The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2019 Edition

The Donner Party ^{Dale Bailey}

Lady Donner was in ascendance the first time Mrs. Breen tasted human flesh. For more years than anyone cared to count, Lady Donner had ruled the London Season like a queen. Indeed, some said that she stood second only to Victoria herself when it came to making (or breaking) someone’s place in Society—a sentiment sovereign in Mrs. Breen’s mind as her footman handed her down from the carriage into the gathering London twilight, where she took Mr. Breen’s arm.

“There is no reason to be apprehensive, Alice,” he had told her in their last fleeting moment of privacy, during the drive to Lady Donner’s home in Park Lane, and she had felt then, as she frequently did, the breadth of his age and experience when measured against her youth. Though they shared a child—two-year-old Sophie, not the heir they had been hoping for—Mr. Breen often seemed more like a father than her husband, and his paternal assurances did not dull the edge of her anxiety. To receive a dinner invitation from such a luminary as Lady Donner was surprising under any circumstances. To receive a First Feast invitation was shocking. So Mrs. Breen was apprehensive—apprehensive as they were admitted into the grand foyer, apprehensive as they were announced into the drawing room, apprehensive most of all as Lady Donner, stout and unhandsome in her late middle age, swept down upon them in a cloud of taffeta and perfume.

“I am pleased to make your acquaintance at last, Mrs. Breen,” Lady Donner said, taking her hand. “I have heard so much of you.”

“The honor is mine,” Mrs. Breen said, smiling.

But Lady Donner had already turned her attention to Mr. Breen. “She is lovely, Walter,” she was saying, “a rare beauty indeed. Radiant.” Lady Donner squeezed Mrs. Breen’s hand. “You are radiant, darling. Really.”

And then—it was so elegantly done that Mrs. Breen afterward wasn’t quite certain how it had been done—Lady Donner divested her of her husband, leaving her respite to take in the room: the low fire burning in the grate and the lights of the chandelier, flickering like diamonds, and the ladies in their bright dresses, glittering like visitants from Faery that might any moment erupt into flight. Scant years ago, in the era of genteel penury from which Mr. Breen had rescued her, Mrs. Breen had watched such ethereal creatures promenade along Rotten Row, scarcely imagining that she would someday take her place among them. Now that she had, she felt like an imposture, wary of exposure and suddenly dowdy in a dress that had looked little short of divine when her dressmaker first unveiled it.

Such were her thoughts when Lady Donner returned, drawing from the company an elderly gentleman, palsied and stooped: Mrs. Breen’s escort to table, Mr. Cavendish, one of the lesser great. He had known Mr. Breen for decades, he confided as they went down to dinner, enquiring afterward about her own family.

Mrs. Breen, who had no family left, allowed—reluctantly—that her father had been a Munby.

“Munby,” Mr. Cavendish said as they took their seats. “I do not know any Munbys.”

“We are of no great distinction, I fear,” Mrs. Breen conceded.

Mr. Cavendish seemed not to hear her. His gaze was distant. “Now, when I was a young man, there was a Munby out of—”

Coketown, she thought he was going to say, but Mr. Cavendish chuckled abruptly and came back to her. He touched her hand. “But that was very long ago, I fear, in the age of the Megalosaurus.”

Then the footman arrived with the wine and Mr. Cavendish became convivial, as a man who has caught himself on the verge of indecorum and stepped back from the precipice. He shared a self-deprecating anecdote of his youth—something about a revolver and a racehorse—and spoke warmly of his grandson at Oxford, which led to a brief exchange regarding Sophie (skirting the difficult issue of an heir). Then his voice was subsumed into the general colloquy at the table, sonorous as the wash of a distant sea. Mrs. Breen contributed little to this conversation and would later remember less of it.

What she would recall, fresh at every remove, was the food—not because she was a gourmand or a glutton, but because each new dish, served up by the footman at her shoulder, was a reminder that she had at last achieved the apotheosis to which she had so long aspired. And no dish more reminded her of this new status than the neat cutlets of ensouled flesh, reserved alone in all the year for the First Feast and Second Day dinner that celebrated the divinely ordained social order.

It was delicious.

“Do try it with your butter,” Mr. Cavendish recommended, and Mrs. Breen cut a dainty portion, dipped it into the ramekin of melted butter beside her plate, and slipped it into her mouth. It was nothing like she had expected. It seemed to evanesce on her tongue, the butter a mere grace note to a stronger, slightly sweet taste, moist and rich. Pork was the closest she could come to it, but as a comparison it was utterly inadequate. She immediately wanted more of it—more than the modest portion on her plate, and she knew it would be improper to eat all of that. She wasn’t some common scullery maid, devouring her dinner like a half-starved animal. At the mere thought of such a base creature, Mrs. Breen shuddered and felt a renewed sense of her own place in the world.

She took a sip of wine.

“How do you like the stripling, dear?” Lady Donner asked from the head of the table.

Mrs. Breen looked up, uncertain how to reply. One wanted to be properly deferential, but it would be unseemly to fawn. “Most excellent, my lady,” she ventured, to nods all around the table, so that was all right. She hesitated, uncertain whether to say more—really, the etiquette books were entirely inadequate—only to be saved from having to make the decision by a much bewhiskered gentleman, Mr. Miller, who said, “The young lady is quite right. Your cook has outdone herself. Wherever did you find such a choice cut?”

Mrs. Breen allowed herself another bite.

“The credit is all Lord Donner’s,” Lady Donner said. “He located this remote farm in Derbyshire where they do the most remarkable thing. They tether the little creatures inside these tiny crates, where they feed them up from birth.”

“Muscles atrophy,” Lord Donner said. “Keeps the meat tender.”

“It’s the newest thing,” Lady Donner said. “How he found the place, I’ll never know.”

“Well,” Lord Donner began—but Mrs. Breen had by then lost track of the conversation as she deliberated over whether she should risk one more bite.

The footman saved her. “Quite done, then, madam?”

“Yes,” she said.

The footman took the plate away. By the time he’d returned to scrape the cloth, Mrs. Breen was inwardly lamenting the fact that hers was not the right to every year partake of such a succulent repast. Yet she was much consoled by thoughts of the Season to come. With the doors of Society flung open to them, Sophie, like her mother, might marry up and someday preside over a First Feast herself.

The whole world lay before her like a banquet. What was there now that the Breens could not accomplish?

Nonetheless, a dark mood seized Mrs. Breen as their carriage rattled home. Mr. Cavendish’s abortive statement hung in her mind, all the worse for being unspoken.

Coketown.

