No matter what Papa says about the importance of girls being modest and demure, I know I will never be these things and I refuse to be considered less than a man. Because the second thing that I decided today when I was out riding is that I am going to be the greatest artist in the world. That is my plan – and when I make my mind up, I do not fail.

Chapter 5: The Horse Guards

By the time I stopped reading Rose’s diary the bathwater had gone cold and my toes had turned wrinkly. Wiping my hands on my towel to keep the pages from getting damp, I carefully put the book back into the hidey-hole. That secret chamber was actually quite easy to manipulate now that I knew how. All I had to do was tap hard to pivot the false panel and it would open to the dark space beyond where the diary had been concealed, undiscovered for a hundred and fifty years.

I didn’t doubt that it was real; that what I’d held in my hands was the actual journal of Rose Bonifait. There was one thing puzzling me, though. How come the diary was in English? The answer, by chance, came to me in a conversation with Nicole at breakfast the next morning.

“I was wondering,” I said, as she served me up brioche and jam and a big mug of hot chocolate. “Why did Rose choose to offer this scholarship to a pupil from England?”

“But I thought you knew?” Nicole was surprised. “Rose herself was English on her mother’s side. Eleanor Claridge arrived from London at the age of eighteen to study in Paris in 1830. Her parents intended her to become a refined lady who would return to them with a rounded education and sophisticated manner. But instead, the young Eleanor met Rose’s father, Jacques Bonifait. It was a whirlwind romance, nobody approved, but they got married regardless and Madame Eleanor Bonifait never left France again. She died when Rose was only seven.”

And now it all made sense to me. In the diary Rose had spoken of her mother teaching her English in the park. So Rose had been fluent in two languages! And after her mother died, what better way to keep her diary secret than to write in a tongue that no one else in the household could speak?