Aunt Dottie continued, “My brother, Alfred, once he inherited the title, was even worse. He was such a high stickler that even your father—his heir—avoided him wherever possible. And by his standards, he indulged Henry. Mind you, Henry was always lazy and selfish and irresponsible, even as a boy.”

George sat drinking this up. She knew so little about her family. She’d never met her father, Henry, who’d abandoned her and her mother shortly after their forced wedding. And she knew very little about her grandfather, Aunt Dottie and Aunt Agatha’s brother, Alfred, who was Cal and Rose and Lily’s father. And what she knew wasn’t very nice.

“When Alfred remarried, he allowed his second wife to more or less edge poor Cal out of the family—he was still just a boy, sixteen or so—but was never really welcome at Ashendon after that. The army became Cal’s home.”

And when Alfred’s second wife had died, George thought, he’d done much the same thing with Rose and Lily, taking his two recently bereaved daughters away from everything they knew and dumping them into an exclusive seminary for girls.

Aunt Dottie sighed. “Alfred was never a good father. He had the same attitude to girls as our father had. The way he treated poor Lily after he’d discovered her little problem.” She shook her head. “My brother only ever did two good things in his life, and one of them was to let me buy a little house in Bath and live there with a companion—once he’d been convinced I had an aversion to marriage.” She gave a mischievous half smile. “I did, but only to his kind of cold-blooded marriage. Not to men, and especially not to Logan.”

She stared out of the window for a long moment and her mouth quivered. “Oh, Logan. What if . . . ? I couldn’t bear . . .” She wiped a tear away. “No, I must be brave. He will be all right. He will.”

George waited for her to add, I have one of my feelings about it. Aunt Dottie’s feelings were famous. But she didn’t say it, which was a worry.

“What was the other good thing your brother did?” George prompted gently. The reminiscences seemed to be doing her good. And, besides, they were fascinating.

“What? Oh, sending Rose and Lily to a seminary in Bath. His reasons were vile—he couldn’t be bothered with girls, and he found poor little Lily an embarrassment—but it meant I could see a lot of the girls.” Her face softened. “They’ve been like daughters to me.” She glanced at George and patted her on the arm. “As are you, dear child, even though your very existence was unknown to us for so long.”