“We cast off in a quarter hour,” the steward said. “Should make good time to Dover, though the wind can be fickle this time of year if you’re bound for Calais. The Dover inns are cozy, though, and they are used to waiting on the weather.”

He bowed and withdrew as Tommie dragged a chair over to the porthole and stood on the seat.

“I can’t see anything, Mama. The glass is too dirty.”

“The sea air leaves brine on everything,” Matilda said, “but the ship isn’t going anywhere for another fifteen minutes. We’ll go back up on deck then. Shall we play some cards?”

“Tell me again how to say ‘I miss everybody.’”

Matilda did not miss everybody, not yet. She was too consumed with missing Tremont. “Mes amis me manquent. Can you say that?”

Tommie parroted the French exactly, and then Matilda translated each word for him. She wrote the words out and pointed to them as she spoke. Tommie asked how to say France is stupid and Vikings are brilliant and a dozen other phrases while the minutes dragged by.

Please come, Matilda thought, sending that silent plea to Tremont. Please tell me that your great, busy mind has found a way for us to be married, despite Harry, despite everything. Please, please…

But by the time she was explaining to Tommie how to say I call myself Thomas, the motion of the boat had changed, becoming less gentle.

“We’re moving,” Tommie said, his head coming up like a horse who heard the groom pouring oats into a bucket. “We’re sailing on the sea!”

Not quite, but they were underway. Matilda took Tommie up on deck, where other passengers were assembled along the rail, waving farewell to friends onshore and doffing hats in a general gesture of parting.

“Mama, we’re sailing away! The ship is moving!”

“I know, Tommie. I know.”

She searched the crowd on the pier for a particular tall, quietly elegant gentleman and found no one answering to that description, which was to be expected. She’d led Tremont to believe they were sailing later and from a different pier.

“We are sailing away!” Tommie called again, waving to nobody in particular. “I’m a Viking on my longship, and I’m sailing away to France!”

His exclamation provoked a few smiles, and Matilda tried to return them, but she was not a Viking, and she was not on her longship, and Tremont was not going to save her from the wretched burden of living her life as a loving mother and an honorable, decent adult female.

And that hurt, brutally, but the pain was gilded with a little pride. You were wrong, Papa. I have not come to a bad end, nor will I. So there and to blazes with you and your hypocritical judgments of me.