Chapter 2
Danielle Allard removed the books from her marketing basket and replaced them with apricot tarts. Perhaps she’d have time
to read and perhaps she wouldn’t (she would not), but the committee would welcome the tarts, this was guaranteed. Everyone
loved Miriam’s tarts, especially Dani herself, and she popped one in her mouth as she breezed from the bedroom.
“Dani?” came a call from the kitchen. It was Whittle, his voice gentle but expectant. Speaking through the pastry, Dani shouted
a muffled farewell.
“May we bend your ear for a tick?” Whittle pressed.
Dani waved over her shoulder, determined to reach the St. Andrew’s church before the others. There was no time for ear bending.
Giles Stinchcomb would be at the meeting, and Dani should be seated at the head of the table before the battle royale commenced.
Quiet authority was borne of poise and preparedness. Nothing was achieved in a blind rush.
“Moppet?” Whittle called again, his voice louder now.
Dani turned back, pulling the tart from her mouth. She saw them then—her surrogate parents, huddled together in the kitchen
doorway. Their faces were ashen and dark circles ringed their eyes. They held to the door as if heading a strong wind.
Dani paused. “What’s happened?”
“But will you sit, Moppet?” asked Whittle.
“Yes,” agreed Miriam stridently. “Let us all sit.”
Sit?
Dani frowned at the sofa and four chairs in the small parlor of their cottage. Sit? It was not their habit to cease the activity of an otherwise busy morning to sit. They were not a family of choreographed sitters. They shouted through windows, and leaned against kitchen counters, and
reclined on the rug in front of the fire. Even lectures (or on the rare occasion, scoldings) came with no preamble or formality.
Miriam, in particular, could informally lecture Dani for a good quarter hour and no chair was required.
Now Miriam and Whittle Dinwiddie bustled to the sofa like guests in their own home.
“Has someone died?” Dani asked slowly.
“No,” Miriam said, the word carefully drawn out, “no one has died.”
So what is it? Dani raised her eyebrows.
They weren’t looking at her; they stared at an adjacent chair, clearly waiting for her to inhabit it. A cat called Lemonade
reclined on the slouchy cushion, an orange leg in the air as he groomed. It was Lemonade’s prerogative to sit all day long,
but he was a cat.
Sighing, Dani shooed the animal away and dropped into the seat. She was in possession of a very strong will but she was not
defiant. She reclined and licked crumbs from her finger. “I’m here.” She sighed to the tart. “I’m listening. I’m sitting.”
“We’ve something important to tell you, Danielle,” Miriam began. Another cat, a short-hair gray called Misty, leaped into Miriam’s lap but she returned the animal to the ground. In her hand, she clutched a thick rectangle of folded parchment.
Dani paused, the tart halfway to her mouth. Rarely, if ever, was Dani addressed by her full name. And never, ever did Miriam
Dinwiddie put off a cat. Whatever they were about to tell Dani must be very grave indeed.
“We’ve received a letter,” continued Miriam, “several letters in fact . . .” More folded parchment was added to the stack
in her hand, pulled from the depths of her pocket. Miriam stared at the bundle like a dead bird.
“Am I meant to . . .” Dani ventured, “read these letters? Are they from your cousin in Bedfordshire? Not her rheumatism again, I hope—”
“You are to be married, Dani,” blurted Miriam. After she said it, she squeezed her eyes shut.
Dani stopped chewing. She gulped the pastry down her throat. Very slowly, she rolled from the seatback to sit up. “I beg your
pardon?”
“Forgive me,” Miriam breathed, blinking through tears. “Whittle and I have just received word, not two days ago, and we’ve
not known how to say it. We’ve not known how to reckon with it. This day was always coming. We knew it would come.”
And now it was Dani’s turn to close her eyes. Behind her lids, she saw a painfully bright light. Her brain was on fire. “Married?
Married to whom? And for God’s sake, why?”
Miriam pursed her lips and shook her head. Meanwhile, Dani could barely keep her mouth from falling open. She scooted to the
edge of her seat.
“Sorry. Let us begin again,” Dani said. “Deep breath, Miriam. That’s right. Go back a bit and repeat everything. Please.”
“What we’re trying to say, Moppet,” said Whittle, “is that a marriage has been arranged—that is, your marriage has been arranged. For you. You are to leave us. Not far, apparently, but not—”
“Do not say the word marriage again without saying to whom,” Dani cut in.
She looked about the room, assuring herself that she sat in a known house, surrounded by known parents and known cats, within
her known life. This was not a dream.
