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three copies of each map. I put one in the wooden box beneath Belle’s spreading silk skirts. The other provided stationery for my monthly letter to Jeremy, map on one side, confidences written on the other. His replies referenced church towers, clock towers and London’s Tower Bridge.
    Daisy observed my efforts with nonchalant indifference.
    “I wonder at your devotion to Hethering,” she said, nearly overturning the inkwell on one of my drawings. For a graceful girl, she was remarkably clumsy when one of my possessions could be damaged. “You won’t live here forever.”
    I said nothing, but she may have detected the smugness in my silence. “Everyone knows that.” Her dulcet tones turned petulant. “Everyone.”
    I ignored her. My chin rose.
    Daisy and I became companions of a sort, but we were never truly friends. I was fortunate to have Nurse and Miss Prinn, Willow and Miss Juniot. I came to know her brothers a little better every year. Clifton was never congenial, he wore his family’s disappointment like an invisible hand held to his brow, but he was a straightforward boy and tried to be pleasant. Blaise was a sneak, greedy and insincere.
    Jeremy’s years at school passed in long stretches of quiet work and longing, broken by brief periods of pure happiness when he came home for holidays. He grew into a tall, handsome man. Four years younger, I was still a girl. He wrote brilliant exams, and headed off to university to study landscape architecture and diplomacy, an interest he discovered while a citizen of the world my father denied me.
    *****
     
    As I grew into womanhood, I worried Jeremy would outgrow me. I fretted more and more that his world was larger than mine. He would grow bored and forsake me for a sophisticated beauty.
    Another sorrow pressed my heart. Willow’s health failed, and she was often in bed. I tried to make her smile with silly fairy stories while I coaxed her to drink some tea and eat a bit.
    One afternoon, she clutched my hand. “Don’t let them take your Jemmy away. They took Léon.” She drifted off into uneasy sleep.
    “My sister was Willow’s companion when she was a young lady,” Miss Juniot explained. “They traveled in France. Willow found a friend, the younger son of a prominent family. He knew Willow’s difficulties, but he adored her. The parents parted them despite their happiness. They both suffered. Not long after, he drowned. They called it a boating accident.”
    Miss Juniot pursed her lips. “Willow never mentions Léon. Sometimes she calls his name in her sleep.”
    On the days Willow rallied, she stitched in frantic haste on a roll of linen she hid from me. “It’s a secret,” she said, with a wan facsimile of the mischievous smile I loved. I tried not to peek, but grew anxious as she completed the border. What would rally her when it was done?
    Nothing. She found no further happiness. Willow was clever, if damaged. She undid the complicated lock on her bedroom window. They found her body floating in the pond, her cinnamon hair drifting in its indigo waters.
    I remembered her words about Jeremy. “If you lose him, find him. I lost my Léon, I’ll find him one day.”
    Jeremy came home without permission to stand at my side during Willow’s simple funeral service. He held my hand in defiance of Father, and dried my tears with the handkerchief I gave him that first Christmas.
    Dickon Scard stood alone in the last pew, dressed in fine clothes that made me remember his career in London. He, too, had left our county to study at university. He was gone before I could speak to him, no one else acknowledged his presence.
    While the few mourners drank tea and ate frosted cakes, Miss Juniot gave me a parcel wrapped in grass green paper. “Willow left this in your work bag.”
    I couldn’t bear to open it. I put it under my pillow and ran to meet Jeremy at our tower.
    He was pacing its miniature sward of clipped grass.
    “I have to go back.”
    “Will you