“Oh!” she had cried—and she had laughed aloud with glee. “You used to be my mother.”

Mrs. Mitford had looked mystified, Jane’s mother had looked mortified and Louisa had smirked, because she was behaving with perfect six-year-old manners.

Jane had made matters worse before anyone could stop her.

“I fell in the river and drowneded,” she had said, eager to explain. “The water wasn’t terribly deep, and it wasn’t terribly cold, either. But it took me by surprise and I drowneded. You need not have been dreadfully unhappy, though, and I would have told you so afterward if I could, but I couldn’t. I went down and down into the water until I came to the light, and it was the most lovely light in the world. And he called me with his hands and I went and everything was—oh, so lovely that I didn’t really want to come back after all. Not just then, anyway. But you can see now that you need not have worried. Here I am, safe and sound.”

She had been beaming with happiness, her arms outspread, waiting to be recognized and embraced, when Mrs. Mitford crumpled into an insensible heap on the floor.

Back at Goodrich Hall a short time later, Jane had spent a few hours alone in the nursery, seated on a hard chair, before being fetched down to her father in the library and informed in a long speech, most of which she did not understand, what it meant to be Miss Jane Everett of Goodrich Hall, daughter of Sir Horace Everett, upon whose head she must never ever again bring down such shame. If she persisted in her wicked untruths, it was altogether probable the gypsies would come one night and take her away.

And back in the nursery she had faced what had seemed worse to her—her mother’s sorrow. She had shed a few tears as she questioned Jane about how she knew the story of Mary Mitford, who had been abandoned by her lover and had then thrown herself into the river to drown. Though the official version was that she had slipped and fallen in and drowned by accident. Only so could she be granted Christian burial in the churchyard where her father was vicar.