Her grandfather had made his fortune in the mills of Coketown. Through charm and money (primarily the latter), Abel Munby had sought admission into the empyrean inhabited by the First Families; he’d been doomed to a sort of purgatorial half-life instead—not unknown in the most rarified circles, but not entirely welcome within them, either. If he’d had a daughter, a destitute baronet might have been persuaded to take her, confirming the family’s rise and boding well for still greater future elevation. He’d had a son instead, a wastrel and a drunk who’d squandered most of his father’s fortune, leaving his own daughter—the future Mrs. Breen—marooned at the periphery of the haut monde, subsisting on a small living and receiving an occasional dinner invitation when a hostess of some lesser degree needed to fill out a table.

Mr. Breen had plucked her from obscurity at such a table, though she had no dowry and but the echo of a name. Men had done more for beauty and the promise of an heir, she supposed. But beauty fades, and no heir had been forthcoming, only Sophie—poor, dear Sophie, whom her father had quickly consigned to the keeping of her nanny.

“You stare out that window as if you read some ill omen in the mist,” Mr. Breen said. “Does something trouble your thoughts?”

Mrs. Breen looked up. She forced a smile. “No, dear,” she replied. “I am weary, nothing more.”

Fireworks burst in the night sky—Mrs. Breen was not blind to the irony that the lower orders should thus celebrate their own abject place—and the fog bloomed with color. Mr. Breen studied her with an appraising eye. Some further response was required.

Mrs. Breen sighed. “Do you never think of it?”

“Think of what?”

She hesitated, uncertain. Sophie? Coketown? Both? At last, she said, “I wonder if they reproach me for my effrontery.”

“Your effrontery?”

“In daring to take a place at their table.”

“You were charming, dear.”

“Charm is insufficient, Walter. I have the sweat and grime of Coketown upon my hands.”

“Your grandfather had the sweat and grime of Coketown upon his hands. You are unbesmirched, my dear.”

“Yet some would argue that my rank is insufficient to partake of ensouled flesh.”

“You share my rank now,” Mr. Breen said.

But what of the stripling she had feasted upon that night, she wondered, its flesh still piquant upon her tongue? What would it have said of rank, tethered in its box and fattened for the tables of its betters? But this was heresy to say or think (though there were radical reformers who said it more and more frequently), and so Mrs. Breen turned her mind away. Tonight, in sacred ritual, she had consumed human flesh and brought her grandfather’s ambitions—and her own—to fruition. It was as Mr. Browning had said. All was right with the world. God was in his Heaven.

And then the window shattered, blowing glass into her face and eyes.

Mrs. Breen screamed and flung herself back into her husband’s arms. With a screech of tortured wood, the carriage lurched beneath her and in the moment before it slammed back to the cobbles upright, she thought it would overturn. One of the horses shrieked in mindless animal terror—she had never heard such a harrowing sound—and then the carriage shuddered to a stop at last. She had a confused impression of torches in the fog and she heard the sound of men fighting. Then Mr. Breen was brushing the glass from her face and she could see clearly and she knew that she had escaped without injury.

“What happened?” she gasped.

“A stone,” Mr. Breen said. “Some brigand hurled a stone through the window.”

The door flew back and the coachman looked in. “Are you all right, sir?”

“We’re fine,” Mrs. Breen said.

And then, before her husband could speak, the coachman said, “We have one of them, sir.”

“And the others?”

“Fled into the fog.”

“Very well, then,” said Mr. Breen. “Let’s have a look at him, shall we?”

He eased past Mrs. Breen and stepped down from the carriage, holding his walking stick. Mrs. Breen moved to follow but he closed the door at his back. She looked through the shattered window. The two footmen held the brigand on his knees between them—though he hardly looked like a brigand. He looked like a boy—a dark-haired boy of perhaps twenty (not much younger than Mrs. Breen herself), clean-limbed and clean-shaven.

“Well, then,” Mr. Breen said. “Have you no shame, attacking a gentleman in the street?”

“Have you, sir?” the boy replied. “Have you any shame?”

The coachman cuffed him for his trouble.

“I suppose you wanted money,” Mr. Breen said.

“I have no interest in your money, sir. It is befouled with gore.”

Once again, the coachman moved to strike him. Mr. Breen stayed the blow. “What is it that you hoped to accomplish, then?”

“Have you tasted human flesh tonight, sir?”

“And what business is it—”

“Yes,” Mrs. Breen said. “We have partaken of ensouled flesh.”

“We’ll have blood for blood, then,” the boy said. “As is our right.”

This time, Mr. Breen did not intervene when the coachman lifted his hand.

The boy spat blood into the street.

“You have no rights,” Mr. Breen said. “I’ll see you hang for this.”

“No,” Mrs. Breen said.

“No?” Mr. Breen looked up at her in surprise.

“No,” Mrs. Breen said, moved at first to pity—and then, thinking of her grandfather, she hardened herself. “Hanging is too dignified a fate for such a base creature,” she said. “Let him die in the street.”

Mr. Breen eyed her mildly. “The lady’s will be done,” he said, letting his stick clatter to the cobblestones.

Turning, he climbed past her into the carriage and sat down in the gloom. Fireworks exploded high overhead, showering down through the fog and painting his face in streaks of red and white that left him hollow-eyed and gaunt. He was thirty years Mrs. Breen’s senior, but he had never looked so old to her before.

She turned back to the window.

She had ordered this thing. She would see it done.

And so Mrs. Breen watched as the coachman picked up his master’s stick and tested its weight. The brigand tried to wrench free, and for a moment Mrs. Breen thought—hoped?—he would escape. But the two footmen flung him once again to his knees. Another rocket burst overhead. The coachman grunted as he brought down the walking stick, drew back, and brought it down again. The brigand’s blood was black in the reeking yellow fog. Mrs. Breen looked on as the third blow fell and then the next, and then it became too terrible and she turned her face away and only listened as her servants beat the boy to death there in the cobbled street.

“The savages shall be battering down our doors soon enough, I suppose,” Lady Donner said when Mrs. Breen called to thank her for a place at her First Feast table.

“What a distressing prospect,” Mrs. Eddy said, and Mrs. Graves nodded in assent—the both of them matron to families of great honor and antiquity, if not quite the premier order. But who was Mrs. Breen to scorn such eminence—she who not five years earlier had subsisted on the crumbs of her father’s squandered legacy, struggling (and more often than not failing) to meet her dressmaker’s monthly reckoning?

