Undeterred, Bessie picked up Maggie’s bonnet and began to dust off the crown. “Miss Trumble may not mind it, but you can be sure that dresser of hers, Miss Jenkins, will have something to say about your appearance. And any fault she finds will be hung round my neck, make no mistake. It’s jealousy, is what it is. For all you aren’t the daughter of a baron, she’d give her right arm to do for you instead of Miss Trumble. Not that Miss Trumble isn’t a sweet girl—far sweeter than you are, Miss Margaret, truth be known—but she isn’t what anyone would call a beauty.”

“In tonnish circles, Jane is considered quite pretty.”

Bessie snorted. “I’ll wager no gentleman ever compared her complexion to Devonshire cream, or said her eyes were like two Indian sapphires.”

“It would be rather silly if they had. Jane’s eyes are brown.”

“And what about those gentlemen during your come out, Miss Margaret? The ones that called you the Pocket Venus? I can’t imagine anyone saying the same about Miss Trumble, no matter how many frills and furbelows Miss Jenkins puts her into.”

“Naturally, they wouldn’t. Jane is tall.”

“A regular Long Meg,” Bessie agreed without malice.

“And I might have been called the Pocket Venus at the beginning of my come-out season, but before I returned home, they were calling me something quite different, and well you know it.”

“Foolishness,” Bessie grumbled. “And don’t think that makes Miss Jenkins any less envious of me looking after you!”

Maggie stared out the window of the coach as Bessie fitted her bonnet back on her head and tied the ribbons in a jaunty bow at the side of her face.

It had been over four years since Maggie had last traveled to London to visit her friend. She’d fully expected to make the journey the previous spring, but no sooner had she cast off her blacks after a year spent in mourning for her father than Aunt Daphne—in her typically disobliging fashion—had slumped over one morning at breakfast, as dead as the proverbial doornail, and Maggie had been forced straight back into her mourning clothes again.

Aunt Daphne had been the last of Maggie’s family. There were no other relatives living, and consequently, no one left who might eventually need to be mourned. “Burn these,” Maggie had instructed Bessie when she’d stripped off her mourning weeds for the very last time. “I shall never be needing them again.”