“And does Joe work for Mr. Kedge too?” Penelope asked. It was a rhetorical question, to fill the strangely awkward silence; they were on land leased to Tom Kedge.

“He did.” Agnes’s gaze flicked to Nev for a moment.

“Oh, I’m sorry-are you a widow?” Penelope asked.

“Joe ain’t dead,” Agnes flashed.

The boy in the corner looked up. “Papa went to ’Stralia,” he said, very clearly.

I should have seen that coming, Penelope thought, angry with herself. “Do you do all right on your own?” It was a foolish question. Agnes was alive, but for any other definition of “all right” she very clearly wasn’t. And there was no answer that wasn’t humiliating.

Nev went into the corner and sat down across from the sallow little boy. He pulled something from his pocket and spoke to him in a low tone. Penelope forced herself not to strain to hear what he was saying and listen to Agnes.

“I do all right,” Agnes said. “I have help from friends in the village. My brother sends me money from America when he can, and my daughter, Josie-” Tears glimmered in Agnes’s eyes. “I’d like to keep her at home”-Josie rolled her eyes-“but we used to spin for the woolen manufacturers in Norwich, and since the mill opened up there’s no more of that work.”

“Are you able to get help from the parish?” Penelope asked.

Agnes’s face twisted. “No, my lady. I’ve lived here ten years, but Mr. Snively says I haven’t got a settlement. Mr. Snively says I’d have to go home to Harwich and go on the parish there.”

“We’d have a settlement if you married Aaron,” Josie said.

Agnes turned bright red. “Don’t make me slap you, Josie Cusher! I’m already married to your father, in case you’d forgotten.”

“Aaron-” the little girl began to insist.

“Does Mr. Snively decide who gets poor relief?” Penelope broke in.

Agnes looked at once relieved and disgusted. “He’s the head of the Poor Authority, isn’t he?”

Penelope’s eyebrows rose. Mr. Snively hadn’t mentioned that. “I’m sorry. I’m new here, and there are a lot of things I don’t know. I hope you will be patient with me. I mean to help you and the other people here, if I can.”

Agnes’s gaze dwelt almost insultingly on Penelope’s fine clothes and smooth hands. Penelope’s gown was plain, but it was neat and clean and new. Agnes’s dress was none of those things; it was ragged and threadbare and dirty-not even patched, because the fabric was too thin to hold stitches.

“If you wished to go to Harwich, I daresay we could pay your coach fare,” Penelope tried.

“How would Joe find me then?”

“Couldn’t you write to him?”

Agnes looked almost pitying. “I don’t know how to write.”

“I could write it for you,” Penelope offered.

Agnes sighed. “Thank you, but I wouldn’t know where to send it-he don’t have a proper address, like.” She paused. “’Tisn’t like for you, your ladyship. Joe and I don’t write to each other. Joe did send me word once or twice, at the beginning-but he had to pay someone to have it writ, and then he’d to pay to send it, and then I’d to pay to get it and find someone who could read it back to me. A year ago, a letter came, and I hadn’t the sixpence to pay the postage.”

Penelope’s eyes widened. “But-”

Agnes shrugged, hard-faced, but Penelope saw real grief in her eyes. “The baby was sick.”

Penelope wanted to ask more, to clamor Wasn’t there anything you could have done? The thought of the unclaimed letter filled her with-it wasn’t quite frustration, and it wasn’t quite anger. It was more like a restless need to do something. Penelope had always believed that if you put your mind to it, worked hard, and didn’t whine, there was no reason you shouldn’t solve nearly any problem. She was beginning to realize that she had never had such huge, hopeless problems as this woman.

There was an unexpected sound in the tiny cottage-the little boy giggled. “Do it again!”

Nev reached forward and pulled a shining sixpence from behind the boy’s ear. He clapped and reached for it, but Nev twirled his hand and it disappeared. Penelope’s heart sank-but she had misjudged Nev. “Look in your pocket,” he said.

The boy did-and there was the sixpence! His eyes went round-and then he closed his fist on it, and put it behind his back. “It’s gone,” he said, slyly.

“Kit, give Lord Bedlow back his sixpence,” Agnes said in a low voice.

Nev looked startled. “He can keep it.”

“I couldn’t-” Agnes stopped herself. “Thank you.” Penelope had always supposed that pride was the one thing that could not be taken from you; now she saw she had been wrong. “Say thank you, Kit,” Agnes said, almost desperately.

But Kit could not say thank you. He could only stare at his fist, and then at Nev. Josie too was staring. Nev shifted awkwardly.

As she and Nev were leaving, Penelope heard Agnes say, with a catch in her voice, “Tomorrow we’ll go into town and buy some real bread. Would you like that?”

“Can we buy some bacon too?” Kit asked.

“Not this time, sweetheart.”

Penelope thought of her own generous helping of bacon at breakfast that morning. Nev must have been thinking the same thing. “Tell Cook to send them some bacon.”

“Can we?” Penelope wanted to, but-“It wouldn’t be fair, unless we sent them all bacon.” She did not know how to talk about Agnes’s indefinable anger. Would a gift of food trample the woman’s pride too far?

“Then we’ll send them all bacon.”

“But we can’t afford it. Not until New Year’s, at least.”

“It seems ridiculous to say we can’t afford something, after seeing that home,” Nev said stubbornly. “We’ll stop eating bacon ourselves and send them that-”

She was touched-she hated being the parsimonious, logical one. But her accountant’s mind could do no other. “ Nev, we’re two people; we don’t eat much bacon to begin with. And the servants eat what we leave. If we don’t eat bacon, they can’t eat bacon. There must be other things we ought to spend the money on first. I don’t know-plows, or something.”

“Couldn’t we-” Nev lapsed into frustrated silence, and Penelope would have given up a lot more than bacon to take that hopeless look off his face.

“Never mind. We’ll send Kit some bacon.”

One look at his buoyant grin, and Penelope went up in a blaze. So this was passion.

Did it mean she was common? Gentlemen felt passion, of course. But ladies weren’t supposed to or weren’t supposed to give in to it. Immoderate feeling of any sort was to be shunned. Just because one enjoyed eating cake, that didn’t mean one should eat cake with every meal, or one became fat and slothful and a slave to one’s desires. It was all too easy to see how it might happen-she would have let Nev do anything to her, anything at all, right there on the breakfast table.

Control, restraint, elegance-they were all synonymous with that indefinable something that made you gentry and not common. Excess was wearing bright colors and crying in public and talking too loud and eating in big bites and all the things that Penelope had trained herself never, ever to do, ever since her first day at Miss Mardling’s. This was just one more thing to add to the list. I am just as good as that stuck-up Lady Bedlow, she told herself. My parents are worth a hundred of her. I will not give her justification to sneer at me and call me common. I will be a lady if it kills me.

“Penny for your thoughts?” Nev tilted his head, pondering. “There’s a pun there, I’m sure of it.” He flashed her another grin and her breath caught in her throat.

It might really kill her.

That evening Lady Bedlow and Louisa were expected at the Grange for dinner. I would invite you to the Dower House, but I’m afraid I can’t afford to provide the kind of fare that your bride must be accustomed to, Lady Bedlow had said.

Nev watched his family walk in, feeling unexpectedly and uncomfortably as if he were ranged with Penelope against them.