heard for miles around.
—Honeycutt’s Gazette of Fashion and Domesticity for Ladies
IT HAD REQUIRED three large coaches to bring Eliza, little Cecelia, the nurse, and the number of guards the duke had undoubtedly insisted accompany her to the Tricklebank home. A crowd of onlookers and gawkers hoping for a glimpse of the little princess had gathered in the green, through which Hollis had to push to reach the door of her father’s home.
She smiled up at one of the guards. “Mrs. Honeycutt,” she said, and the guard allowed her to pass.
If her family didn’t know she’d arrived, Jack and John, the family dogs, were on hand to alert one and all of the arrival of more foreign invaders.
“For heaven’s sake!” Hollis cooed when Ben, the house steward, opened the door. She squatted down to greet the dogs properly, laughing as they tried to lick her face.
“Down, you bloody dogs, down!” Ben bellowed as Hollis stood to remove her cloak.
“It’s quite all right, Ben,” Hollis said cheerfully. “I am very happy to see them, too.”
Ben shut the door and took Hollis’s coat.
“Thank you, Ben. Has Caro arrived?”
“Aye, she has and is already at the telling of some long tale,” he said with a fond grin.
“Mrs. Honeycutt!” Hollis’s father bellowed from deeper in the house. “Is that you? Have you come at last?”
“I have indeed, Pappa!” she called back. She patted down her hair and entered the drawing room.
Poppy was the first person she saw, standing just inside the door, as if she’d just arrived herself. Poppy was the maid who had attended them all these years. Hollis’s mother had discovered her, a proper orphan, and brought her home. She was so close in age to Hollis and Eliza that they had always viewed her as another sister. Poppy cried out with delight as Hollis walked into the room. Hollis grinned...but her grin fell when Poppy darted past her to the far end of the room. She saw then that Eliza and baby Cecelia were standing near the bookshelves, and Poppy’s cry of delight had been for the baby. “May I hold her, please?” Poppy asked, reaching for the baby.
“Well,” Hollis said, and toyed with a ringlet over her ear. “I will endeavor not to be offended.”
“Both of us, darling,” Caroline said from her place on the settee, where she was stretched out as if preparing for a nap. “Hardly anyone in this room has noticed me, and I am wearing a new dress.”
“At least you’re glad to see me, aren’t you, Pappa?” Hollis crossed the room and stepped over a big basket of his yarn to kiss her father’s cheek.
“Your arrival gives me a thrill like no other, except perhaps my granddaughter. Where is the cherub, Eliza?”
“I’ve got her, Your Honor,” Poppy said, walking across the room to him.
Eliza followed closely behind, as if she thought Poppy might drop the baby. She pressed her hand to Hollis’s cheek as she breezed by. “Happy you’ve come, darling.”
Hollis rolled her eyes. She glanced around the drawing room, that familiar place where the four women in this room had grown up. Four motherless girls. Eliza and Hollis’s mother was lost to cholera, and Caro’s mother soon thereafter. She thought of how they’d puttered about this room as their father’s sight had slowly left him.
She wondered what Eliza thought of this room now after living in palaces. It looked the very same as it had all those years. A bit more worn, of course. And the bookshelves were stuffed with even more books. Her father’s knitting—a hobby he’d taken on after his sight had left him—took up more room than it once had. A basket of yarn—tangled, thanks to a very disobedient cat, Mr. Pris—was at her father’s feet.
The mantel above the hearth was still cluttered with the clocks Eliza had stored there. She had a peculiar hobby of repairing clocks, and before Prince Sebastian had blundered into this house and demanded information from her—thereby starting a chain of events that had led to the darling little cherub—Eliza had taken in the clocks as extra work. When she had moved to Alucia, they remained precisely where she’d left them, still in disrepair, still clicking and turning and chiming at different times. It was as if Poppy was afraid to move them lest Eliza come bursting through the door one day, desperate to finish the repair of them.
In the front bay window, there was a pair of upholstered chairs, separated by a small table stacked with books.