No doubt she would have to explain to Mrs. Conally what happened. The housekeeper would take one look at her and demand an explanation. She was not easily put off with excuses or tactics of avoidance.

She knew better than to enter through the grand front doors of the house where her arrival would be much noticed and exclaimed over. The staff was on high alert these days when it came to her. Her sisters had conspired to make certain she now took her meals with the family, forbidding her from asking for a tray in her room where she could eat as she worked. Alone.

It was this very aloneness they so objected to. She didn’t know why they should disapprove. It did not bother Nora. Marian and Charlotte insisted she was on her way to becoming a hermit. A terrible fate, apparently, and one they refused to allow her. What they failed to understand was that she was the happiest when she was buried in her work. It’s what she loved.

She slipped through the servants’ entrance in the back of the hall, listening for a moment, dripping in the corridor, to the sounds of the staff busy in the kitchen. They would be readying for luncheon. If her sister and the duke were not yet home, they would be soon.

It was now or never whilst the servants were so occupied and below stairs in the kitchen. She darted up the stairs and slipped inside her room undetected, setting her satchel down carefully on her work table.

She stripped off her clothes, letting the sodden garments drop heavily. Unpinning her hair, she worked a brush through the half-dry mass of snarled waves. It really was an inconvenience and such a bother. She should cut it.

She selected a fresh dress and donned it. This frock was just as plain and modest as the last one she wore. It was another one from the old days. The days before Warrington and her life at Haverston Hall. There had been no fine dresses in her life then. It made no sense to wear one of her new elegant gowns when she was working in her laboratory. In truth, she had little use for the gowns, but they were what was expected of a duke’s sister-in-law, even an unorthodox duke like Warrington who eschewed life in Town and could scarcely be prevailed upon to rub elbows with his peers.

The cotton dress fit her snugly, but the fabric was well-worn and comfortable, even if it did hug her chest too tightly and stretch at the seams in several places, namely her generous hips—they were a definite tribute to the splendid bisques and soufflés Cook was fond of preparing. One welcome perk of her sister marrying a duke; his kitchens were far superior to what she was accustomed.