Libby pushed aside the rocks holding down the guidebook’s pages and snapped it closed. Mama said each person was designed by the loving hand of God too, fashioned in their mother’s womb, known before they were born. But if so, then why—why—had she been made to be so ill-fitting an addition to the world in which she’d been placed? Why was she strapped with expectations that chafed so terribly?

Asking her to dance and flirt and attend musicales and teas was like asking a storm petrel to walk confidently on land or dive a yard beneath the surface. She wasn’t suited for it.

And now she’d ruined her lovely morning with the very thoughts she’d hoped to leave behind her on the mainland. Frustrated with herself, she closed her sketchbook. She’d put down images of two birds and three beetles as well as a detailed diagram of the flower to her right that she’d yet to identify. The birds she’d found in the guidebook, so she’d been able to write their Latin names, their common names, and her own descriptions of them. The beetles she’d look up when she was back at the house, where her entomology book was still in her trunk. The flower . . . she didn’t yet have a book to teach her about the flora of the Scillies. She’d poke about the shops in Hugh Town sometime in the next few days though. Surely there would be a bookshop that had something. Or a local who could teach her.

What she needed was a botanist. Her lips tugged up a bit as she stacked the guidebook on top of the sketchbook. Perhaps one particular botanist. The man who had quite literally stumbled upon her in the gardens of Telford Hall two years ago, while she’d been flat on her stomach, watching a caterpillar spin its chrysalis on the underside of a leaf. She didn’t know his name—there’d been no shortage of people coming and going in those days, offering their condolences to the family after Papa’s death.

Comfort, for her, had only been found out of doors. Away from the mourners. The guests. The black dresses and veils. The whispers of what a shame it was that Lord Telford had lost the ongoing battle with consumption at that particular time, when it meant postponing her coming out. As if she could care about presentations and balls and gowns when her father lay dying. As if she ever would have cared anyway.

So, she’d been hiding from them all, as she did every chance she got, in the gardens. Mabena had only just been hired, and she’d won a place in Libby’s heart by covering for her and helping her slip out. She’d hunkered down to watch the caterpillar, her sketchbook under her hand and the Latin names flowing from her fingers.