“I’m familiar with the problem,” North said. “I’m told you first become aware of it when some sweet and naughty young thing rises up from your sheets and asks if you ever carouse with your brother.”

Beck’s eyebrows flew up. “And here I thought I was the only one.”

“We always do,” North said, glowering afresh at his cards. “We always think we’re the only ones when it counts, though in fact, we never are.”

Beck finished a quick lunch under a shady tree, soreness reverberating through every muscle and sinew of his body. At least the crushing fatigue of spring plowing had kept him from misbehaving with Sara again.

She hadn’t dragged him to any more pretty corners of the property, and no longer offered to light him to his room. Allie was a good and constant chaperone, and ye gods, the child was sharp. She was waiting for him when he got back to his team, grinning as she stroked the nose of the nearest horse.

“Watch your feet around these fellows,” Beck warned, checking the harness. “One misstep on their part, and you’ll have toes like a duck.”

“I’m wearing my half boots.”

“So have you come to help?” Beck surveyed the ground yet to be turned. Thank all the gods, there wasn’t that much of it. Just another few backbreaking, arm-wrenching, hand-blistering, gut-wearying hours of work.

“I have come to cadge a piggyback ride on old Hector. Mama said I might, because it’s a lovely day, the chores are done, and you’re to send me back to her if I’m a nuisance.”

“Duly noted.” Beck hefted her up into his arms. Hector took the outside position on the left, which, given the direction Beck turned the team, put him on the inside of each turn, and gave him the least to do. He could carry a little girl without even noticing the weight. “Up you go.”

Allie scrambled onto the horse’s broad back and, predictably, began to chatter. Not so predictably, she also scooted around, swinging a leg over the beast’s withers, then another over his rump, so she was sitting on him backward.

“This is more polite,” she informed Beck as the team turned into the first furrow. “So when are you going into Portsmouth? Mama says you might also make a trip into Brighton, because you’re thinking of selling the vegetables there later this summer. I think you ought to sell our flowers.”

Conversing with somebody facing him while he plowed was oddly disorienting. Beck had to look past Allie to fix his gaze on some object at the end of the furrow. Plowing straight was an art, and Beck would have said he had the talent for it, until Allie sat between him and the end of the furrow.

“What sort of flowers, princess?”

“All kinds. I don’t know all their names, but I can draw them. We put them all over the house when summer comes. Before the strawberries even come in, we have bunches and bunches of tulips and irises—I know how to separate those—and there are roses too, but Mama despairs of them. I like to draw the roses—they’re complicated.”

“What have you been drawing lately?” Beck asked, reaching the first turn.

“I always draw. In my head, mostly, which Aunt says is good practice. Mama saw you and Mr. North without your clothes, and Aunt said she wished she could draw you.”

“That’s nice,” Beck muttered. Turns were tricky, especially with horses hitched three across. “What else do you—she saw what?”

“You.” Allie grinned beatifically. “Without your clothes. Both of you. Mama and Aunt Polly saw Mr. North in the pond last summer, but after you unloaded hay, Mama was up in the carriage house and saw you bathing in the cistern. She said the sight would keep her up at night for weeks, which is silly. It’s just skin.”

Beck tried to divide his attention. “Allemande, you can’t go repeating such things merely to provoke a reaction. I’m sure your mother was mortified, and had we known, North and I would have been mortified as well. Modesty is a virtue shared by most decent folk.”

“Not Aunt. She says artists have to study nudes because human subjects are the most complicated. She drew naked people all the time when we were in Italy. I will draw naked people again too one day.” She wrinkled her nose and sighed in resignation. “I draw naked pigs and cats and so forth now. From what little I’ve done with them, I don’t expect people will be much different.”

“We aren’t going to talk about naked people. Or naked pigs or cats. What’s for dinner tonight?”

“Aunt is making roast chicken with smashed potatoes.” Allie smacked her lips dramatically. “And she said she’s making a chocolate cake with icing to sweeten Mr. North’s temper, because plowing makes him cranky.”

“Plowing, not getting much sleep, and dodging busy little girls with nothing better to do than plague their elders.”

“I’d paint if Mama would let me,” Allie groused. “Am I really plaguing you?”

“Of course not,” Beck assured her, though she absolutely was. He wanted to carefully examine his recall of the day they’d unloaded the hay wagon, and go over every detail of his dunking in the cistern. They’d both stripped down completely; that much he was sure of.

“I’ve decided I would like to paint Mr. North’s hands,” Allie went on happily. “It’s not quite a human subject, because I’m forbidden those, but I like hands.”

“Your mother might not approve. She was not even comfortable with your doing Heifer’s portrait.”

“But she told me it turned out well, and Aunt agreed. Aunt is never one to spare feelings at the expense of truth. She says an artist has to be ruthless.”

“I can’t like the idea of you being ruthless,” Beck said, thinking a relatively carefree Allie was challenge enough. “But tell me something, oracle of the plow, when was the last time you heard your mother play her violin?”

“I haven’t heard her play since I was little. There’s a pianoforte in the downstairs parlor, but she only dusts it, she doesn’t play it. She and Aunt argue about that too.”

“About dusting it?”

“No, silly.” Allie lifted her arms to the spring day in casual joy. “Aunt says Mama should teach me a little so I am suitably capable at the keyboard, but Mama gets all tight around her eyes and does that cranky-without-saying-a-word thing, and then Aunt gets quiet, but that never lasts.”

“Most mamas know how to do what you describe, sisters too.”

Allie lowered her arms and shuddered. “Papa could do it. I was little, but I remember him glaring and glaring. Mama wouldn’t play for him and his friends, and it was awful.”

She glared herself in recollection.

“I thought you were very young when you came back to England, Allie.” The plow hit a subterranean rock, and the team stopped.

“We came back when I was four, and we saw everything. That’s when Papa found out I could draw like Aunt. Then it was back to Italy, and I got lessons and everything. Aunt and I both had lessons. Then we came back to England again, but we didn’t see anything except Brighton and Three Springs. Papa was dead. Mama said I didn’t have to wear black if I didn’t want to.”

Beck urged the team forward and hefted the plow over the rock, his back screaming at the abuse.

“Did you want to wear black?” Beck tossed the question out as a distraction, unwilling to pry more directly. From Allie’s account and Sara’s own comments, Sara’s marriage had had its share of rough spots and challenges.

Allie smoothed her hand over the horse’s broad rump. “Of course not. I’m to have more long dresses in the fall.”

“You are growing up,” Beck said, wishing it didn’t have to be so. He missed his sisters badly and wanted nothing so much as to leave the team in the field, mount Ulysses, and see his father one last time. The realization blended with the plowing-ache to form a peculiarly poignant misery.

Allie heaved a great sigh. “I know it’s not all bad, growing up. When I’m older, Mama won’t be able to tell me what to paint. Hermione’s udder is dripping on both sides.”