He didn’t have to pull out his pocket watch to know it wasn’t yet eleven—he knew when they’d set out from home, after all, and how long it took to walk to Piper’s Hole. “We’ll have an hour to get into our places.” And they’d been down there earlier too, deciding where each of them would be hidden, where she should wait, what she should say to lure the chap into revealing something incriminating so that Constable Wendle had a reason to block the cave entrance and detain him.

Plenty of time. “Won’t you tell me, Libby?”

“Tell you what?” But she knew. She had to, and he could hear in her voice that she did.

Still, he’d humor her. “What’s broken between you and Benna?”

He nearly regretted the question when he saw the moonlit pearl of a tear drop onto her cheek.

16

Libby averted her face so she could dash the tear away, praying he hadn’t seen it. She’d never been the sort of girl to cry over every snubbing or hurt feeling. She couldn’t be, otherwise she’d have spent her entire adolescence in tears, crying over each little barb Edith or one of her friends sent her way. The year at finishing school would have been a veritable ocean of waterworks. No, she wasn’t the sort for tears, and she didn’t want Oliver Tremayne to think she was.

But she’d been so dashedly close to them for the past two days, every time she looked at Mabena and realized everything she’d thought she knew about the woman was a lie. And to hear it put so truly, in a voice so very sincere in its request that she open her heart—even if he hadn’t been gripping her elbow, her emotions would have surged up.

Broken. The perfect word to describe things. “She isn’t my friend.” It came out a murmur, one that she prayed the wind wouldn’t take to where Mabena strode ahead of them. “I suppose I never should have thought she was. Perhaps Mama was right. Perhaps there can never be true friendship between employer and employee.”

Mama had actually expanded it to “between people of different stations,” but Libby couldn’t go quite that far.

And she felt Oliver’s fingers stiffen on her arm. “You can’t believe that.”

“Not for the reasons Mama said. Not because there’s any natural superiority. But because there’s something about the nature of the relationship that must make it too hard to trust.” She sighed, trying to watch Mabena on the path ahead of them, even though it was hard to see her through the night. “Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe she just can’t trust me.”

“You can’t believe that either.”