You’d have thought, Fiona told herself, that Mr. Elliot knew better than God Almighty what ought to be done about sinners—stone them, very likely! He had a very Old Testament view of such matters, a cold and self-righteous man. She had never been able to like him. In three years, she had not found an iota of generosity or compassion in him, not even when her aunt was dying. He had thundered at the ill woman, demanding to know if all her sins had been confessed and forgiven. Reminding her that Hell was full of horrors and demons. In the end, he had had no comfort to give. Fiona had simply shut him out. She found herself wondering if Mr. Elliot had forgiven her for doing that.

As he warmed to his theme now, she felt eyes moving toward her surreptitiously, a merest glance cast from under the brim of a hat or from under pale lashes. She knew what they were thinking. The point was being made publicly that in Duncarrick she herself was Mary Magdalen. A wanton. Because of her child?

That made no sense: they’d all been told when she brought the boy here that she had lost her husband in the war. Even her aunt, a stickler for propriety, had held her and cried, then taken her around the town to meet everyone of consequence, lamenting the tragedy of a lad growing up without his father, and the wicked fighting in France that had killed so many good men.

Fiona wasn’t the only young widow in the town. Why had she been singled out in this fashion? Why had people suddenly—and without explanation—turned so strongly against her? She’d never so much as looked at another man since 1914. She had never wanted another man in place of the one lost.

On the following Monday morning, outside the butcher’s shop, someone shook a letter in her face and demanded to know what Fiona meant by walking boldly amongst decent folk, putting all their souls in danger.

Managing to reach the letter in the red, waving fingers of the woman who did washing for a living, she took it and smoothed it enough to read it.

Have you taken in her washing? The sheets soiled by her wickedness and the linens that have touched her foul flesh? Have you no care for your own soul?

It wasn’t signed—

The shock turned Fiona’s heart over in her chest. She read the lines again, feeling sick. Mrs. Turnbull was watching her, something avidly nasty in the set of her face, as if she relished the pain she’d caused.

“You don’t do my laundry—” Fiona began, bewildered, and then realized that it didn’t matter.

But who could have written such a thing?

It was vicious! She was speechless with the cruelty of it.

. . . sheets soiled by her wickedness . . . her foul flesh . . .

There were no names mentioned—