Attie stepped closer. "If you would go on and have more children, she would have some healthy competition." The more Worthingtons in the world, the better.

Miranda smiled gently as she sat up and wearily pushed back her hair. "Auntie Attie, you have seven siblings and none of them have ever given you a single second of competition."

She held out her arms. Attie plunked Aurora into her mother's grasp and then plunked her own bottom onto the foot of the bed. Miranda pulled her feet up just in time. "That's true." It was.

Aurora stretched fat little fists toward her mother. Miranda glanced at Attie and hesitated as she reached for the neckline of her nightdress. Attie rolled her eyes. "Oh, all right. The privacy bit. I know."

She slid off the high bed and strolled to the bedchamber door as if she didn't care at all.

"Attie? How are things?"

Attie stopped but didn't turn around. "Cas is asleep on your sofa. Archie and Philpot are with Iris. Dade is driving that latest doctor back to wherever he came from. Useless man. Elektra and Aaron cannot travel from Shropshire at all. She's confined to her bed so she doesn't give birth too soon and he won't leave her. Bliss and Morgan are at sea, along with Orion and Francesca, so they won't get their letters until they make port. Bliss and Morgan are doing ship-captainy things and Orion and Francesca are researching on the hereditary family structure of porpoise pods. Still, I know they would all come running if they could. Callie and what's-his-name are due in a few days from the Cotswolds. There's a roast in the oven. I'm going down to go scrub the potatoes now." There. Had she forgotten anything? "Oh yes. Lysander hasn't spoken for three days. I think he's getting worse."

"He's worried about Iris, too. He doesn't seem to be taking it well, I agree." Miranda stroked her daughter's cap of shimmering red hair for a moment. "What about Poll?" Miranda's question was soft.

Attie shrugged uneasily. There was so much history between Poll and Cas and Miranda. Her brother Poll hadn't come home in over a year and his letters, never frequent, had begun to trail off. "I posted your letter two days ago just as you asked. No word yet. We don't even know if he's still in Edinburgh. He wrote from there months ago."

Miranda looked down at her tiny daughter and did not meet Attie's gaze. "It would be good if he could come. Soon."

Soon. Attie's belly turned to ice. Iris's "silly little cold", the one she'd caught wandering about the riotously overgrown and damp garden one moonlit night, the cold that hadn't gone away, that turned to a fever, and then to a terrible bubbling cough that sounded as if she were drowning, that the doctor called pneumonia —