His confusion kept him where he was, and I soon found myself swallowed up in the foot traffic moving about the street. It wasn’t the gentry, of course. Servants, merchants, couriers . . . all the people whose labor helped the city’s rich survive. I fell in step with them, unsure of where I was going.

Some crazy part of me thought maybe I should go make an appeal to Donald Crosby. He’d seemed to like me well enough in our minutes-long conversation. Or maybe I could seek passage somewhere. Go off to the continent and charm some Belsian noble. Or maybe I could just lose myself in the crowd, one more anonymous face to blend into the city’s masses.

“Can I help you, my lady? Did you get separated from your servants?”

Apparently not so anonymous.

I’d ended up on the edge of one of the city’s many commercial districts. The speaker was an older man who carried parcels on his back that looked far too heavy for his slight frame.

“How do you know I’m a lady?” I blurted out.

He grinned, showing a few missing teeth. “Ain’t too many out alone dressed like you.”

I glanced around and saw he was right. The violet jacquard dress I wore was a casual one for me, but it made me stand out in the sea of otherwise drab attire. There were a few others of higher classes out shopping, but they were surrounded by dutiful servants ready to shield them from any unsavory elements.

“I’m fine,” I said, pushing past him. But I didn’t get very far before someone else stopped me: a ruddy-faced young boy, the kind who made his living delivering messages.

“Need me to escort you home, m’lady?” he asked. “Three coppers, and I’ll get you out of all this.”

“No, I . . .” I let my words drop as something occurred to me. “I don’t have any money. Not on me.” He started to leave, and I called, “Wait. Here.” I pulled off my pearl bracelet and offered it to him. “Can you take me to the Church of Glorious Vaiel?”

His eyes widened at the sight of the pearls, but he hesitated. “That’s too much, m’lady. The church is only over on Cunningham Street.”

I pushed the bracelet into his hand. “I have no idea where that is. Take me.”

It turned out to be only about three blocks away. I knew all the major areas of Osfro but little about how to travel between them. There’d never been any need to know.

There were no services today, but the main doors were propped slightly open, welcoming any souls in need of counsel. I walked past the elegant church, out to the graveyard. I moved through the common section, through the nicer section, and finally to the noble section. It had a wrought-iron gate surrounding it and was filled with monuments and mausoleums, rather than ordinary gravestones.

I might not know my way around Osfro streets, but I knew exactly where my family’s mausoleum was in this graveyard. My guide waited near the iron gate as I walked over to the handsome stone building labeled WITMORE. It wasn’t the biggest one on the property, but I thought it was one of the most beautiful. My father had loved art of all kinds, and we’d commissioned exquisite carvings of the six glorious angels on all the exterior walls.

I had no way to enter, not without prior arrangements with the church, and simply sat on the steps. I ran my fingers over the names carved amid those listed on the stone placard: LORD ROGER WITMORE, SIXTEENTH EARL OF ROTHFORD, AND LADY AMELIA ROTHFORD. Above them, my grandfather’s name was listed alone: LORD AUGUSTUS WITMORE, FIFTEENTH EARL OF ROTHFORD. My grandmother’s name would join his one day, and then the mausoleum would be full. “You’ll have to find your own place,” Grandmama had told me at my father’s funeral.

My mother had died first, catching one of the many illnesses that ran rampant in the poorer parts of the city. My parents had been greatly interested in investing in charitable establishments among the less fortunate, and it had cost them their lives, my mother getting sick one summer, my father the next. Their charities fell apart. Some said my parents had been saintly. Most said they’d been foolish.

I stared up at the great stone door, which held a carving of the glorious angel Ariniel, the gatekeeper of Uros. The work was gorgeous, but I always thought Ariniel was the least interesting of the angels. All she did was open the way for others and facilitate their journeys. Was there some place she’d rather be? Something else she’d rather do? Was she content to exist so that others could achieve their goals while she stayed at a standstill? Grandmama had said I’d always have choices made for me. Was that way of both humans and angels? The scriptures had never addressed such questions. Most likely they were blasphemous.

“My lady!”

I turned from that serene face and saw a flutter of color at the gate. Three of my ladies were hurrying toward me. Far beyond them, near the church’s entrance, I saw our carriage waiting. Immediately, I was swarmed.

“Oh, my lady, what were you thinking?” cried Vanessa. “Did that boy behave inappropriately?”

“You must be freezing!” Ada tossed a heavier cloak over my shoulders.

“Let me brush the dirt from your hem,” said Thea.

“No, no,” I said to that last one. “I’m fine. How did you find me?”

They all began talking over one another, but it basically came down to their noticing my disappearance and questioning the boy at our town house’s gate and pretty much every person I’d passed in my outing. I’d apparently made an impression.

“Your grandmother doesn’t know yet,” said Vanessa, urging me forward. She was the cleverest of them. “Let’s get back quickly.”

Before I stepped away, I looked back at the angel, back at my parents’ names. “Bad things are always going to happen,” my father had told me in his last year. “There’s no way to avoid that. Our control comes in how we face them. Do we let them crush us, making us despondent? Do we face them unflinchingly and endure the pain? Do we outsmart them?” I’d asked him what it meant to outsmart a bad thing. “You’ll know when the time comes. And when it does, you need to act quickly.”

The maids couldn’t stop fussing over me, even on the carriage ride home. “My lady, if you’d wanted to go, you should have just let us arrange a proper visit with a priest,” Thea said.

“I wasn’t thinking,” I murmured. I wasn’t about to elaborate on how the letter from Lady Dorothy had nearly given me a nervous breakdown. “I wanted the air. I decided I’d just walk over on my own.”

They stared at me incredulously. “You can’t do that,” said Ada. “You can’t do that on your own. You . . . you can’t do anything on your own.”

“Why not?” I snapped, feeling only a little bad when she flinched. “I’m a peeress of the realm. My family name commands respect everywhere. So why shouldn’t I be free to move everywhere? To choose to do whatever I want?”

None of them spoke right away, and I wasn’t surprised that it was Vanessa who finally did: “Because you’re the Countess of Rothford. Someone with a name like that can’t move among the nameless. And when it comes to who you are, my lady . . . well, that’s something we never have a choice in.”

Chapter 2

I realized then that I was taking the first approach to this “bad thing” with Lionel: I was letting it crush me. And so, I decided then and there that I would choose the nobler, unflinching approach. I would endure the pain.