“Anne,” Joshua said, turning to her as they made their way up Sutton Street toward the school. “I am sorry Sydnam Butler does not live closer to Bath. Yours was a friendship we all watched with interest.”

She was very glad she had not realized that at the time.

“It was just a friendship,” she assured him.

“Was it?” He looked into her face.

But they had rounded the corner onto Daniel Street, and Claudia and Susanna, alerted by the arrival of the carriage with their bags, were out on the doorstep watching for them. Anne was swallowed up in hugs and greetings and laughter. And just as she drew free and looked beyond them to the doorway, she saw another lady standing there, looking tall and dark and slender and elegant and exquisitely fashionable-and smiling joyfully.

“Frances!” Anne exclaimed, and stepped into her open arms.

“Lucius and I are just back from the Continent,” Frances, the Countess of Edgecombe, told her, “and came to Bath on our way home to see if one of you would like to spend the final two weeks of the holiday with us at Barclay Court. Susanna is going to come. Anne, how delighted I am that you have arrived home just in time for me to see you. I never stop missing you. And just look how bronzed you are!”

Frances had found love in a snowstorm when her carriage ran into a snowbank, driven there by the reckless driving of the earl and his coachman as they overtook it. It had been hate at first sight-and love ever after. For some time after Frances’s wedding the three remaining friends had looked at life with more hope, though they had not admitted as much to one another.

“I would have hated missing you,” Anne said. “Oh, Frances, just look at you.”

But she turned back to the doorway before going inside and could see that David was right up in Joshua’s arms out on the pavement, his arms wrapped tightly about Joshua’s neck, his face buried against his shoulder. Joshua had one hand spread over the back of the boy’s head and was kissing the side of it.

Anne’s eyes were blinded by tears and she blinked them away.

Why did everything wonderful have to be left behind? she wondered. Why was life so heavily punctuated with good-byes?

Joshua set David down, cupped his face with both hands, kissed his forehead, and turned to Anne.

“You have done a fine, fine job with him, Anne,” he said, reaching out his right hand. “He is a great lad. I’ll write from Penhallow.”

She set her hand in his as David darted past her into the school, not pausing to greet any of the ladies or even Keeble, one of his favorite people.

“Thank you again,” she said.

“Anne,” he said, lowering his voice and tightening his grip on her hand, “you are doing a fine job, but that lad needs a family. And there is one waiting to acknowledge him in Cornwall-Prue and Ben, Constance and Jim Saunders, Freyja and me. And Chastity and Meecham too, though they don’t live there. David has aunts and uncles and cousins even if he was born out of wedlock. You must at least think about telling him something of his lineage. Will you?”

“I can look after my own son, Joshua,” she said stiffly, withdrawing her hand. “But I do thank you for being so kind to him.”

“I’ll write,” he said, shaking his head, clearly in frustration.

“Good-bye, Anne.”

“Good-bye,” she said, and watched him until he had turned the corner and gone out of sight.

But there were different kinds of good-byes, she thought. This one was not heart-wrenching for her, though it clearly was for David. She would see Joshua again-perhaps as soon as Christmas.

She would never see Sydnam again.

Not ever.

Susanna linked an arm through hers and she stepped inside the school with her friends.

She was back home and it was good to be here.

But never was an awfully long time.


By the time Anne got David to bed that night she seemed finally to have convinced him that Christmas was not so very far away. He had been partly consoled too by the interest Matron and several of the girls had shown in his holiday. He had regaled them with tales of where he had been and what he had done.