Effie didn’t answer. It was, in truth, what she had thought. She could see now she was stupid to have believed it. Five years spent as a lady’s companion wasn’t precisely the same as a five-year teaching contract. Naturally, the same terms wouldn’t apply.

She felt a fool to have ever supposed they might. Worse than a fool, for she had lately built her dreams on the promise of that elusive stipend. She’d dared to imagine she and Franc might find a place for themselves somewhere. A home that would be theirs alone.

“What have you done to earn it?” Miss Corvus asked. “You have been in school, merely learning your trade.”

“I did not attend school in Paris.”

“On the contrary. If the Academy was your Eton, then Paris was your Oxford. I’ll allow that you have been a most devoted student. But a student is all you have been. It is now your work begins.” Miss Corvus looked at her steadily. “What have you to say to that? A position in another household?”

Effie swallowed the surge of bitterness that swelled in her throat. Whatever her private feelings, she refused to allow Miss Corvus to see them. A lady’s primary strength lay in keeping her composure. “What can I say?” she asked. “As ever, I exist purely at your pleasure.”

Miss Corvus didn’t dispute the fact. It had been her coin that had enabled Effie’s life in France these past five years. Her contacts, too. It was she who had made the arrangement for Effie to act as a companion to Madame Dalhousie.

Purchasing Franc had been Effie’s single stroke of independence. Unlike the clothes or the lodgings or even the acquaintances she’d made abroad, Franc belonged entirely to her.

“Then we are agreed,” Miss Corvus said. Opening the drawer of the table beside her, she withdrew a note card. A postal direction was written on it in black ink. She handed the card to Effie. “This afternoon, you will travel to London. You will go to that address in Mayfair. I have a contact there, Lady Belwood. She will sponsor your entry into society.”

Effie kept her countenance through pure force of will. It was one thing for an orphan girl to move in fashionable society as a lady’s companion. It was quite another for her to be introduced into that society as an equal. Such was the fate of the daughters of gentlemen, not former street children from the Rookery.

“To what purpose?” she asked.

“No one is yet acquainted with you in London,” Miss Corvus said. “You are a complete unknown. It’s why I insisted on you never visiting town before your time. And why I grew so angry when I discovered you’d attempted to do so.”