Effie was amazed Miss Corvus was willing to acknowledge the events of five years ago. But if she was prepared to reference them, then Effie had no intention of refraining. “I didn’t attempt to visit fashionable London. My business was in St. Giles.”

Effie had traveled there on the occasion of her eighteenth birthday. She hadn’t got far. Miss Corvus had intercepted her within a day.

“Vexing girl!” she’d said furiously during the tense carriage ride back to the Academy. “What on earth did you hope to gain from this ill-advised stunt?”

“I wanted to find out about my past,” Effie had answered.

“You have no past,” Miss Corvus had told her. “Only a future. And that future is for me to decide, not you.”

Sitting across from Effie now, a flash of residual anger darkened Miss Corvus’s eyes at the reminder of Effie’s ingratitude. “A foolish mistake on your part, returning to that place.”

“Was it foolish to wonder about my mother?” Effie asked. She had no distinct memory of the lady to call her own, just the faded, dreamlike recollection of a fair-haired woman in a squalid room above a malodorous rag-and-bone shop. A woman who may have been called Grace. The image of her had plagued Effie for as long as she could remember.

“The pitiful wretch who brought you into this world wasn’t a mother,” Miss Corvus said. “She was a creature of the slums with no means, nor any desire, to support a child. She parted with you willingly. Eagerly. And she was well compensated for it. That you would persist in thinking of her in such romantical terms speaks to your lack of maturity.” Her lips compressed. “You disappoint me, Miss Flite.”

“And you mistake me as ever,” Effie said stiffly. “I have no interest in happy families, nor have I any illusions in that vein. It’s knowledge I crave.”

Miss Corvus gave a dismissive sniff. “You have it. You know as much as I do.”

Effie had her doubts. What she knew was only what Miss Corvus had chosen to tell her. Effie couldn’t trust it. Not when she couldn’t recollect any of the details for herself. She’d been too young when she’d left the Rookery.

Or rather, when she’d been taken.

The only thing she could recall with any degree of clarity was that one day she’d made the grievous mistake of stealing Miss Corvus’s reticule. It had been a sumptuous, velvet article, plump with the weight of coin. Effie had sliced the dangling ribbons from Miss Corvus’s wrist with a cutthroat razor as she’d stopped to make a purchase at a Covent Garden flower stall.

Yes, that Effie remembered, for that single desperate act had sealed her fate.

As for the rest…