Morgan continued, “The note requested you be brought to Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital, but it so happened that the vicar had met with Mother a week earlier. She’d asked for him to pray for her to have more children. It was a brave step for her, but that tells you her desperation. Father didn’t even know she’d made such a request.”

“So the vicar contacted Mother?”

“Yes, and it didn’t take more than moment for Father to be completely in agreement. They picked you up that night when it was dark, in a hired hack so no one would suspect. The vicar took care of the paperwork, and it was done.”

“That’s quite the story.”

Morgan nodded. “And because we’d skipped spring season, when we returned with an almost one-year-old girl in tow, people simply assumed that Mother had been in confinement and that was why they’d skipped the season. Mother and Father never corrected people’s assumptions.”

“That worked out quite tidily,” Joan remarked.

“Indeed, as if God planned it so.”

Joan nodded, her mind whirling with all the implications and details. All the things that could have gone wrong but went so very right instead. “It’s incredible, really.”

“I thought so. And Percy and I were so young that we didn’t really know what was going on. For all we knew, that’s how babies were made and how we came to be in the family as well.” He snickered. “It wasn’t till later we found out, which led to other questions, and I can still remember Mother scolding us for asking how babies were made, since they weren’t only picked up at a church.”

Joan burst into a laugh. “Oh my, I can’t imagine Mother doing anything but blushing a crimson red.”

“She did that, and then sent us off to our father. Who explained some, but not much.”

“Speaking of which…”

“No. That is a conversation you will have with your husband when the time is right. I am not up to that challenge.”

“You delegate quite a few things to my future husband for being so dead set against my interest in him to begin with.” Joan placed a hand on her hip.

“I had my reasons, and all of them are no longer necessary. I stand by my decision.”

“You would.” She held the blanket to her chest, then gently placed it back into the box. “Well, I suppose I’ll never truly know. But…I wonder.” She tipped her chin and looked at him. “I wonder if I would have been handed over to the Foundling Hospital. Maybe there was some deep part of me that knew, and that’s why I was drawn to help there.”