Nor were the Breens of any greater rank than the other two women in Lady Donner’s drawing room that afternoon. Though he boasted an old and storied lineage, Mr. Breen’s was not quite a First Family and had no annual right to mark the beginning of the Season with a Feast of ensouled flesh. Indeed, prior to his marriage to poor Alice Munby, he himself had but twice been a First Feast guest.

Mrs. Breen had not, of course, herself introduced the subject of the incident in the street, but Mr. Breen had shared the story at his club, and word of Mrs. Breen’s courage and resolve had found its way to Lady Donner’s ear, as all news did in the end.

“Were you very frightened, dear?” Mrs. Graves inquired.

Mrs. Breen was silent for a moment, uncertain how to answer. It would be unseemly to boast. “I had been fortified with Lady Donner’s generosity,” she said at last. “The divine order must be preserved.”

“Yes, indeed,” Mrs. Eddy said. “Above all things.”

“Yet it is not mere violence in the street that troubles me,” Mrs. Graves said. “There are the horrid pamphlets one hears spoken of. My husband has lately mentioned the sensation occasioned by Mr. Bright’s Anthropophagic Crisis.”

“And one hears rumors that the House of Commons will soon take up the issue,” Mrs. Eddy added.

“The Americans are at fault, with their talk of unalienable rights,” Mrs. Graves said.

“The American experiment will fail,” Lady Donner said. “The Negro problem will undo them, Lord Donner assures me. This too shall pass.”

And that put an end to the subject.

Mrs. Eddy soon afterward departed, and Mrs. Graves after that.

Mrs. Breen, fearing that she had overstayed her welcome, stood and thanked her hostess.

“You must come again soon,” Lady Donner said, and Mrs. Breen avowed that she would.

The season was by then in full swing, and the Breens were much in demand. The quality of the guests in Mrs. Breen’s drawing room improved, and at houses where she had formerly been accustomed to leave her card and pass on, the doors were now open to her. She spent her evenings at the opera and the theater and the orchestra. She accepted invitations to the most exclusive balls. She twice attended dinners hosted by First Families—the Pikes and the Reeds, both close associates of Lady Donner.

But the high point of the Season was certainly Mrs. Breen’s growing friendship with Lady Donner herself. The doyenne seemed to have taken on Mrs. Breen’s elevation as her special project. There was little she did not know about the First Families and their lesser compeers, and less (indeed nothing) that she was not willing to use to her own—and to Mrs. Breen’s—benefit. Though the older woman was quick to anger, Mrs. Breen never felt the lash of her displeasure. And she doted upon Sophie. She chanced to meet the child one Wednesday afternoon when Mrs. Breen, feeling, in her mercurial way, particularly fond of her daughter, had allowed Sophie to peek into the drawing room.

Lady Donner was announced.

The governess—a plain, bookish young woman named Ada Pool—was ushering Sophie, with a final kiss from her mother, out of the room when the grande dame swept in.

“Sophie is just leaving,” Mrs. Breen said, inwardly agitated lest Sophie misbehave. “This is Lady Donner, Sophie,” she said. “Can you say good afternoon?”

Sophie smiled. She held a finger to her mouth. She looked at her small feet in their pretty shoes. Then, just as Mrs. Breen began to despair, she said, with an endearing childish lisp, “Good afternoon, Mrs. Donner.”

“Lady Donner,” Mrs. Breen said.

“Mrs. Lady Donner,” Sophie said.

Lady Donner laughed. “I am so pleased to meet you, Sophie.”

Mrs. Breen said, “Give Mama one more kiss, dear, and then you must go with Miss Pool.”

“She is lovely, darling,” Lady Donner said. “Do let her stay.”

Thus it was decided that Sophie might linger. Though she could, by Mrs. Breen’s lights, be a difficult child (which is to say a child of ordinary disposition), Sophie that day allowed herself to be cossetted and admired without objection. She simpered and smiled and was altogether charming.

Thereafter, whenever Lady Donner called, she brought along some bauble for the child—a kaleidoscope or a tiny chest of drawers for her dollhouse and once an intricately embroidered ribbon of deep blue mulberry silk that matched perfectly the child’s sapphire eyes. Lady Donner tied up Sophie’s hair with it herself, running her fingers sensuously through the child’s lustrous blonde curls and recalling with nostalgia the infancy of her own daughter, now grown.

When she at last perfected the elaborate bow, Lady Donner led Sophie to a gilded mirror. She looked on fondly as Sophie admired herself.

“She partakes of her mother’s beauty,” Lady Donner remarked, and Mrs. Breen, who reckoned herself merely striking (Mr. Breen would have disagreed), basked in the older woman’s praise. Afterward—and to Sophie’s distress—the ribbon was surrendered into Mrs. Breen’s possession and preserved as a sacred relic of her friend’s affections, to be used upon only the most special of occasions.

In the days that followed, Lady Donner and Mrs. Breen became inseparable. As their intimacy deepened, Mrs. Breen more and more neglected her old friends. She was seldom at home when they called, and she did not often return their visits. Her correspondence with them, which had once been copious, fell into decline. There was simply too much to do. Life was a fabulous procession of garden parties and luncheons and promenades in the Park.

Then it was August. Parliament adjourned. The Season came to an end.

She and Mr. Breen retired to their country estate in Suffolk, where Mr. Breen would spend the autumn shooting and fox hunting. As the days grew shorter, the winter seemed, paradoxically, to grow longer, their return to town more remote. Mrs. Breen corresponded faithfully with Mrs. Eddy (kind and full of gentle whimsy), Mrs. Graves (quite grave), and Lady Donner (cheery and full of inconsequential news). She awaited their letters eagerly. She rode in the mornings and attended the occasional country ball, and twice a week, like clockwork, she entertained her husband in her chamber.

But despite all of her efforts in this regard, no heir kindled in her womb.

Mrs. Breen had that winter, for the first time, a dream which would recur periodically for years to come. In the dream, she was climbing an endless ladder. It disappeared into silky darkness at her feet. Above her, it rose toward an inconceivably distant circle of light. The faraway sounds of tinkling silver and conversation drifted dimly down to her ears. And though she had been climbing for days, years, a lifetime—though her limbs were leaden with exhaustion—she could imagine no ambition more worthy of her talents than continuing the ascent. She realized too late that the ladder’s topmost rungs and rails had been coated with thick, unforgiving grease, and even as she emerged into the light, her hands, numb with fatigue, gave way at last, and she found herself sliding helplessly into the abyss below.

The Breens began the Season that followed with the highest of hopes.

