“Emma,” said Jane decidedly. “I’ve already used Elizabeth.”

Arabella smiled with forced brightness. “Did I tell you that I finished a draft of my novel? I call it Sketches from the Life of a Young Lady in London. It’s not so much a novel, really. More a series of observations. Sketches, in fact.”

Jane ignored her attempts to change the subject. “Your father said you were only home until the holidays.”

“I was. I am.” Arabella struggled against the wind that seemed determined to wrap her skirt around her legs as she labored uphill. What madman had designed the streets of Bath on a nearly perpendicular grade? Someone with a grudge against young ladies without the means to afford a carriage. “Aunt Osborne expects me back for Christmas. I am to spend the twelve days of Christmas with her at Girdings House at the express command of the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale.”

The invitation had been issued before Captain Musgrave had entered onto the scene. An invitation from the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale was something not to be denied. The Dowager Duchess of Dovedale possessed a particularly pointy cane and she knew just how to use it.

Arabella’s aunt attributed the invitation to her own social consequence, but Arabella knew better. The house party at Girdings was being thrown quite explicitly as a means of marrying off the dowager’s shy granddaughter, Charlotte. The dowager needed to even the numbers with young ladies who could be trusted to draw absolutely no attention to themselves. After years as her aunt’s companion, Arabella was a master at the art of self-effacement.

She had been, to Aunt Osborne, the equivalent of a piece of furniture, and to her aunt’s friends something even less.

The first person to have looked at her and seen her had been Captain Musgrave.