“Never know what we might find there! We might — all right?”

“All right,” Arabella repeated, smiling across at him. Something about Mr. Fitzhugh’s open enthusiasm was infectious. Even if he was a Turnip.

“Splendid!” exclaimed Mr. Fitzhugh, and he sounded as though he really thought it was. “Should be an amusing excursion, even if it is all a mad duck romp.”

“You mean a wild goose chase?”

“That too,” said Mr. Fitzhugh airily. “Can’t get away from the fowl, it seems.”

Sally twisted in her chair, pearl earbobs swinging. “Do not mention the chickens!”

“What happened?” demanded Jane in an undertone. “Did you get the position?”

It was the first chance they had to speak privately since Arabella had arrived, breathless, only moments ahead of the rest of her family.

After supper, the entire party had adjourned upstairs to the drawing room. In the chairs nearest the fire, Papa and Mr. Austen had their heads together over a knotty piece of Virgil. It saddened Arabella to see how old her father looked, how gray and drawn. He had been Mr. Austen’s pupil once, but the poor health that had plagued him since her mother’s death made him look more his old tutor’s contemporary than his junior. Cassandra had taken on the managing of Margaret for the evening, and was speaking to her determinedly of bonnets and trimmings. Olivia sprawled by the fire at their father’s feet, her nose buried in one of Mr. Austen’s books, while Mrs. Austen busied herself with the tea tray, handing the cups to Lavinia to hand around, an act of extreme faith, given Lavinia’s habit of dropping, knocking over, or bumping into things with limbs recently grown too long to manage properly.

Through the long windows that looked out onto the Sydney Gardens, Arabella could just make out the side of Miss Climpson’s seminary. Or she could if she leaned and squinted. Odd to think that it would be her home soon, that she would look out onto these very same gardens.