Let him! His opinion of her no longer mattered. She was free. Standing in front of the mirror, Margaret watched a slow smile spread across her face. Today she was twenty-one years old, and she really had come of age. Her gift to herself was to wipe the slate clean. She was going to take Lewis’s advice and start being herself.

The question was, what sort of life did she envisage? And just as important, where? The obvious choice was to travel to the Continent. There was a big world, as Lewis had said, beyond Powerscourt’s gates. She could visit the canals of Venice, the boulevards of Paris, the Acropolis, the Colosseum. Though Lewis had actually suggested that she travel further afield, to America perhaps. The shared language was an attraction, but it seemed too big a first step to seriously contemplate.

Ought she to contemplate it nevertheless? Was crossing the Channel too tentative a step? Her father’s reach was long, the tentacles of her family connections extensive. On the Continent she would still be Lady Margaret Montagu Douglas Scott, the second daughter of the Duke of Buccleuch, with her scandalous history trailing behind her in a cloud of half-remembered gossip. Eyebrows would be raised at her purposeless meanderings without family or a husband in tow. Which raised another question: Who would accompany her, for she couldn’t travel on her own. She would have to find a chaperone of some description for the sake of propriety.

But there was no need to make such a momentous decision rashly or on a whim. She had only just discovered she was a woman of independent means. There was time enough to think about what that meant.

Margaret gave a little skip of delight. She would tell Julia her news later, but the sun was coming out for the first time in days, and Pennygael was overdue an outing. Hurrying to her wardrobe, unbuttoning her gown as she did, she pulled out her riding habit and began to change.

As she jammed her hat onto her head and swept the long skirt of her riding habit over her arm, there was a tap on her bedchamber door. “You’re wanted in the morning room, Lady Margaret,” the maid informed her.

It would most likely be something to do with the school. With her husband once again absent, Julia had started taking a much more active interest. Now that Enniskerry had been accepted into the national school system, she was overseeing all the necessary work to ensure that it would be the best equipped in the system. A gift to each child of a copy of Margaret’s stories was one of Julia’s aims, and so she had been harrying the printer into producing the first proofs as soon as he had received the last of Billy’s illustrations. Perhaps the volume had arrived!