At home I found an unexpected letter in the morning post. It was from Lizzie, apologizing if Alec’s radical talk had made me uncomfortable. “You must forgive him,” she wrote. “Machines are his passion, and all he can see is the good they could do.” She went on to invite me for afternoon refreshments. There was no time to decline the invitation, so once the girls began their music and art lessons, I put on my hat and went out.

Lizzie had given me the address of a coffee shop on Third Avenue. Although it was only four blocks from the Lyndon home, it might as well have been in an entirely different city. The streets were dirty and noisy, full of horse-drawn carriages and omnibuses, and there were many more people on the sidewalks. “Oh, good, you came!” she cried when I entered the shop, taking both my hands in hers and squeezing them fiercely. “I was worried you’d never want anything more to do with me. You fled so quickly yesterday.”

“I was a little taken aback,” I admitted.

“I am very sorry for that. Sometimes I wish I could muzzle those boys.” She hooked her elbow through mine and led me to a table. “I do want us to be friends. You’ll need friends outside magpie land, and I could do with some intelligent conversation that’s not about machines.”

She sounded so contrite that I wanted to reassure her. “I would like that,” I said.

She brightened instantly. “Oh, good!” We sat down, and a waiter soon came over. “I’ll have coffee with milk, and we’ll have some butter cakes,” she said to him. “Verity?”

“I’ll have a cup of tea.”

The waiter stiffened and snarled, “We do not offer tea in this establishment.”

“She’s new here,” Lizzie said to him. “She must not know.”

“Do you offer lemonade?” I asked nervously. I didn’t frequent coffee shops, but I didn’t think it common to be criticized so harshly for one’s choice of beverage.

“Lemonade it is. One moment, please,” he said.

“This shop is sympathetic to our cause, and patriots don’t drink tea,” Lizzie explained when he was gone.

“Why ever not?” I asked.

“Because all tea in the American colonies must go through England so that we have to pay English taxes on it. We aren’t allowed to import it directly from China or India. It’s only a small form of protest, but every little thing that strikes back at them helps us.”

“I never heard anything about that.”

“You’ve been reading the wrong newspapers. Do you think the officially sanctioned papers would acknowledge that any subject of the Crown is less than perfectly content?” She laughed and shook her head. “And I promised we wouldn’t discuss politics after we drove you away yesterday.”