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How outlandishly studded with blessings Alexandra's life was. She supposed she'd always known that. When she was free from here—surely she would be?—she would count them over and over, like a miser with his gold.

But now her head felt light as blown glass. So far she'd been given one lumpy beige meal in a bowl, because it was apparently important to keep criminals alive until the court said they could go ahead and kill them. She was ashamed that she hadn't been able to eat it. Nerves had obliterated hunger pangs, and revulsion had done the rest. She'd given her meal to Lizzy.

"Tell Bunty your story," Lizzy urged.

Alexandra obligingly turned to Bunty. "My dear friend, Lord Thackeray, who is my third cousin, was given permission to borrow the carriage of the duke, with whom he is acquainted—"

"Ha! A duke! That there is my favorite part of the story!" Agnes gleefully interjected.

"—who is up in years and quite forgot that he'd loaned his carriage and alerted the authorities and they took us away. It's merely a mistake and I'm confident all will be resolved soon." 

She had told this story three times. They loved it. They all thought it was a fairy tale.

Alexandra was half beginning to believe it was, too.

The "resolved soon" part of it, that was.

Because not one of the prison officials seemed to believe she was who she claimed to be. Then again, there were moments she found it difficult to believe, too.

She had given them the name of her solicitor, and her sister's husband, who was a viscount, though her sister and her husband were currently on holiday in Italy.

No one had yet come for her.

This seemed impossible. Unreal. Nearly the whole of her life someone had always known precisely where she was at any given time.

Her brother and father were currently in America, in New York, visiting. She was meant to travel to New York in a week in the company of a couple she knew from her childhood parish, Mr. and Mrs. Harper. She ought to be finishing up packing right at this moment.

It seemed nothing in her life, and yet everything in her life, had prepared her for being abandoned in a prison. She was three people at once in this moment: the one who was comprised of pure terror; the one floating over her body with a sense of unreality; and the diplomat, who, despite herself, remained curious, kind, respectful, and sparkling, adroitly managing the circumstances without anyone quite realizing that this was precisely what she was doing.

"Ye mun 'ave a lot of time on yer 'ands if ye can waste it on words like misunnerstannin'." Bunty spat on the floor, as if the word was an insect she'd accidentally ingested.

"Oh, no, she's right busy," Agnes defended stoutly. "Getting blood out of clothes and the like."

Bunty's eyes traveled Alexandra speculatively from head to toe.

"I'll just 'ave them shoes off yer, will I?" she decided to say threateningly, at last.

"Oh, I don't think so," Alexandra replied pleasantly but firmly. She tucked her satin-slippered feet beneath her skirt.

Would she fight for her slippers if she needed to? She decided she would. She was fit enough. What she lacked in size she could perhaps make up for in stamina. Even if Bunty's biceps looked like little cannonballs tucked under her sleeves.

Agnes had shared with her that a previous cellmate had managed to hide in her skirts the leg of a broken stool, which she'd patiently, surreptitiously sharpened to a lethal point over a period of weeks. She'd used it to attack the warden. But Alexandra didn't have weeks to fashion a weapon.

How had her life come to this? How had her life narrowed to a single point? At least prison was definitive. For the past five years, she'd lived in a sort of in-between world, a sort of pampered purgatory, admittedly of her own making. She had recently taken steps to break away from it: she was meant to begin a journey to New York to visit her brother in about a week's time, traveling from Liverpool on a Black Ball packet. She had no real desire to spend six weeks at sea. But she needed a change, and she wanted to be with people who loved her, to be reminded that she was a person who could be loved.

And while Bunty stared at her with her flat, dark eyes, Alexandra's overtaxed senses, pitched like a small prey animal's for new dangers, sensed almost at once that something had disturbed the usual rhythms of the prison.

Along the block of cells, a hush was creeping toward them. A bit like a slow, oily tide.

The volume of the ceaseless human sounds was tapering, gradually, into murmurs.

And then into silence.