Besides, if the past was anything to go by, Atalanta Worthington was well-nigh indestructible. Fearlessly acrobatic and agile as a cat underfoot in a stable, Attie had already wriggled out of more dangerous situations than anyone in the Worthington household really wanted to think about.

Poll made sure not to nap in any case.

"She's old." Attie declared suddenly. She slithered backwards through the window opening and sprawled across her seat on her back. With her long skinny arms and legs, she looked as artlessly natural as a fawn.

Poll waited.

"Old and kindly and … maternal." She chewed the end of one long braid meditatively. "She's a widow, in black, with gray hair all twisted up tight on her head." She looked at Poll. "She likes cats."

"I like cats." Anyone who knew his youngest sister had better like cats, in all their capricious moods and elegant disregard for opinion. If they weren't game enough for cats, they wouldn't last an hour in Attie's wildly unpredictable company.

Poll felt a pang. He'd missed her so. The world would be a terribly unexciting place without Atalanta Worthington in it.

Just to goad her, he shook his head. "She's young and lovely. I'll wager her nice words about Lysander weren't maternal at all."

Attie cut her green eyes at him. "Bite your tongue."

All the Worthingtons together had concluded the mysterious, letter-writing Mrs. Gemma Oakes had to be a widow.

"He has proved to be of immeasurable help to me."

"Me", not "us."

"Her penmanship is awful," Attie pointed out. "Shaky, like Mrs. Philpot's. Old, I tell you."

"Injured," Poll countered. "She said so in the letter."

"If she's young and beautiful, she wouldn't be alone out in the middle of — " Attie swept an arm grandly, trying desperately to scorn the heavenly Yorkshire countryside, but Poll wasn't fooled. Attie was dizzy with joy at the wild, open beauty of the place. She was even fascinated by the mines.

"I could be a miner," she'd declared. "I don't care about getting dirty."

Poll had rolled his eyes at that, for it had been a rather recent development for Attie to go willingly to her bath. As if fully aware of her own future devastating beauty and entirely alarmed by it, Attie practiced ignoring all things to do with vanity or glamour.

Poll wasn't looking forward to her debut either. They were going to have to dig a bloody moat around Worthington House to cut down on the suitors.

A moat with a crocodile or three.

With a certain satisfaction Poll concluded that their eldest brother Daedalus would be in charge of fending off the flower-bearing multitudes. Hmm. Perhaps he ought to invest in a flower business?

The carriages halted before a grand and charming manor — or rather, the remains of one. Its tumbledown stateliness graced an arching swath of flat land along the river road.