As the story was told and retold, passing over the anxious tongues of every gossipmonger in town, actual details had appeared. Details like the fact that the captain was tall, dark, and handsome. And that Harriet was heartbroken if by some strange mischance he didn’t write one of his weekly epistles. And that the worthy captain was an orphan who had raised himself by his bootstraps from the humblest of beginnings and had found untold wealth in sailing the seas of India and beyond.

Each new rumor added to the credibility of the whole, until Captain Frakenham was as real to the people of Sticklye-By-The-River as the butcher who sold meat from his shop on the corner. Except to the Wards, of course. They knew better.

“I wish there really was a Captain John,” Sophia said, giving a blissful sigh. “He’s absolutely perfect.”

Ophelia nodded, her round face wreathed with a dreamy smile. “Thick black hair and the bluest eyes—”

“Blue eyes? Who told you that?” Harriet demanded.

“Charlotte Strickton. I met her in town the other day and she said she’d heard it from the parson’s wife.”

Blast it all, this whole thing was entirely out of control.

“I’m glad I’m not so shallow,” Sophia said loftily. “I value the captain for his bravery and not his looks. When I think of all the adventures he’s had, I feel faint with—”

“Oh for the love of—” Harriet snapped an exasperated look at her sisters. “There is no Captain Frakenham!”

“We know,” Ophelia said, looking amazed.

“Of course we do,” Sophia added with an innocent blink of her long lashes. “Really, Harriet, you are too serious.”

“It annoys me the way everyone is treating me differently now that I’m supposedly affianced. I’m not affianced, and I never will be.”

Sophia shook her head. “Nonsense. One day, the right man will come along, and you’ll change your mind.”

Harriet wasn’t so sure. In all her twenty-four years, she’d never met a single man who had managed to make her feel anything more than acute irritation. It was a lowering thought, but not one she’d willingly share with her talkative siblings. “I, for one, was not born to become some man’s wife.”

Ophelia blinked owlishly through her spectacles. “What were you born for?”

“I was born to enjoy life, to lie in bed all day while eating bonbons and drinking hot chocolate. But somehow, fate has forgotten me, and so here I am.”

Sophia eyed her elder sister with some awe. “Bonbons in bed. I like that. Anything better than these sheep, which smell even if Ophelia is too thickheaded to admit it.”

“I know they smell,” Ophelia said in an offended tone. “But they cannot help it and I, unlike you, am not about to berate them for it.”

“What we really smell is not sheep,” Harriet said before the two could start up again, “but profit. Extra funds that will enable us to replace Stephen for the shearing.”

“Poor Stephen,” Ophelia said, her eyes darkening in pity.