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own room at home?
    The duke is, well, I suppose like all dukes—his prime pastimes are being dead stiff boring when he is not putting on airs.
    Everyone is too busy bothering themselves about the new duchess to concern themselves with a violinist. I sort of take second fiddle—pardon the pun—around here next to the flurry over her. Which is good; they don’t seem to be used to outsiders.
    The duchess herself seems pleasant enough—cold, andbeautiful in an older woman sort of way. Very polite. She has agreed to take me on and be my patron—yesf a real patron!—in return for doing other things for her as well. Minor things, like rearranging furniture to her contentment, and other tasks, hard to describe. No … I take that back. It seems I can write them, just not talk about them…. And those were her exact words:
“Tell
anyone …”
    Claire, this is very strange—don’t be telling Mum or Da. The duchess has me all over the countryside looking for strange things—she wants a baby and cannot, so far. At first it was herbs and roots and leaves, but now it’s other things … animals, and—I fear to even talk about the others.
    But that’s just it, Sis—she gave me a golden necklace with a fiddle charm; it would be pretty if it weren’t so strange. Since putting it on I cannot talk about the things I do for her. Almost like magic. She says it’s not, though, something about magnets and mesmerism. Science, she says. Spiritualism, I say!
    But she has bought me music and strings and done nothing improper. She plans on taking me to a real symphony this month! It is my first real job, and I’ll take what I can get.
    I hope you and Elsie are well, and Jo and Emma and Katherine, and do pass this on to Sabrina if you get the chance! I miss her so. Tell her that her big brother thinks about her every day. I would send something for Mum and Da, but I trust the people carrying this message about as far as I can throw them. It’s just as well that royalty doesn’t expect a common fiddler to be educated in the ways of proper letters.

    Lots of love to the entire family,
    Alan

Chapter Six
THE BEGINNING OF BAD THINGS
     
    J
essica’s life was coming to an end.
    Snow
could accurately count back to this time as the final days of her happy childhood.
    One hot summer day, bored, she went to the stable to find Davey and his friend Michael, both of whom took care of the horses and, when by themselves, smoked and played cards like adults. “Do you want to go to the stream today?” she asked them.
    “Oh, aw,” Davey said, kicking some straw at his feet. “I dunno, Jess. I have t’ do some stuff with the horses.”
    She frowned and looked at the other boy. “Michael?”
    “I, uh, I dunno.” He looked up at her and blushed, then looked down. “What if we get caught?”
    “That never used to bother you!” There was something in the air, an embarrassment, a tension, that was new and undeniable. She looked hard into the faces of her old friends. They looked away.
    “Is it because I’m a duchess?” she asked bluntly. “That was never a problem before.”
    “You’re no duchess,” Davey spat, with a little of their old fierce friendship back. “Not yet, anyhow. Naw—its just, you know, others might, you know, look funny.”
    “Oh.” She had lost some strange little fight and hadn’t even known there was one. “Well,” she said nervously,“maybe another day, then?”
    “Sure—when the masters away, maybe.”
    “And his witch,” Michael added.
    “She’s
not
a witch!” Jessica stamped her foot, glad to have something real to argue about. “Everyone’s always saying that. She’s a
scientist
.”
    “No such thing as lady scientists,” Michael muttered under his breath.
    “What’s a
scientist
got Alan all over the countryside picking poisonous herbs for?” Davey demanded.
    “They’re not poisonous,” she tried again. “You should see her laboratory. It’s real, with tubes, and metal, and