They were borne out. Lady Donner renewed her friendship with Mrs. Breen. They were seen making the rounds at the Royal Academy’s Exhibition together, pausing before each painting to adjudge its merits. Neither of them had any aptitude for the visual arts, or indeed any interest in them, but being seen at the Exhibition was important. Lady Donner attended to assert her supremacy over the London scene, Mrs. Breen to bask in Lady Donner’s reflected glow. After that, the first dinner invitations came in earnest. Mr. Breen once again took up at his club; Mrs. Breen resumed her luncheons, her charity bazaars, her afternoon calls and musical soireés. Both of them looked forward to the great events of the summer—the Derby and the Ascot in June, the Regatta in July.

But, foremost, they anticipated the high holiday and official commencement of the London Season: First Day and its attendant Feast, which fell every year on the last Saturday in May. Mr. Breen hoped to dine with one of the First Families; Mrs. Breen expected to.

She was disappointed.

When the messenger from Lady Donner arrived, she presumed that she would open the velvety envelope to discover her invitation to the First Feast. Instead it was an invitation to the Second Day dinner. Another woman might have felt gratified at this evidence of Lady Donner’s continued esteem. Mrs. Breen, on the other hand, felt that she had been cut by her closest friend, and in an excess of passion dashed off an indignant reply tendering her regret that Mr. and Mrs. Breen would be unable to attend due to a prior obligation. Then she paced the room in turmoil while she awaited her husband’s return from the club.

Mrs. Breen did not know what she had anticipated from him, but she had not expected him to be furious. His face grew pale. He stalked the room like a caged tiger. “Have you any idea what you have done?”

“I have declined an invitation, nothing more.”

“An invitation? You have declined infinitely more than that, I am afraid. You have declined everything we most value—place and person, the divine order of the ranks and their degrees.” He stopped at the sideboard for a whisky and drank it back in a long swallow. “To be asked to partake of ensouled flesh, my dear, even on Second Day—there is no honor greater for people of our station.”

“Our station? Lady Donner and I are friends, Walter.”

“You may be friends. But you are not equals, and you would do well to remember that.” He poured another drink. “Or would have done, I should say. It is too late now.”

“Too late?”

“Lady Donner does not bear insult lightly.”

“But she has insulted me.”

“Has she, then? I daresay she will not see it that way.” Mr. Breen put his glass upon the sideboard. He walked across the room and gently took her shoulders. “You must write to her, Alice,” he said. “It is too late to hope that we might attend the dinner. But perhaps she will forgive you. You must beg her to do so.”

“I cannot,” Mrs. Breen said, with the defiance of one too proud to acknowledge an indefensible error.

“You must. As your husband, I require it of you.”

“Yet I will not.”

And then, though she had never had anything from him but a kind of distracted paternal kindness, Mr. Breen raised his hand. For a moment, she thought he was going to strike her. He turned away instead.

“Goddamn you,” he said, and she recoiled from the sting of the curse, humiliated.

“You shall have no heir of me,” she said, imperious and cold.

“I have had none yet,” he said. His heels rang like gunshots as he crossed the drawing room and let himself out.

Alone, Mrs. Breen fought back tears.

What had she done? she wondered. What damage had she wrought?

She would find out soon enough.

It had become her custom to visit Mrs. Eddy in her Grosvenor Square home on Mondays. But the following afternoon when Mrs. Breen sent up her card, her footman returned to inform her as she leaned out her carriage window “that the lady was not at home.” Vexed, she was withdrawing into her carriage when another equipage rattled to the curb in front of her own. A footman leaped down with a card for Mrs. Eddy. Mrs. Breen did not need to see his livery. She recognized the carriage, had indeed ridden in it herself. She watched as the servant conducted his transaction with the butler. When he returned to hand down his mistress—Mrs. Eddy was apparently at home for some people—Mrs. Breen pushed open her door.

“Madam—” her own footman said at this unprecedented behavior.

“Let me out!”

The footman reached up to assist her. Mrs. Breen ignored him.

“Lady Donner,” she cried as she stumbled to the pavement. “Lady Donner, please wait.”

Lady Donner turned to look at her.

“It is so delightful to see you,” Mrs. Breen effused. “I—”

She broke off. Lady Donner’s face was impassive. It might have been carved of marble. “Do I know you?” she said.

“But—” Mrs. Breen started. Again she broke off. But what? What could she say?

Lady Donner held her gaze for a moment longer. Then, with the ponderous dignity of an iceberg, she disappeared into the house. The door snicked closed behind her with the finality of a coffin slamming shut.

“Madam, let me assist you into your carriage,” the footman said at her elbow. There was kindness in his voice. Somehow that was the most mortifying thing of all, that she should be pitied by such a creature.

“I shall walk for a while,” she said.

“Madam, please—”

“I said I shall walk.”

She put her back to him and strode down the sidewalk as fast as her skirts would permit. Her face stung with shame, more even than it had burned with the humiliation of her husband’s curse. She felt the injustice of her place in the world as she had never felt it before—felt how small she was, how little she mattered in the eyes of such people, that they should toy with her as she might have toyed with one of Sophie’s dolls, and disposed of it when it ceased to amuse her.

The blind, heat-struck roar of the city soon enveloped her. The throng pressed close, a phantasmagoria of subhuman faces, cruel and strange, distorted as the faces in dreams, their pores overlarge, their yellow flesh stippled with perspiration. Buildings leaned over her at impossible angles. The air was dense with the creak of passing omnibuses and the cries of cabbies and costermongers and, most of all, the whinny and stench of horses, and the heaping piles of excrement they left steaming in the street.

She thought she might faint.

Her carriage pulled up to the curb beside her. Her footman dropped to the pavement before it stopped moving.

“Madam, please. You must get into the carriage,” he said, and when he flung open the carriage door, she allowed him to hand her up into the crepuscular interior. Before he’d even closed the latch the carriage was moving, shouldering its way back into the London traffic. She closed her eyes and let the rocking vehicle lull her into a torpor.

She would not later remember anything of the journey or her arrival at home. When she awoke in her own bed some hours afterward, she wondered if the entire episode had not been a terrible dream. And then she saw her maid, Lily, sitting by the bed, and she saw the frightened expression on the girl’s face, and she knew that it had actually happened.

“We have sent for the physician, madam,” Lily said.

“I do not need a physician,” she said. “I am beyond a physician’s help.”

“Please, madam, you must not—”

“Where is my husband?”

“I will fetch him.”

Lily went to the door and spoke briefly to someone on the other side. A moment later, Mr. Breen entered the room. His face was pale, his manner formal.

“How are you, dearest?” he asked.

“I have ruined us,” she said.

She did not see how they could go on.

Yet go on they did.

