So much for that. What he had seen was her supposed inheritance. His eyes had been for Aunt Osborne’s gold, not for her.

“And after Twelfth Night?” Jane asked.

She wasn’t going back to that house. Not with them. Not ever. “What newlyweds want a poor relation cluttering up the house?”

Jane looked at her keenly. “Has your Aunt Osborne said as much?”

“No. She wouldn’t. But I feel it.” It would have been so much simpler if that had been all she felt. “It seemed like a good time to come home.”

Except that home wasn’t there anymore.

When she thought of home, it had always been of the ivy-hung parsonage of her youth, her father sitting in his study, writing long analyses of Augustan poetry and — very occasionally — his sermons, while her rosy-cheeked sisters tumbled among the butterflies in the flower-filled garden.

To see them now, in a set of rented rooms redolent of failure and boiled mutton, had jarred her. Her father’s cheeks were sunken, his frame gaunt. Margaret had gone from being a self-important eight-year-old to an embittered twenty. Olivia had no interest in anything outside the covers of her books; not novels, but dusty commentaries on Latin authors dredged from their father’s shelves. Lavinia, a roly-poly three-year-old when Arabella left, was all arms and legs at fifteen, outgoing and awkward. They had grown up without her. There was no place for her in their lives.

No place for her in London, no place for her in Bath. No place for her with her aunt, with her father, her sisters. Arabella fought against a dragging sensation of despair. The wind whistled in her ears, doing its best to push her back down the hill up which she had so laboriously climbed.

Absurd to recall that just three months ago she had believed herself on the verge of being married, living every day in constant expectation of a proposal. It was a proposal that had come, but to Aunt Osborne, not to her.