Her mind was spinning like a whirligig in the wind. Finally, she made a decision: she would leave it up to fate. If there was a baby, she would resign herself. Walk down that aisle, smile, become Lady Durfey. She shuddered at the thought.

But if not . . . she’d steal freedom.

That very night, she discovered that Rodney had failed to “plant” anything, to use his repulsive terminology.

Philippa was still thinking about what it meant, and what she would do next, when she realized that Betty, the upstairs maid, was chattering on and on about a castle. Elsewhere in England, people undoubtedly talked of the great castles of Windsor and Edinburgh, but around Little Ha’penny, there was only one castle worth discussing: Pomeroy. It stood on the other side of the great forest, its turrets just tall enough to be visible on a clear day. For years, Philippa had stared out her window and dreamed of a knight in shining armor who would ride through town and fall in love with her, sweeping her onto the back of his steed and taking her away.

Away from Rodney, she now realized.

No knight in shining armor ever came; in fact, the castle had been unoccupied and neglected for years until a real prince moved there a couple of years ago. He was a foreigner, from some place in Europe.

As in a real fairy tale, the prince hadn’t lived in Pomeroy Castle long before he fell in love and married a princess. Or an heiress, at the least. No one really knew for sure because Little Ha’penny was far away from the polite world. Although Rodney puffed out his chest and boasted about his father’s connections, the fact was that Sir George Durfey was the sort of man who stayed very close to home. He’d even kept his son home with a tutor rather than send him off to Eton.

“It’s not good for the lad to be so provincial,” her father had remarked, years ago. Phineas Damson, Esq., was the only other gentleman in the area, though, and if the truth be told, he wasn’t all that interested in Sir George, nor in his future son-in-law. What Papa liked was to investigate battles. He spent the better part of his days in his study, surrounded by maps of places like Spain and Egypt, painstakingly translating accounts of Greek battles.

In short, no one knew anything about the castle and its royal occupants, and in keeping with their provincial outlook, most of the goodly inhabitants of Little Ha’penny had lost interest once the Prussian prince moved in.

“I’m sorry, Betty,” Philippa said, “could you tell me that again? About the princess, I mean?”

“Well,” Betty said importantly, “I was just saying what I heard from Mrs. Pickle, who heard it from the coachman of the morning mail.”

“And?”

“She had a baby. The princess that is, not Mrs. Pickle.”