“I thought I would be sad forever, but I don’t resent Faircliffe anymore. They make each other so happy. It is vexingly adorable. Ask her where she got that hideous bonnet.”

“The one in the caricatures?”

“The very one.” Tommy eyed the hourglass. Half of the sand now pooled at the bottom. “Chloe always reminds me that change can be for the better. We found each other. Then Bean. Then our siblings. Then I found you.”

“Those are wonderful changes,” Philippa said. “I especially like the last one.”

“Finding is fun,” Tommy agreed. “It’s losing that’s difficult. At first it was impossibly hard to be without Bean. Then just as impossible for me to try to replace him, however temporarily, as his imaginary heir.”

Philippa blinked. “I had not thought of that. It must have taken extra courage to approach me in public as the baron. And to hear his name, again and again.”

Tommy dusted her whiskers with hair powder. “I prefer being me, without any costume at all. That is, when I’m not being…Great-Uncle Wynchester.”

She grinned and lowered her hands. Gray-brown whiskers burst from her cheeks in untamed glory.

Philippa snorted with laughter. “You look as though you’ve not seen your valet in decades.”

“Then it’s perfect.”

“Should you look so particular?” Philippa peered at the whiskers in fascination. “Won’t a pair of squirrels growing out of your face make you memorable?”

“Unforgettable,” Tommy agreed. “Which is often the best disguise. If witnesses are asked to describe me, they’ll all say exactly the same thing: they saw an old man with an abundance of whiskers. They won’t have the least idea of any detail that might actually identify me.”

It was quite clever, and an embarrassing observation about human nature.

Tommy put down her mirror. “How do I look?”

“Incongruous,” Philippa admitted. “You’ve a young man’s hair, an old man’s whiskers, and a mostly Tommy face.”

“Ah,” said Tommy. “Then it’s time for the next step.”

Powdering her short hair gray with patches of white at the temple took no time at all. “I’ll have my hat on the entire time,” Tommy explained. “But even if someone notices my hair is powdered, they’ll think nothing of it…at my age.”

Philippa stared in wonder as Tommy carefully added wrinkles all over her face. Deep grooves in her forehead and a dimpled bit of skin between her eyebrows, just above the bridge of her nose. Laugh lines at the corners of her eyes. Grooves from the sides of her nostrils down past the corners of her mouth. Smudges of sallow purple-gray, creating the illusion of drooping bags beneath her eyes.

“You look ancient,” Philippa said. “And exhausted.”