“Cecilia dear, will you read aloud to fill the silence?” Miss Darlington asked.

As gunfire scattered in celebration and soldiers began singing, Cecilia took up the volume of Hiawatha. Memory stirred in her heart. She saw again a wickedly endearing smile, a lock of hair falling over a bright eye, a brochure about auks. She remembered the feeling of his fingers sliding up her thigh and—

“That is an awful lot of throat clearing you are doing,” Miss Darlington observed.

“Forgive me, Aunty. Don’t worry, I’m quite well.”

“You are on the brink of laryngitis! Pleasance, fetch Miss Bassingthwaite some lemonade.”

“Yes, miss,” Pleasance said. She began to cross the room but stumbled as the backwash from a rising house shook theirs.

“Someone is leaving?” Miss Darlington said with surprise. “Olivia will be displeased if she doesn’t have even numbers for her party table.”

Cecilia leaned aside to look out the window. “No, it appears some people are playing football,” she said.

“And how would that create”—Miss Darlington paused as the house trembled again—“a backwash?”

“They are playing with houses.”

Miss Darlington pursed her lips in disapproval of such youthful high spirits. “Football is not a suitable pursuit for ladies. But this is a sign of the times, alas. I fear as the new century looms we will lose the dignified feminine habit of gentleness.”

“Perhaps,” Cecilia replied. “Oh dear, you have dropped the Queen of Bohemia’s bottle of smelling salts for which you kneecapped two guards and seduced another before pushing him out the window. Shall I pick it up for you?”

“No, don’t bother. Useless thing. It is far too small for its purpose. Read to me, dear. Soothe my troubled mind.”

Cecilia turned to The Song of Hiawatha. She had just found her place beneath the level moon when a fervent knocking came upon the front door.

Pleasance entered to inform them of a caller in much the same way a doctor informs a Romantic poet of their tuberculosis.

“Ignore it,” Miss Darlington murmured from her cozy state.

“Ignore it?” Pleasance’s mouth fell open. For her, an unanswered knock was equivalent to having to put down a book three pages before the ending. She threw Cecilia a pleading look.

“Ignore it,” Cecilia reiterated, although with a sympathetic smile. “‘And before him on the upland, he could see the Shining Wigwam—’”

“Who? Where?” Pleasance peered around anxiously—as if, having been neglected at the door, Miss Wigwam had forced another entry.

“It is in the poem, dear,” Cecilia explained. “Hiawatha sees the magician’s tent.”

There came again a knocking, only this time it was heels against the foyer floor, accompanied by a trilling voice. “Yoo-hoo! Jem! Anyone home?”

Miss Darlington sighed. “Anne Brown,” she muttered.

And indeed Miss Brown entered the room, her propulsion so determined, and so assisted by her bellows-like skirts, that Pleasance had no option but to scurry before her or be trampled.

“The door was open,” Miss Brown said. “I mean, it was shut and locked, but in essence it was open, if you understand me. I say, Jem!” She stared aghast at Miss Darlington. “You do look rather done in.”