The major was apparently not the only canny MacKay. “Tremont is constitutionally incapable of hurting a child, but I do worry. When my marriage to Harry was at its worst, and I contemplated dire options, the thought of leaving Tommie without my protection stopped me. I brought that child into the world, and he is entitled to all I have to give him until he can manage on his own. Tremont is good and dear and wonderful, but a part of my heart will always choose Tommie over any adult male.”

“It won’t come to that,” Dorcas said. “If Tremont is the right man, it won’t come to that.”

“Tremont can be the best man in the world, and life can still conspire to disoblige my dreams.”

“Harry Merridew must have been a proper limb, to use Mrs. Oldbach’s term, and not in its humorous sense. Is something else bothering you besides courtship jitters?”

Dorcas calmly wound her yarn, and Matilda realized that Tremont’s trusting nature—or his optimistic nature, giving people the benefit of the doubt until proven wrong—was contagious.

“The men might be whistling,” Matilda said, “but they are also keeping secrets. They stop talking when I walk into a room, they are more watchful, and I suspect all that whistling is intended to distract me from the fact that they are up to something, and I won’t like what it is.”

“Shall I alert the major?”

“I’m being silly.” Though the memory of Biggs, usually so voluble, falling oddly silent—twice—would not leave Matilda’s mind.

Dorcas’s winding never changed tempo, but her gaze acquired a ferocity that suggested hurling thunderbolts occupied her free time.

“The worst part,” Dorcas said, “of being at the mercy of a small, mean man is that he can make you doubt yourself. You cannot trust your own senses. The bonnet you thought fetching is dowdy if he says it is. The song you worked so hard to learn at the pianoforte is sentimental drivel when he declares it such. When a decent fellow finally comes along, you cannot believe in his virtue, or in his regard for you. If Harry Merridew inflicted those wounds on your soul, I am glad he’s dead. You see the men hiding their conversations from you, peering out of windows more often, and otherwise behaving out of character, and that is real, Matilda. You are not silly.”

“Thank you.”

“You’ll tell Tremont?”

“Yes. I know the look of a man keeping secrets. I can nearly smell it on him, and fellows are keeping secrets. Tremont must be told.”

“Your aunt Portia is not as I had imagined her,” Tremont said, guiding the gig around a beer wagon half loaded with barrels. “I expected a fluttery little dumpling aging into vagueness.”