“Well, now you’ve gone and hurt my feelings,” he said, grinning again. “And I was going to give you a prototype of my ladies’ shoe lacer-upper, too.”

“How shall I survive without it?” Alva replied, unable to keep herself from grinning back.

And because she couldn’t, it was time to go.

“I hope your family enjoys their stay,” she said, setting a foot on the stair. “Good-bye.”

“Until we meet again,” she heard him say, but she didn’t turn around, and as she climbed she thought that she’d better make very sure they didn’t.

CHAPTER FOUR

Hyde Park, March 2, 1875

As her barouche bounced up Liefdehuis’s pitted drive, Alva reread the letter she’d received that morning. After scanning the three terse sentences for what must have been the twelfth time, she crumpled it tightly and threw it on the floor, where it failed to make any kind of satisfactory bang. She eyed it coldly.

Howard Miller, who had the only available building crew in town, was withdrawing his crew, effective immediately, and would not be returning. Furthermore, he had the gall, after a mere week on the job, to declare that the advance deposit was already depleted and “payment in full” for the remainder would be expected by the fifteenth of the month.

The letter had been waiting for her when she’d arrived at her Hyde Park rental house, rumpled and tired from the early morning train. She’d barely had time to meet her new staff, all hired by letter, and splash some water on her face before turning around and leaving for Liefdehuis. Something was fishy about Miller’s sudden reversal, and she intended to find out what it was before she did anything about it. The first step was to see what, if any, work had been completed.

The carriage came to a rough stop in front of the house, and her new coachman-cum-footman, a local lad with barely fading acne scars on his cheeks, helped her alight. Alva gazed up at the house that had brought her back to America.

It loomed over her, surrounded by overgrown grounds that had probably once been the height of elegance. Here and there one could make out a vestige of former grandeur: the tall trees they’d passed on the way; the long-dry fountain sitting in the middle of the circular front drive; the wild forest of brambles that had once been a formal rose garden. The building itself was an uninspired gray stone rectangle, three stories high and crumbling around the edges. Save for its condition, there was nothing particularly distinctive about the property—it had been built with size in mind, rather than elegance, to impress rather than please. When it had been first built it would have been perfectly average; now, after decades of emptiness and rejection, its broken and boarded windows gave it a fragile, whipped expression, like an ugly dog who’s come to expect the kick.