It was too much, all at once, much too much to deal with on top of everything else that had been visited upon her in the last few weeks. The butcher, as well as the baker, both denying her further credit until the current accounts were settled. Her brother, Thomas, sickening and needing constant attendance. Her father’s banker apologizing, but patiently explaining why she couldn’t have access to her father’s funds without his permission. Watching the household funds, which had been ample and should have lasted nearly a year for incidentals, dwindle down to nothing because she had been forced not only to settle with those nasty merchants who had shown up at her door demanding immediate payment on outstanding debts, but also to pay cash just to put a bit of food on the table.

Most of her servants had already been let go, an event that had made her literally sick to her stomach in the doing. Many of those servants had been with her family for years, had made the move with them from Portsmouth to London three years ago when her father had expanded his business and relocated there. It had been horrible for them to lose their jobs during the holiday season, but just as traumatic for her to have to be the one to tell them. But she had been unable to pay them this month, and with her father already a month late in returning, she could no longer assure them that he would be home soon to settle with them.

And now this . . . this eviction. Unexpected, completely without warning. The little man had said a demand had been sent by the new owner through the posts, that there had been ample warning, but she didn’t read her father’s mail, so she hadn’t seen it. New owner? How could Mr. Adams, whom they had bought the house from, sell it out from under them? Was that legal? When there was only a few thousand pounds remaining before the house was completely theirs?

She couldn’t comprehend why all this was happening, why merchants they had dealt with for several years now no longer trusted her family to settle with them at the end of the year as was their custom, why they had lost their home. One day to leave. They were to vacate by tomorrow, pack up everything and be gone. How? She didn’t have any money left to hire wagons to move them. And to where? Their old home in Portsmouth had been sold. They had no other relatives. The old family estate near Kent was merely a property, uninhabitable, and besides, the doctor had warned that if Thomas didn’t remain in bed and out of drafts, he wouldn’t recover, could even take a turn for the worse.

“Are you all right, miss?”