“And by whose authority?” Dani continued. “Who has arranged for me to marry? And why have the two of you learned of it by post?”
To these questions, Miriam and Whittle seemed to have no answers. They huddled together on the small sofa and gazed at her
in silence. They looked wretched; they looked like someone very dear to them had been lost at sea.
“Miriam?” Dani prompted. “Miriam. Married to whom? What you’re saying makes no sense.”
Dani entertained no suitors. Courtships with local men had been discouraged by Miriam and Whittle. Their reasoning had been
vague, but they’d referenced Dani’s rank and the lack of appropriate men in the vicinity. In fact the only thing more vague
than the lack of appropriate men was Dani’s “rank.” It was a nonspecific elevated station that no one ever discussed and had
been a mystery to Dani for so long, she’d given up trying to learn more about it.
Conveniently, she’d also lacked interest in the young men of Ivy Hill. The farmers and tradesmen and even the educated sons of the village’s most successful merchant were sweet and earnest but also very dull. She’d not thought of marriage because she’d yet to encounter anyone she wished to marry.
For years, Miriam and Whittle had made promises of a London Season, but Dani had celebrated her twenty-second birthday in
the spring, and surely the time for a London debut had come and gone. Honestly, on the rare occasion Dani thought of “marriage,”
she dreamed about the privileges of adulthood it would bring, not the man who would be the conduit. She longed for her own
home to manage, independence, more authority in her committee work. Any bridegroom in these fantasies was a nameless, faceless
means to an end. And now this? It made no sense.
“Remember, Moppet,” began Whittle, “we’ve always said the parents of your birth . . .” He paused, wiping his brow.
Dani turned to him, a little stunned that he’d waded into the conversation.
Silas “Whittle” Dinwiddie was a man of few words.
He was especially silent during tense conversations or emotional reckonings.
When he spoke it was only to praise and tease and reminisce about “days gone by,” in St. James’s Palace.
And neither he nor Miriam ever raised the topic of Dani’s actual parents.
On the rare occasion that Dani’s birth parents were discussed, the reference would be worshipful but nonspecific, as if they were long-dead saints.
The parents of her birth were revered for their goodness but irrelevant for their absentness.
Dani had been told only that they were very esteemed, and this esteem came with grave danger.
And grave danger had been unsafe for a little baby.
When she was older, the danger was also too grave for a little girl.
In the end, the parents of Dani’s birth had represented too much grave danger to Dani at any age.
And this great unsafeness precluded knowing a single other detail about them.
Miriam and Whittle, being childless but very much wanting to be parents, had been chosen as surrogates.
They’d been the only mother and father Dani had ever known; beloved parents in the truest sense.
Add to this Dani’s innate practicality, her contentedness with the here and now, and her birth family just .
. . ceased to be discussed. Miriam and Whittle were loath to talk about it, and Dani had little time for absent parents who’d abandoned her.
The topic of Dani’s birth parents was so very unspoken, Dani thought of them less than she thought of getting married, and that was saying quite a lot.
“What of the parents of my birth?” Dani asked Whittle, her voice going a little high and thin. She sucked in a breath. She would
not accuse. She would only ask again and again until she understood. A cat rubbed against her leg—it was Pebble—and she swiped
her up and began to stroke her with fast, heavy strokes.
“What Whittle wishes to tell you,” said Miriam, “is—”
“Knock, knock?” sang a cheerful voice from the doorway, and the three of them jumped.
“But Dani, you’ve not yet left?” asked Amelia Broom from the stoop. Dani’s neighbor and dearest friend smiled through the
top half of the open Dutch door. “I thought for certain I’d missed you. I only popped over to—”
“Amelia,” Dani rasped, her voice a sort of plea. The sight of her friend was the only familiar thing in a suddenly foreign
land.
“But can you go on ahead, dear?” Miriam ordered Amelia. “We’re having a family chat at the moment. When we’ve finished, Dani
will follow along.”
“Actually, love?” cut in Whittle. “I think Dani might benefit from the company of her friend.”
Now Dani twisted back, gaping at Whittle. Rarely, if ever, did Silas Dinwiddie contradict his wife.
In the doorway, Amelia hovered uncertainly. “Oh, forgive—”
“Come in, Amelia Broom,” called Whittle. “Come in and have a seat by our Dani.”
“Amelia,” Dani called thinly, another plea. Her friend shot her a confused look. Danielle Allard was not, by nature, pleading.
And the Dinwiddies did not contradict each other. The mood in the parlor was unrecognizable. Carefully, nervously, Amelia