Word was quietly circulated that Mrs. Breen had fallen ill and thus a thin veil of propriety was drawn across her discourtesy and its consequence. But no one called to wish her a quick recovery. Even Mrs. Breen’s former friends—those pale, drab moths fluttering helplessly around the bright beacon of Society—did not come. Having abandoned them in the moment of her elevation, Mrs. Breen found herself abandoned in turn.

Her illness necessitated the Breens’ withdrawal to the country well before the Season ended. There, Mr. Breen remained cold and distant. Once, he had warmed to her small enthusiasms, chuckling indulgently when the dressmaker left and she spilled out her purchases for his inspection. Now, while he continued to spoil her in every visible way, he did so from a cool remove. She no longer displayed her fripperies for his approval. He no longer asked to see them.

Nor did he any longer make his twice-weekly visit to her chamber. Mrs. Breen had aforetime performed her conjugal obligations dutifully, with a kind of remote efficiency that precluded real enthusiasm. She had married without a full understanding of her responsibilities in this regard, and, once enlightened, viewed those offices with the same mild aversion she felt for all the basic functions of her body. Such were the consequences of the first sin in Eden, these unpleasant portents of mortality, with their mephitic smells and unseemly postures. Yet absent her husband’s hymeneal attentions, she found herself growing increasingly restive. Her dream of the ladder recurred with increasing frequency.

The summer had given way to fall when Sophie became, by chance and by betrayal, Mrs. Breen’s primary solace.

If Mr. Breen took no interest in his daughter, his wife’s sentiments were more capricious. Though she usually left Sophie in the capable hands of the governess, she was occasionally moved to an excess of affection, coddling the child and showering her with kisses. It was such a whim that sent her climbing the back stairs to the third-floor playroom late one afternoon. She found Sophie and Miss Pool at the dollhouse. Mrs. Breen would have joined them had a book upon the table not distracted her.

On any other day she might have passed it by unexamined. But she had recently found refuge in her subscription to Mudie’s, reading volume by volume the novels delivered to her by post—Oliphant and Ainsworth, Foster, Collins. And so curiosity more than anything else impelled her to pick the book up. When she did, a folded tract—closely printed on grainy, yellow pulp—slipped from between the pages.

“Wait—” Miss Pool said, rising to her feet—but it was too late. Mrs. Breen had already knelt to retrieve the pamphlet. She unfolded it as she stood. A Great Horror Reviled, read the title, printed in Gothic Blackletter across the top. The illustration below showed an elaborate table setting. Where the plate should have been there lay a baby, split stem to sternum by a deep incision, the flesh pinned back to reveal a tangle of viscera. Mrs. Breen didn’t have to read any more to know what the tract was about, but she couldn’t help scanning the first page anyway, taking in the gruesome illustrations and the phrases set apart in bold type. Too long have the First Families battened upon the flesh of the poor! one read, and another, Blood must flow in the gutters that it may no longer flow in the kitchens of men!—which reminded Mrs. Breen of the boy who had hurled the stone through their carriage window. The Anthropophagic Crisis, Mrs. Graves had called it. Strife in the House of Commons, carnage in the streets.

Miss Pool waited by the dollhouse, Sophie at her side.

“Please, madam,” Miss Pool said, “it is not what you think.”

“Is it not? Whatever could it be, then?”

“I—I found it in the hands of the coachman this morning and confiscated it. I had intended to bring it to your attention.”

Mrs. Breen thought of the coachman testing the weight of her husband’s walking stick, the brigand’s blood black in the jaundiced fog.

“What errand led you to the stables?”

“Sophie and I had gone to look at the horses.”

“Is this true, Sophie?” Mrs. Breen asked.

Sophie was still for a moment. Then she burst into tears.

“Sophie, did you go to the stables this morning? You must be honest.”

“No, Mama,” Sophie said through sobs.

“I thought not.” Mrs. Breen folded the tract. “You dissemble with facility, Miss Pool. Please pack your possessions. You will be leaving us at first light.”

“But where will I go?” the governess asked. And when Mrs. Breen did not respond: “Madam, please—”

“You may appeal to Mr. Breen, if you wish. I daresay it will do you no good.”

Nor did it. Dawn was still gray in the east when Mrs. Breen came out of the house to find a footman loading the governess’s trunk into the carriage. Finished, he opened the door to hand her in. She paused with one foot on the step and turned back to look at Mrs. Breen. The previous night she had wept. Now she was defiant. “Your time is passing, Mrs. Breen,” she said, “you and all your kind. History will sweep you all away.”

Mrs. Breen made no reply. She only stood there and watched as the footman closed the door at the governess’s back. The coachman snapped his whip and the carriage began to move. But long after it had disappeared into the morning fog, the woman’s words lingered. Mrs. Breen was not blind to their irony.

Lady Donner had renounced her.

She had no kind—no rank and no degree, nor any place to call her own.

A housemaid was pressed into temporary service as governess, but the young woman was hardly suited to provide for Sophie’s education.

“What shall we do?” Mr. Breen inquired.

“Until we acquire a proper replacement,” Mrs. Breen said, “I shall take the child in hand myself.”

It was October by then. If Mrs. Breen had anticipated the previous Season, she dreaded the one to come. Last winter, the days had crept by. This winter, they hurtled past, and as the next Season drew inexorably closer, she found herself increasingly apprehensive. Mr. Breen had not spoken of the summer. Would they return to London? And if so, what then?

Mrs. Breen tried (largely without success) not to ruminate over these questions. She focused on her daughter instead. She had vowed to educate the child, but aside from a few lessons in etiquette and an abortive attempt at French, her endeavor was intermittent and half-hearted—letters one day, ciphering the next. She had no aptitude for teaching. What she did have, she discovered, was a gift for play. When a rocking horse appeared on Christmas morning, Mrs. Breen was inspired to make a truth of Ada Pool’s lie and escort Sophie to the stables herself. They fed carrots to Spitzer, Mr. Breen’s much-prized white gelding, and Sophie shrieked with laughter at the touch of his thick, bristling lips.

“What shall we name your rocking horse?” Mrs. Breen asked as they walked back to the house, and the little girl said, “Spitzer,” as Mrs. Breen had known she would. In the weeks that followed, they fed Spitzer imaginary carrots every morning, and took their invisible tea from Sophie’s tiny porcelain tea set every afternoon. Between times there were dolls and a jack-in-the-box and clever little clockwork automata that one could set into motion with delicate wooden levers and miniature silver keys. They played jacks and draughts and one late February day spilled out across a playroom table a jigsaw puzzle of bewildering complexity.

“Mama, why did Miss Pool leave me?” Sophie asked as they separated out the edge pieces.

