The little girls giggled, their quarry apparently no longer of interest, and chanted, “Uncle Alex, Uncle Alex!”
The smaller girl reached up to pat Alex’s cheek, but the larger, faster one reached inside his jacket, searching. Alex laughed. “I haven’t any peppermint sticks today, you little thief.”
The children both began to chatter, rendering it almost impossible for Sabrina to understand anything either said. Then one of them turned and pointed at Sabrina and said clearly, “Who’s she?”
“She’s our guest,” Alex told them. “Sabrina, I’d like you to meet my brother Theo’s daughters. This little imp is Athena and this one is her sister, Brigid. Say hello to Sabrina, girls.”
“Hello, Sabrina,” they said as one.
Brigid turned her face into Alex’s shoulder in an apparent attack of shyness, but Athena grinned at her with unabashed interest and said, “Are you a boy or a girl?”
“I’m a girl, but I’m wearing boys’ clothes.” Sabrina couldn’t keep from smiling back at the girl.
“I want to wear boys’ clothes,” Athena decided.
Alex did his best to hide his own smile. “This poor beleaguered woman is their mother. Megan, allow me to introduce you to Sabrina. Sabrina, this is the Marchioness of Raine.”
“Ma’am.” Another title. But of course she would have one. Wasn’t the heir to the dukedom often a marquess? Did that mean that Theo was the oldest? And was Alex actually a lord? Well, at least she could blame her lack of memory for not knowing the order of precedence.
“Call me Megan,” the girls’ mother declared.
“You’re American,” Sabrina blurted in surprise.
“Yes, I am. A stranger in a strange land.” She reached out to shake Sabrina’s hand in a firm, businesslike manner. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Mama, I want to wear boys’ clothes,” Athena said, drawing the conversation back to the topic which most interested her. “Can I?”
“May I,” Megan amended. “I don’t know. I hadn’t really thought about it.”
“Me, too,” Brigid announced. “I wanna wear boys’ cloves.”
“Clothes, silly, not cloves.” Athena giggled.
“We’ll discuss this later,” Megan told them firmly. “Come here, you two.” She reached out and took them, setting them down on the floor. Squatting down to their eye level, Megan went on, “Haven’t I told you not to chase Rufus? You scare him. And it’s not fair to run from Alice when you know she turned her ankle yesterday.”
The girls nodded, the little one’s lower lip beginning to tremble. “Yes, Mama.”
“We won’t do it anymore,” Athena said gravely. “Promise.”
“Good. Now you run back to Alice.” Megan gave them a little push in the direction they had come from. Sabrina could see a harried-looking woman at the other end of the hallway hobbling valiantly toward them. “And apologize to Alice.”
The girls took off at a run, and Megan rose, turning back to Alex and Sabrina. “Sorry for the interruption.” Though her voice was friendly, her reddish-brown eyes studied Sabrina curiously. Sabrina suspected that the woman didn’t miss much.
“I was just showing Sabrina to her room. She will be staying with us for a while,” Alex explained. “She’s in rather a spot. I was hoping you might be able to help us.”
“Of course.” Megan’s gaze grew even shrewder. “What do you need?”
“For one thing, perhaps you could lend her something to wear? These are her only clothes.” As she nodded, Alex went on, “I also wondered if you had heard anything about a young lady going missing. Or perhaps some sort of accident or even a crime where a young woman might have been injured.”
“No...not yet. Why? Were you in an accident?” She leaned in a little, peering at Sabrina’s bruises.
“I’m not sure,” Sabrina replied, and Alex launched into another retelling of Sabrina’s predicament.
Megan listened with interest, but the warm sympathy that had marked the duchess’s face mingled with a certain skepticism in Megan’s eyes. Her first words when Alex finished were “If it were Con telling me this instead of you, I would be certain this was a prank.”
Alex chuckled. “No, no, I promise you, it’s not. It’s all true.”
“I’ve heard of people losing their memory after being hit in the head, which you obviously were. I’ll check with my contacts and see if they’ve heard anything.”
“Megan is a newspaper reporter,” Alex said in an aside to Sabrina.
“Really?” Sabrina looked at her in amazement.
“I was.” Megan nodded. “Now I write mostly longer investigative pieces for magazines. I’ll look into it and see what I can find.”
“Especially Newbury. That’s the departure point for her train ticket, so we’re assuming that whatever happened would probably have taken place around there. But, of course, if it was that she had been kidnapped, that could have taken place anywhere and she merely happened to escape at Newbury.”
“Kidnapped?” Sabrina gaped at him, but Megan seemed to find nothing odd in this idea and merely nodded.
“I don’t know how much I can find out about something happening in Newbury unless it was really big news, but I will ask around,” Megan told them. “And I’ll look through my dresses for something you can wear, Sabrina. Some of my dresses would be too old for you, but I’m sure we’ll come up with enough things. Anna may have left a few frocks here, as well—anything of Kyria’s, of course, would be much too long.” She whipped around and walked away in the same brisk manner with which she seemed to do everything.
“I don’t think she believed me,” Sabrina said.
“Megan has a journalist’s nose for news. If there’s anything there to find, she’ll chase it down.”
“I just hope... What if it’s something awful?” Sabrina turned to him, brows drawing together anxiously. “I mean, what if I’m a terrible person or I’ve done something reprehensible? I could be anyone—I could have run amok and started chopping people into bits.”
Alex smiled. “I think we can take the risk.”
“Those names she mentioned—Anna, and Cara, was it? Do they live here, too?”
“No. Anna is married to my brother, and they live in Gloucestershire. But they often come to visit. And it’s Kyria, not Cara. She’s one of my sisters.” He cast an amused sideways glance at her. “Odd name, I know, but my father is an antiquarian, and his particular field of interest is ancient Greece and Rome. Sadly, he insisted we all learn Greek and Latin growing up. The other thing he inflicted on us was our names. Mother put her foot down on some of the worst names, so Reed and Olivia managed to escape, and my name luckily was both normal and Greek. Poor Con, though, got stuck with Constantine. And Theo’s full name is Theodosius. His twin is Thisbe.”
“Oh, my. You have a great number of family.”
“I suppose so. Theo and Thisbe are the oldest, then Reed. Next is Kyria, followed by Olivia, and Con and I bring up the rear.”
“Two sets of twins!”
“Fortunately, we are on the opposite ends of the family, so we weren’t all young at once. Kyria has a set of twins as well, Jason and Allison. But you don’t want to hear the names of all my nieces and nephews. They’re far too numerous.” He stopped