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“Oh!” Lucy sat bolt upright. “You shouldn’t have! Your poor knees.”

“My knees aren’t so bad as you’d like to make out.” Aunt Marian’s slow, painful progress across the room told a different story. But Stirling women admitted no weakness.

Lucy was a miserable example of the breed.

“I make no plans to punt on the Thames, but I can climb a flight of stairs.” Aunt Marian set a loaded tray on the side table. “Have the Holroyds ruined you for my pea soup with their veal roast and fruit pies?”

Dear God. What time was it? The hours had run together.

“Of course not,” murmured Lucy. She’d told her aunt she might stay at Kate’s after the salon, as she sometimes did when an opening or lecture ended late. Usually, though, she arrived home the next day filled with stories.

Today she’d raced upstairs with barely a word—well before afternoon lessons concluded—and hadn’t come down for dinner. No wonder Aunt Marian was giving her that quizzical look.

“I was busy painting is all.” She smiled. “I lost track of time.”

Aunt Marian glanced at her empty easel. Lucy had been doing the bulk of her painting in the glasshouse for weeks. She’d described the gorgeous makeshift studio to her aunt faithfully, with only one crucial deviation from truth.

She’d placed it in the corner of the Holroyds’ garden.

Her tiny lies and omissions were catching up to her.

All at once, her smile wobbled. Aunt Marian’s expression shaded into concern and she lowered herself gingerly onto the bed. Her weight, unlike Anthony’s, barely shifted the mattress.

“I wasn’t painting.” Lucy flung herself onto her aunt’s lap as a new storm of weeping overtook her. She used to cry often into her aunt’s scratchy apron as an awkward, half-grown girl mourning the loss of her parents, and later, as an intense, overly impassioned young woman, licking smaller wounds, rejections, disappointments. It had been years since she’d done so.

Now, as then, she felt a light pressure: fingers moving slowly through her hair. Aunt Marian had always had the way of it, stroking without catching on tangles. Lucy curled into her. She could feel a thimble dig into her cheek through an apron pocket.

“I was sniveling, crying my eyes out over a man. I’ve let you down.”

“Nonsense,” said Aunt Marian firmly, pressing her palm to Lucy’s forehead. “You haven’t let me down. You’re my pride and joy.”

Lucy choked on a sob. Her aunt had done everything she could to further her education. “I’m supposed to be beyond all this.” Winning medals. Showing in galleries. Those were the pursuits and accomplishments that rated. “But I went and fell in love regardless.”

“Did you?” Aunt Marian’s voice was mild and her fingers worked again at Lucy’s hair, picking apart knots without snapping a strand.

“You want me to follow a path different than my mother’s,” Lucy whispered. “I’m making the same mistake she did.”

“You’re rusting my thimble is what you’re doing,” said Aunt Marian. “Here. Take this.”

She shifted, and Lucy lifted her hot, wet face, sitting up and accepting a handkerchief. She twisted it so hard her knuckles ached.

“Now, what’s this about your mother?” Aunt Marian adjusted her spectacles.

Lucy squirmed under her aunt’s gaze, afraid to continue but unable to stop herself.

“If she hadn’t fallen in love with my father, she’d still be alive,” she said.

There, that was the crux of it. It hurt to utter the words aloud.

“Perhaps.” Aunt Marian tilted her head. “And you wouldn’t be. Your mother wanted children. She didn’t regret having you, not for a minute.”

Despite her best effort, Lucy’s lips trembled. Her aunt sighed.

“She loved your father, but it wasn’t love of him that killed her. It was a host of things, chance included. Women’s lives are never easy. In love, out of love, married, unmarried—there’s no formula that guarantees happiness.”

She cleared her throat. “I don’t oppose love on principle. But it’s rarely principled in practice, by men, at any rate. You’ve a great talent to pursue. I want you to trust in that first.”

Lucy lowered her eyes. Talent, intelligence, will—they sprang from, were embedded in, the body. And her body was different now. What would that mean for her?