“She had to go away.”

“But where?”

“Home, I suppose,” Mrs. Breen said. Pursing her lips, she tested two pieces for a fit. She did not wish to speak of Miss Pool.

“I thought she lived with us.”

“Just for a while, dear.”

“Will she ever come to visit us, Mama?”

“I should think not.”

“Why not?”

“She was very bad, Sophie.”

“But what did she do?”

Mrs. Breen hesitated, uncertain how to explain it to the child. Finally, she said, “There are people of great importance in the world, Sophie, and there are people of no importance at all. Your governess confused the two.”

Sophie pondered this in silence. “Which kind of people are we?” she said at last.

Mrs. Breen did not answer. She thought of Abel Munby and she thought of Lady Donner. Most of all she thought of that endless ladder with its greased rungs and rails and high above a radiant circle from which dim voices fell.

“Mama?” Sophie said.

And just then—just in time—a pair of interlocking pieces came to hand. “Look,” Mrs. Breen said brightly, “a match.”

Sophie, thus diverted, giggled in delight. “You’re funny, Mama,” she said.

“Am I, then?” Mrs. Breen said, and she kissed her daughter on the forehead and the matter of Ada Pool was forgotten.

Another week slipped by. They worked at the puzzle in quiet moments, and gradually an image began to take shape: a field of larkspur beneath an azure sky. Mrs. Breen thought it lovely, and at night, alone with her thoughts, she tried to project herself into the scene. Yet she slept restlessly. She dreamed of the boy the coachman had killed in the street. In the dream, he clung to her skirts as she ascended that endless ladder, thirteen stone of dead weight dragging her down into the darkness below. When she looked over her shoulder at him, he had her grandfather’s face. At last, in an excess of fatigue, she ventured one evening with her husband to broach the subject that had lain unspoken between them for so many months. “Let us stay in the country for the summer,” she entreated Mr. Breen. “The heat is so oppressive in town.”

“Would you have us stay here for the rest of our lives?” he asked. And when she did not reply: “We will return to London. We may yet be redeemed.”

Mrs. Breen did not see how they could be.

Nonetheless, preparations for the move soon commenced in earnest. The servants bustled around packing boxes. The house was in constant disarray. And the impossible puzzle proved possible after all. The night before they were to commence the journey, they finished it at last. Mrs. Breen contrived to let Sophie fit the final piece, a single splash of sapphire, blue as any ribbon, or an eye.

They arrived in London at the end of April. Mrs. Breen did not make an appearance at the Royal Academy’s Exhibition the next week, preferring instead the privacy of their home on Eaton Place. The Season—no, her life—stretched away before her, illimitable as the Saharan wasteland, and as empty of oasis. She did not ride on Rotten Row. She made no calls, and received none. A new governess, Miss Bell, was hired and Mrs. Breen did not so often have the consolation of her daughter. In the mornings, she slept late; in the evenings, she retreated to her chamber early. And in the afternoons, while Sophie was at her lessons, she wept.

She could see no future. She wanted to die.

The messenger arrived two weeks before First Feast, on Sunday afternoon. Mrs. Breen was in the parlor with Sophie, looking at a picture book, when the footman handed her the envelope. At the sight of the crest stamped into the wax seal, she felt rise up the ghost of her humiliation in Grosvenor Square. Worse yet, she felt the faintest wisp of hope—and that she could not afford. She would expect nothing, she told herself. Most of all, she would not hope.

“Please take Sophie away, Miss Bell,” she said to the governess, and when Sophie protested, Mrs. Breen said, “Mama is busy now, darling.” Her tone brooked no opposition. Miss Bell whisked the child out of the room, leaving Mrs. Breen to unseal the envelope with trembling fingers. She read the note inside in disbelief, then read it again.

“Is the messenger still here?” she asked the footman.

“Yes, madam.”

At her desk, Mrs. Breen wrote a hasty reply, sealed the envelope, and handed it to the footman. “Please have him return this to Lady Donner. And please inform Mr. Breen that I wish to see him.”

“Of course,” the footman said.

Alone, Mrs. Breen read—and re-read—the note yet again. She felt much as she had felt that afternoon in Grosvenor Square: as though reality had shifted in some fundamental and unexpected way, as though everything she had known and believed had to be calibrated anew.

Mr. Breen had been right.

Lady Donner had with a stroke of her pen restored them.

Mr. Breen also had to read the missive twice:

Below that, in beautiful script, Lady Donner had inscribed a personal note:

Mr. Breen slipped the note into the envelope and placed it upon Mrs. Breen’s desk.

“Have you replied?”

“By Lady Donner’s messenger.”

“I trust you have acted with more wisdom this year.”

She turned her face away from him. “Of course.”

“Very well, then. You shall require a new dress, I suppose.”

“Sophie as well.”

“Can it be done in two weeks?”

“I do not know. Perhaps with sufficient inducement.”

“I shall see that the dressmaker calls in the morning. Is there anything else?”

“The milliner, I should think,” she said. “And the tailor for yourself.”

Mr. Breen nodded.

The next morning, the dressmaker arrived as promised. Two dresses! he exclaimed, pronouncing the schedule impossible. His emolument was increased. Perhaps it could be done, he conceded, but it would be very difficult. When presented with still further inducement, he acceded that with Herculean effort he would certainly be able to complete the task. It would require additional seamstresses, of course—

Further terms were agreed to.

The dressmaker made his measurements, clucking in satisfaction. The milliner called, the tailor and the haberdasher. It was all impossible, of course. Such a thing could not be done. Yet each was finally persuaded to view the matter in a different light, and each afterward departed in secret satisfaction, congratulating himself on having negotiated such a generous fee.

The days whirled by. Consultations over fabrics and colors followed. Additional measurements and fittings were required. Mrs. Breen rejoiced in the attention of the couturiers. Her spirits lifted and her beauty, much attenuated by despair, returned almost overnight. Mr. Breen, who had little interest in bespoke clothing and less patience with it, endured the attentions of his tailor. Sophie shook her petticoats in fury and stood upon the dressmaker’s stool, protesting that she did not want to lift her arms or turn around or (most of all) hold still. Miss Bell was reprimanded and told to take a sterner line with the child.

Despite all this, Mrs. Breen was occasionally stricken with anxiety. What if the dresses weren’t ready or proved in some way unsatisfactory?

All will be well, Mr. Breen assured her.

She envied his cool certainty.

The clothes arrived the Friday morning prior to the feast: a simple white dress with sapphire accents for Sophie; a striking gown of midnight blue, lightly bustled, for Mrs. Breen.

