“Would you like to tell me what happened yesterday to send you into hiding from Lord Nicholas? ”
Jane had never been one to beat about the bush.
Isabel dipped a brush into the bucket of vile roof tar and said,
“Nothing happened.”
“Nothing whatsoever.” Nothing I’d like to revisit.
“No. He agreed to identify and value the collection. I thought I would let him get on with it. If all goes well, Minerva House shall have a new home within the month.” She tried to keep her voice light. Confident.
Jane was quiet as she laid several newly repaired tiles back down upon the roof. “And Lord Nicholas? ”
“What about him?”
“Precisely.”
“I would prefer that he were not necessary to the endeavor,” Isabel said, deliberately misunderstanding Jane’s question. A strong gust of wind blew then, sending Isabel’s shirtsleeves flapping like sails in a storm. She braced herself against the cool breeze, choosing her next words carefully. “But I think that we do not have much of an alternative.”
“You have alternatives, Isabel.”
“None that I can see.”
Jane placed several more tiles in the silence that stretched between them before turning back to Isabel. “You have cared for us for a long time. You have made Minerva House a thing of legend for girls across London. The ones who come to us now … they can barely credit our existence. All that is because of you.” Isabel stopped tarring her tiles, meeting Jane’s cool green gaze. “But you cannot allow the legend to overtake you.”
“It is not a legend for me, Jane. It is real.”
“But you could have more. You are the daughter of an earl.”
“An earl with morals best described as questionable.”
“The sister to a new earl, then,” Jane rephrased. “You could marry. Live the life you were meant to live.”
The life she was meant to live. The words seemed so simple—as though it were clearly mapped out—and perhaps it was. Other wellborn girls seemed to have no trouble following the well-worn path.
Other girls had not had her father. Her mother.
She shook her head. “No. This is the life I was meant to have. No smart marriage, no amount of tea with the ladies of the ton, no London seasons would have changed my course. And look at where my course has taken me. Look at the difference I have made for you. For the others.”
“But you should not sacrifice yourself for us. Would that not defeat the purpose of the house? Have you not taught us that our happiness and our lives are infinitely more important than the sacrifices we made before we arrived here?”
The words were soft, their aim true. Isabel considered her butler, the bracing wind turning Jane’s cheeks a ruddy pink, her warm brown hair slipping out from beneath her cap. Jane had been the first to come to Isabel, a working girl who had barely escaped a drunken beating at the hands of a customer and somehow found the courage to leave London for Scotland, where she had hoped to start a new life. She had made it as far as Yorkshire with a handful of stolen coins—not enough on which to live, but enough to send her to prison for thievery for the rest of her life. When she had run out of money, she had been dropped, literally, onto the side of the road with nothing but the clothes on her back. Isabel had found her asleep in an unused stall in the stables, the day after her last remaining servants had left their posts.
Isabel had been barely seventeen, alone in the house with James, just shy of three years old, and her mother—close to death. One look at Jane, too weak to run, too broken to fight, and Isabel had understood the desperation that had driven the girl to take the most extreme of risks—bedding down in a stable not her own, clearly a part of an estate.
It had not been kindness that had driven Isabel to welcome Jane in—it had been panic. The countess was slipping away, mad with sadness and desperation, the servants were gone, James needed love and nurturing, and Isabel had nothing. She had offered Jane work and gained the most loyal of servants. The most trusted of friends.
Jane had been the only one to witness the countess in her last days, as she railed against Isabel; against smiling, toddling James; against God and Britain—blaming them all for her isolation. For her devastation. When the countess had died—even as the other threads of Isabel’s life were coming unraveled—helping Jane had kept Isabel from falling apart.
Within weeks, Isabel had made her decision to bring others to Townsend Park. If she could not be a good daughter or a good woman, she could ensure that other women on the edges of society would have a place to live and flourish. A few well-placed letters had brought her Gwen and Kate, and after that, there was little need to advertise their location. Girls found them. Townsend Park was renamed Minerva House in hushed whispers across Britain, and girls in trouble knew that if they could reach its doors, they would find safety.
In those girls, Isabel had found a purpose—a way to protect these ill-treated, ill-fated women, and to give them a fresh opportunity at life.
A way to prove that she was more than what others saw.
A way to feel needed.
Not all the girls had remained—in the seven years since Jane’s arrival, they had seen dozens of girls arrive and leave in the dead of night, unable to keep from returning to the life from which they had come. Still more had left to build their own lives, Isabel welcoming the chance to help them realize their dreams. They were seamstresses, innkeepers, and even a vicar’s wife in the North Country.
They were proof that she was not alone. That she had purpose. That she was more than the unwanted daughter of a notorious scoundrel. That she was not the selfish child her mother had accused her of being during those final weeks.