Page 97 of Girl Abroad

“Sorry, bud,” I tell Hugh, who’s staring at the empty doorway. “You’re simply not a priority for him.”

Lee’s entirely lost interest in the cat after barely a week. If the Lord of Cats asks, however, Hugh is the light of Lee’s life. The reason for being.

Poor thing.

I grab a pair of scissors from my desk drawer to crack into this box. Inside is a lidded file box containing loose pages, folders, and yellow envelopes. At first, it’s all nonsense. Fragments of stuff I don’t understand. I pull everything out and start making piles based on names and dates, trying to apply some order to it all.

A bound ledger is the last thing at the bottom of the box. It appears to be an accounting of household expenses for the year, dated 1951. Something the head of the Tulleys’ house staff would have kept, containing weekly entries for the butcher and florist, that sort of thing. I skim the rows until I find the names of staff with their weekly salaries.

And there, on line nineteen, is Josephine.

I’m in utter disbelief to see her there on the page.

“Lee!” I holler at the doorway. “Lee, get in here!”

He comes barreling in a few seconds later, a green hydration mask slathered on his face and worry flickering in his eyes.

“What’s wrong?” He glances around my bedroom until his betrayed gaze lands on Hugh. “What did you do to her, you bloody demon!”

I can’t help but laugh. “I’m good. Hugh only likes to assault you. But check this out!” I thrust out the ledger. “I found her! Her name is Josephine Farnham! She was a maid to the duchess.”

“Brilliant.” He looks genuinely pleased. Everyone in the house has been invested in this mystery from the start. “And what of her fate?”

“Well, I haven’t figured that part out yet. But at least we have confirmation that she was connected to the Tulleys.”

“The young maid who caught the eye of two young lords,” Lee says dramatically. “I adore it. I’ll be telling Eric all about this on our date tonight. Speaking of which…this mask won’t be removing itself.”

With that, he bounds off.

I spend the next several hours meticulously combing through every scrap of paper in the box. And it’s a veritable treasure trove. I feel like one of those people who open abandoned storage lockers and find gold pirate coins and furniture that belonged to Marie Antoinette.

There’s a letter from the duchess to Robert, which in not so subtle language tells him to get his shit together. He’s supposed to marry a princess, and she isn’t interested in his objections or preoccupations with the maid. If it becomes necessary, she threatens to fire Josephine and send her to work elsewhere.

Deeper in the stacks, I locate a black-and-white photograph of the household staff posed in front of the estate in Surrey. It’sgrainy and worn with the years, but a close examination finds the tall thin woman with dark hair and fragile cheekbones at the end of the second row. And either I’m imagining it, or she’s sporting a tiny smirk of mischief.

It’s Josephine. I’m sure of it. But not quite the same Josephine from the Dyce portrait. That one was distracted, sad almost. This girl in the staff photo has a lot more life in her.

I flip over the photograph and glimpse the date. It was taken a little more than a year before theVictoriasinking. Had Josephine fallen for either lord at this point? Maybe just one, and that’s why she’s so happy? New love and all. And then, by the time she posed for Dyce, she was entangled in a full-blown love triangle and riddled with turmoil?

So many questions.

Hugh paws at me from the bed while I sit on the floor. He starts tugging strands of my hair with his claws, tapping at my shoulder. I absently rub his ear while perusing pages until I find an invoice signed by William Tulley.

In the matter of a portrait commission, he agrees to pay Franklin Astor Dyce three hundred pounds.

Finally, proof.

Thishasto be Josephine’s portrait. It would be way too big a coincidence to believe Robert had fallen in love with some other maid at the same time William commissioned a portrait that wasn’t my painting.

I am now fairly confident in saying that Robert and William both had the hots for Josephine.

“So which one did she choose?” I ask Hugh.

The cat blinks at me, bored.

Damn it. This mystery is maddening.

Would William have hidden Josephine’s rejection letter in the painting after she eloped to Ireland with Robert?

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