Secretly pleased, Mrs. Breen modeled it for her husband—though not without trepidation. Perhaps it was insufficiently modest for such a sober occasion.

All will be well, Mr. Breen assured her.

And then it was Saturday.

Mrs. Breen woke to a late breakfast and afterward bathed and dressed at her leisure. Her maid pinned up her hair in an elaborate coiffure and helped her into her corset. It was late in the afternoon when she at last donned her gown, and later still—they were on the verge of departing—when Miss Bell presented Sophie for her approval.

They stood in the foyer of the great house, Mr. and Mrs. Breen, and Miss Bell, and the child herself—the latter looking, Mr. Breen said with unaccustomed tenderness, as lovely as a star fallen to the Earth. Sophie giggled with delight at this fancy. Yet there was some missing touch to perfect the child’s appearance, Mrs. Breen thought, studying Sophie’s child’s white habiliments with their sapphire accents.

“Shall we go, then?” Mr. Breen said.

“Not quite yet,” Mrs. Breen said.

“My dear—”

Mrs. Breen ignored him. She studied the child’s blonde ringlets. A moment came to her: Lady Donner tying up Sophie’s hair with a deep blue ribbon of embroidered mulberry silk. With excuses to her husband, who made a show of removing his watch from its pocket and checking the time, Mrs. Breen returned to her chamber. She opened her carven wooden box of keepsakes. She found the ribbon folded carefully away among the other treasures she had been unable to look at in the era of her exile: a program from her first opera and a single dried rose from her wedding bouquet, which she had once reckoned the happiest day of her life—before Lady Breen’s First Feast invitation (also present) and the taste of human flesh that it had occasioned. She smoothed the luxuriant silk between her fingers, recalling Lady Donner’s words while the child had admired herself in the gilt mirror.

She partakes of her mother’s beauty.

Mrs. Breen blinked back tears—it would not do to cry—and hastened downstairs, where she tied the ribbon into Sophie’s hair. Mr. Breen paced impatiently as she perfected the bow.

“There,” Mrs. Breen said, with a final adjustment. “Don’t you look lovely?”

Sophie smiled, dimpling her checks, and took her mother’s hand.

“Shall we?” Mr. Breen said, ushering them out the door to the street, where the coachman awaited.

They arrived promptly at seven-thirty.

Sophie spilled out of the carriage the moment the footman opened the door.

“Wait, Sophie,” Mrs. Breen said. “Slowly. Comport yourself as a lady.” She knelt to rub an imaginary speck from the child’s forehead and once again adjusted the bow. “There you go. Perfect. You are the very picture of beauty. Can you promise to be very good for Mama?”

Sophie giggled. “Promise,” she said.

Mr. Breen smiled and caressed the child’s cheek, and then, to Mrs. Breen’s growing anxiety—what if something should go wrong?—Mr. Breen rang the bell. He reached down and squeezed her hand, and then the butler was admitting them into the great foyer, and soon afterward, before she had time to fully compose herself, announcing them into the drawing room.

Lady Donner turned to meet them, smiling, and it was as if the incident in Grosvenor Square had never happened. She took Mrs. Breen’s hand. “I am glad you were able to come,” she said. “I have so missed you.” And then, kneeling, so that she could look Sophie in the eye: “Do you remember me, Sophie?”

Sophie, intimidated by the blazing drawing room and the crowd of strangers and this smiling apparition before her, promptly inserted a knuckle between her teeth. She remembered nothing, of course. Lady Donner laughed. She ran her finger lightly over the ribbon and conjured up a sweet, which Sophie was persuaded after some negotiation to take. Then—”We shall talk again soon, darling,” Lady Donner promised—a housemaid ushered the child off to join the other children at the children’s feast. Lady Donner escorted the Breens deeper into the room and made introductions.

It was an exalted company. In short order, Mrs. Breen found herself shaking hands with a florid, toad-like gentleman who turned out to be Lord Stanton, the Bishop of London, and a slim, dapper one whom Lady Donner introduced as the Right Honorable Mr. Daniel Williams, an MP from Oxford. Alone unwived among the men was the radical novelist Charles Foster, whom Mrs. Breen found especially fascinating, having whiled away many an hour over his triple-deckers during her time in exile. The sole remaining guest was the aged Mrs. Murphy, a palsied widow in half-mourning. Mrs. Breen never did work out her precise rank, though she must have been among the lesser great since she and Mr. Breen were the penultimate guests to proceed down to dinner. Mrs. Breen followed, arm in arm with Mr. Foster, whose notoriety had earned him the invitation and whose common origin had determined his place in the procession. Mrs. Breen wished that her companion were of greater rank—that she, too, had not been consigned to the lowest position. Her distress was exacerbated by Mr. Foster’s brazen irreverence. “Fear not, Mrs. Breen,” he remarked in a whisper as they descended, “a time draws near when the first shall be last, and the last shall be first.”

Mr. Foster’s reputation as a provocateur, it turned out, was well deserved. His method was the slaughter of sacred cows; his mode was outrage. By the end of the first course (white soup, boiled salmon, and dressed cucumber), he had broached the Woman question. “Take female apparel,” he said. “Entirely impractical except as an instrument of oppression. It enforces distaff reliance upon the male of the species. What can she do for herself in that garb?” he asked, waving a hand vaguely in the direction of an affronted Mrs. Breen.

By the end of the second course (roast fowls garnished with watercresses, boiled leg of lamb, and sea kale), he had launched into the Darwinian controversy. “We are all savage as apes at the core,” he was saying when the footman appeared at his elbow with the entrée. “Ah. What have we here? The pièce de résistance?”

He eyed the modest portion on Mrs. Breen’s plate and served himself somewhat more generously. When the servant had moved on down the table, he shot Mrs. Breen a conspiratorial glance, picked up his menu card, and read off the entrée sotto voce: Lightly Braised Fillet of Stripling, garnished with Carrots and Mashed Turnips. “Have you had stripling before, Mrs. Breen?”

She had, she averred, taking in the intoxicating aroma of the dish. Two years ago, she continued, she had been fortunate enough to partake of ensouled flesh at this very table. “And you, Mr. Foster?”

“I have not.”

“It is a rare honor.”

“I think I prefer my honors well done, Mrs. Breen.”

Mrs. Breen pursed her lips in disapproval. She did not reply.

Undeterred, Mr. Foster said, “Have you an opinion on the Anthropophagic Crisis?”

“I do not think it a woman’s place to opine on political matters, Mr. Foster.”

“You would not, I imagine.”

