“It will be too upsetting for you to come with me. But I need to go right away. I need to speak with the viscount,” Della said, pushing Sarah’s soft hair away from her face. “You can stay here; the girls will be downstairs soon anyway.”

Sarah nodded. “Thank you.” She made a vague gesture in the air. “For everything. I had given up reading the papers, it was too hard to be disappointed every day.”

Della felt her throat close at her friend’s sad tone. Dear Lord, she hoped this captain-viscount person would have something to tell her.

She took Sarah’s hand and squeezed it, meeting Sarah’s gaze. Her friend smiled weakly at her.

“Do you want to get up?” Della asked.

Sarah considered the question. “I think I’d like to stay down here for a bit.”

Della nodded. “You do that.” She looked up at Mrs. Borens. “Can you stay with Mrs. Wattings as she rests?” She looked back at Sarah. “Do you want tea?”

“That is all you British people can think about,” Sarah replied. “It is not as though tea is the cure to everything.”

“But it is,” Della said with a smile. “And besides, you were born here too.”

Sarah raised her hand toward Della.

“You want to get up so soon?” Della asked.

Sarah wrinkled her nose. “The carpet must have belonged to a family with a dog.”

Another reminder that Della was no longer living with her parents—a duke’s rug would be beaten regularly, and even if the duke had owned one hundred dogs, they would not have been allowed to do something so vulgar as to make it clear they were in residence.

This covering, however, they’d found on one of their foraging trips when they’d first arrived. Della couldn’t bear waste, whether it was worn rugs or people or animals whose families had decided they were unwanted.

Della took Sarah’s outstretched hand, helping her friend to rise. She wrapped her arm around Sarah’s waist, then sat her back down in her chair.

“Tea?” Della asked again, patting Sarah on the shoulder.

She grinned at Sarah’s eye roll.

“I was born here, as you remind me several times a day,” Sarah said, sounding more like her usual self, “but I wasn’t raised on tea. But we can’t get good coffee.”

Sarah’s parents had come from the West Indies before Sarah was born, but according to Sarah, her parents had maintained their West Indian traditions at home, even though all their children were British-born.