light the oil stove in the stables, Annis turned eighteen. Mrs. King baked an enormous cake, enough for all the staff to share. Robbie gave her a lovely new bridle for Bits, one he had been laboring over in secret for months. She hugged him, making him blush and turn his cap in his hands. Her father gave her a gold bracelet and the papers that told her she had come into a small inheritance left by her mother. Harriet gave her a beautiful book of herbs, so large and heavy she almost couldn’t carry it home.
She didn’t expect anything from Frances, of course, nor did she receive anything.
Frances disappeared that very day.
Annis had insisted Velma leave Frances for a time to join the kitchen staff for a piece of birthday cake. Velma resisted at first, but Annis could see how gratified she was at her welcome in the kitchen. The maids had hardly seen her since her return from England. Velma blushed and gave the maids a shy wave, and Mrs. King cut her a generous slice of cake with a dollop of thick cream.
When she was finished, Mrs. King cut a tiny slice of cake for Frances. “Mrs. Frances won’t eat it, probably,” Velma said.
“We can only try,” Mrs. King said. Velma took the plate, with a sliver of cake arranged on a doily, and carried it back upstairs.
Moments later Velma’s cries of alarm carried down the staircase and into the dining room where Annis and her father sat over their coffee. George didn’t move, but dropped his chin onto his chest as if that would shut out Velma’s shrieks.
Annis jumped up, letting her napkin slip to the floor, and dashed toward the stairs. She found Velma on the landing, tears streaming down her red cheeks. “She ain’t there, miss, she ain’t anywhere!”
Annis took the stairs two at a time. On the landing she took Velma’s arm and steered her up the second flight. As they walked she said, “Now, Velma, calm down. Don’t cry anymore. Frances must have wandered off. I’ll help you look.”
“She ain’t never done that, miss, not in all this time!”
“I know. Perhaps she’s feeling better?”
Even Velma knew better than that, and didn’t bother answering. Together they went to Frances’s bedroom, checked her dressing room, looked in her bathroom. They peered into all the other bedrooms, George’s, Annis’s, where Annis surreptitiously checked that the manikins were where she had left them. They climbed the back staircase to look in the servants’ rooms. Annis was startled at how small and cold these were. She didn’t think she had ever been in one of them before, and their paucity of comforts bothered her.
She and Velma flew back down the stairs to the kitchen, the pantry, the storeroom, both parlors and the breakfast room, even the little room beside the servants’ entrance at the back of the house where coats and umbrellas were hung and a rack held muddy boots awaiting cleaning. There was no sign of Frances.
Annis escorted a still-weepy Velma back to the kitchen, where she turned her over to Mrs. King for a cup of tea. “We’ll find her, Velma,” Annis said. “Stop crying. It wasn’t your fault.”
“I’ve got Velma, Miss Annis,” Mrs. King said. “I’ve sent Robbie and Freddie out to look in the stables and the garden shed, just in case. You go tell your father what’s happened.”
It was odd, Annis thought, as she started back to the dining room, that her father had stayed where he was, as if he couldn’t hear the uproar around the house, the clatter of feet, the calling voices, the slamming of doors. She half expected to see he had finally left the table to join the search.
He hadn’t. He sat in his heavy armchair, staring at his coffee as it grew cold. He hadn’t touched the slice of cake resting in front of him.
“Papa?” Annis said uneasily. Instinctively she put her hand to her collar, where the moonstone nestled against her throat. Her father looked up at her, his eyes heavy with misery. With guilt. The moonstone throbbed under her fingers, and she knew. Suddenly, without the slightest doubt, she knew.
“Papa! You—you sent her away!”
“I had the doctor come for her.”
“Where did she go?”
“She’s in a better place. A place she can be cared for.”
“What place?”
“I don’t see what difference it makes, Annis. She won’t notice anyway.”
“Papa—” Annis gasped as the moonstone vibrated against her skin and a knowledge was borne in her mind, knowledge