“I can assure you the Anti-Anthropophagy Bill will never become law, Mr. Foster,” Mr. Williams said. “It is stalled in the Commons, and should it by chance be passed, the Peers will reject it. The eating of ensouled flesh is a tradition too long entrenched in this country.”

“Do you number yourself among the reformers, Mr. Williams?”

“I should think not.”

Mr. Foster helped himself to a bite of the stripling. It was indeed rare. A small trickle of blood ran into his whiskers. He dabbed at it absent-mindedly. The man was repulsive, Mrs. Breen thought, chewing delicately. The stripling tasted like manna from Heaven, ambrosia, though perhaps a little less tender—and somewhat more strongly flavored—than her last meal of ensouled flesh.

“It is good,” Mr. Foster said. “Tastes a bit like pork. What do shipwrecked sailors call it? Long pig?”

Lady Stanton gasped. “Such a vulgar term,” she said. “Common sailors have no right.”

“Even starving ones?”

“Are rightfully executed for their depravity,” Lord Donner pointed out.

“I hardly think the Anthropophagic Crisis is proper conversation for this table, Mr. Foster,” said Mr. Breen.

“I can think of no table at which it is more appropriate.” Another heaping bite. “It is a pretty word, anthropophagy. Let us call it what it is: cannibalism.”

“It is a sacred ritual,” Mrs. Murphy said.

“And cannibalism is such an ugly word, Mr. Foster,” Lord Donner said.

“For an ugly practice,” Mr. Foster said.

Lady Donner offered him a wicked smile. She prided herself on having an interesting table. “And yet I notice that you do not hesitate to partake.”

“Curiosity provides the food the novelist feeds upon, Lady Donner. Even when the food is of an unsavory nature. Though this”—Mr. Foster held up his laden fork—“this is quite savory, I must admit. My compliments to your cook.”

“I shall be sure to relay them,” Lady Donner said.

“Yet, however savory it might be,” he continued, “we are eating a creature with a soul bestowed upon it by our common Creator. We acknowledge it with our very name for the flesh we partake of at this table.”

“Dinner?” Mrs. Williams said lightly, to a ripple of amusement.

Mr. Foster dipped his head and lifted his glass in silent toast. “I was thinking rather of ensouled flesh.”

Mrs. Breen looked up from her plate. “I should think First Feast would be meaningless absent ensouled flesh, Mr. Foster,” she said. “It would be a trivial occasion if we were eating boiled ham.”

The bishop laughed. “These are souls of a very low order.”

“He that has pity upon the poor lends unto the Lord,” Mr. Foster said.

“The Lord also commands us to eat of his body, yes? There is a scripture for every occasion, Mr. Foster. The Catholics believe in transubstantiation, as you know.” Lord Stanton helped himself to a morsel of stripling. “Ours is an anthropophagic faith.”

“My understanding is that the Church of England reads the verse metaphorically.”

“Call me High Church, then,” Lord Stanton said, stifling a belch. There was general laughter at this sally, a sense that the bishop had scored a point.

Mr. Foster was unperturbed. “Are you suggesting that our Savior enjoins us to eat our fellow men?”

“I would hardly call them our fellow men,” Lady Stanton said.

“They are human, are they not?” Mr. Foster objected.

“Given us, like the beasts of the field,” Lord Donner remarked, “for our use and stewardship. Surely an ardent evolutionist such as yourself must understand the relative ranks of all beings. The poor will always be with us, Mr. Foster. As Lord Stanton has said, they are of a lower order.”

“Though flesh of a somewhat higher order may be especially pleasing to the palate,” Lady Donner said.

Mr. Williams said, “This must be flesh of a very high order indeed, then.”

“It is of the highest, Mr. Williams. Let me assure you on that score.” Lady Donner smiled down the table at Mrs. Breen. “You have partaken of ensouled flesh at our table before, Mrs. Breen. I trust tonight’s meal is to your taste.”

“It is very good indeed, my lady,” Mrs. Breen said, looking down at her plate with regret. She would have to stop now. She had already eaten too much.

“And how would you compare it with your previous repast?”

Mrs. Breen put down her fork. “Somewhat more piquant, I think.”

“Gamy might be a better word,” Mr. Williams put in.

“As it should be,” Lady Donner said, looking squarely at Mrs. Breen. “It was taken wild.”

Mrs. Breen was quiet on the way home.

The hatbox sat on the shadowy bench beside her, intermittently visible in the fog-muted light of the passing streetlamps. Outside, a downpour churned the cobbled streets into torrents of feculent muck, but the First Day revels continued along the riverfront, fireworks blooming like iridescent flowers in the overcast sky. Mrs. Breen stared at the window, watching the rain sew intersecting threads upon the glass and thinking of her last such journey, the shattered window, the blood upon the cobbles. She wondered idly what such a debased creature’s flesh would have tasted like, and leaned into her husband’s comfortable bulk, his heat.

After the meal, the men had lingered at the table over port. In the drawing room, Lady Donner had been solicitous of Mrs. Breen’s comfort. “You must stay for a moment after the other guests have departed,” she’d said, settling her on a sofa and solemnly adjuring her to call within the week. “And you must join us in our carriage to the Ascot next month,” she said, squeezing Mrs. Breen’s hand. “I insist.”

There had been no need to open the hatbox she’d handed Mrs. Breen as the butler showed them out. It had been uncommonly heavy.

Mrs. Breen sighed, recalling her husband’s confidence in their restoration.

“This was your doing,” she said at last.

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Letters,” he said. “A delicate negotiation, though one somewhat mitigated, I think, by Lady Donner’s fondness for you.”

“And you did not see fit to tell me.”

“I feared that you might object.”

Mrs. Breen wondered if she would have. She did not think so. She felt her place in the world more keenly now than she had felt it even in her era of privation, when she had striven in vain to fulfill her grandfather’s aspirations.

The carriage rocked and swayed over an uneven patch of cobblestones. Something rolled and thumped inside the hatbox, and she feared for a moment that it would overturn, spilling forth its contents. But of course there was no danger of that. It had been painstakingly secured with a sapphire blue ribbon of mulberry silk. Mrs. Breen could not help reaching out to caress the rich fabric between her thumb and forefinger.

She sighed in contentment. They would be home soon.

“I do wish that you had told me,” she said. “You would have put my mind much at ease.”

“I am sorry, darling,” Mr. Breen said.

Mrs. Breen smiled at him as the dim light of another streetlamp jolted by, and then, as darkness swept over her, she took an unheard-of liberty and let her hand fall upon his thigh. Tonight, she vowed, she would give him the heir he longed for.