James had rescued her from her uncle, and Angus had saved her from James, there had been times in her life when she’d done things on her own. She’d…

Think as hard as she could, she couldn’t remember a single time when she’d been her own rescuer. Just as Angus had said, she sat in one place and waited for a man to come and fix whatever was wrong in her life.

Since she’d been asleep for days, she didn’t want to waste more of her life unaware of what was going on. It was still night when she got up and went downstairs to Harriet’s big secretary desk in the parlor.

First, she needed to take care of Angus. When she thought of the night he’d climbed into her bedroom-if she could put her mind away from the touching and the kissing and the way she’d humiliated herself-she remembered that she’d sensed there was something wrong with him. For one thing, he’d lost weight. For another, his clothes were worn around the sleeves. The diamonds had been enough for him to buy new clothes, but he hadn’t. Why? Was he too cheap to shell out the money? For all that she knew him, she really didn’t know how he handled money.

She spent hours thinking while drawing a pen and ink sketch of a face she knew as well as her own.

When the sun came up, Edilean went upstairs to dress. She quietly knocked on her bedroom door, and Harriet answered. She was already dressed for the day. “Are you still angry at me?” Edilean asked.

“I don’t like the destruction of property, and I truly hate feeling sorry for one’s self.”

“Not me,” Edilean said. “In fact, I’ve thoroughly mastered self-pity.”

Harriet couldn’t help but smile.

“But I’m going to stop it,” Edilean said. “As of today, I’m no longer going to sit in one place and wait for some man to come rescue me.”

“And what does that mean?”

“I have no idea in the least,” Edilean said brightly. “But I do know that I don’t want to end up old and alone. Oh!”

“It’s all right, it wasn’t what I wanted either.”

Edilean’s face turned red at her faux pas, but she smiled. “When I get what I need to do done, I’m going to find you a husband.”

“Oh, that’s a good one,” Harriet said. “And how will you do that? Conjure him from a bottle?”

“If I have to, I’ll buy him.”

Harriet blinked at her for a moment. “With a farm?” she asked softly. “Not a large one, but something nice with big trees. A widower with children would be all I want in life.”

Edilean stared at Harriet, unable to say anything. They hadn’t been together for long, but during that time she’d never once thought that maybe Harriet would like something more in her life than taking care of Edilean and listening to her bellyache all day about how boring her suitors were. “Widower with a farm and children,” she said. “I’ll do it if I have to buy all of Boston.”

“Your belief that you can do anything and that you deserve everything is what I like best about you-and what drives me mad.” Harriet picked up a stack of clean linen and left the room, but she was smiling.