It was another two days before Mika could get out of bed without some part of her body feeling like it was about to shut down, during which time the rest of the household were scrupulous in making sure she was fussed over and entertained, both of which were quite unprecedented experiences in the whole of her life.

When she tried to get up to make her own tea, she was kindly and firmly deposited back in bed. When she mentioned the children’s lessons and Edward Foxhaven’s ever-nearing visit, she was immediately overruled and told in no uncertain terms that she was to do nothing except get better. When boredom so much as dared to encroach, someone was always miraculously there with a chew toy (Circe), books and video games (the children), a story about the stage (Ian), a complaint about Ian (Lucie), a potted plant in need of nurturing (Ken), or a disastrously honest critique of her wan appearance (guess who).

Which was how, on the day reality rudely interrupted this idyll, Mika found herself whiling away most of the evening after dinner upstairs, back in bed, listening to Rosetta read out loud from Persuasion.

One of the consequences of growing up in a house with no real company, not to mention Primrose’s rather narrow and archaic ideas about what constituted a well-stocked library, was the fact that Mika had read just about every classic there was. Twice. If it was written by somebody called Austen or Shelley or Brontë, Keats or Dickens or Eliot, Christie or Rossetti or Blake, she had read it. (Indeed, lest anyone accuse Primrose of not being worldly, she had also made sure names like Homer, Rumi, Dumas, Tolstoy, and Seth appeared on her shelves.)

A handful of Mika’s tutors had attempted to introduce her to new books, handing over comic books, highly masculine epic fantasies, and even, on one memorable occasion, a romance so steamy that Mika had read it three times in one night. But, for the most part, the literary worlds she’d visited growing up featured ballrooms, governesses, pickpockets, men who went by their last names only, the London fog, and not a whole lot else.

So Mika could quite safely say that she already knew Persuasion very well, but Rosetta was more than a little obsessed with Captain Wentworth at the moment and Mika didn’t have the heart to part her from him.

“Just listen to this,” Rosetta was saying dreamily. “You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell—”

Terracotta and Altamira, who were disgusted by notions of romance, made distraught sounds at this and begged Rosetta to pick a book about pirates instead.

“No,” Rosetta said firmly. “The two of you are supposed to be practicing your spellwork anyway, not listening to me read.”