Libby shot a look over her shoulder at her lady’s maid for fortification. Mabena Moon gave her that same muted grin she always did when they were in company with anyone else in Libby’s family. The one that everyone assumed was merely a polite acknowledgment instead of a sign of shared secrets. “I won’t be alone, Mama. Moon’s entire family is there. You read the telegram she got in response—they’re most happy to keep an eye on me.”

A beat of silence descended, punctuated by the ringing of the bell on the ferry calling all passengers to board. Her trunks were already stowed, her ticket purchased. All she had to do was walk up the gangplank and the adventure would begin. An entire summer on England’s most unique island chain. A subtropical climate that produced plants she’d be able to see nowhere else in the country. Birds her eyes had never beheld. Seals. Ocean creatures she’d not even learned the names of yet.

She could almost hear her magnifying glasses calling to her from her trunk. And her microscope sang a siren’s song in her ears. She had fresh notebooks waiting to be filled. Pencils in every shade, sharpened and expectant. Watercolors snug in their cases. A book on the classifications of life on the Isles of Scilly on the tip-top of her trunk, so she could snatch it out the moment she arrived in her summer cottage.

Then it struck—the tidal wave of uncertainty. What did Libby know of the world, of independent life? She’d never been away from home, not really. She was barely twenty. And if she couldn’t get on in the society in which she’d been raised, how did she expect to get on there, with strangers?

Her fingers were the ones to tighten around her mother’s this time. “Are you certain you don’t want to join me?”

Mama chuckled and released her hand. “Had I not promised Edith I would be with her for her lying-in, I would be there in a heartbeat.”

Mention of her older sister, the eldest of the three Sinclair children, made Libby’s lips twist into a wince before she could stop the reaction. Another reason this holiday had sounded so alluring when Mabena whispered the suggestion after Bram’s high-handed declaration last week. Her other option, if she didn’t want to spend the whole summer scowling at Sheridan across the breakfast room at Telford Hall while she waited for him to come to his senses, was to join her mother at Edith’s.

And none of them were ever happy when she and Edith were in the same room. “Give her my love. And if you wanted not to include her judgment on my holiday in your letters, I’d not complain about the lack.”