"I do." Mr. Williams narrowed his eyes. "What on earth might bring you there?"

"Work." She shrugged, as if this were not her last chance at reasonable employment. As if it were nothing at all. "Why doesn't this line go all the way to Glenmaidens, or even to the coast?"

A shiver passed over the woman in the corner, her shoulders tremoring. The draughts through the carriage had been troublesome all day, but Ismay had not felt one for some time.

Mr. Williams nodded slowly. "I wish. The Bureau officers do suggest extending it now and then, but nothing ever materializes."

"Why not?"

The man grinned. "What sort of work? Where, precisely?"

Ismay's belly rolled. Small talk was the last thing she needed, and it would do nothing for her nerves. He was smiling politely enough, but she did not trust him—had lost the luxury of trusting people. Perhaps her mother was right, and she ought to have stayed in Port Skerry after all. No, she reminded herself, a sharp chastisement. What she had in Skerry was no longer a life, and that was her own fault. Here, she could be someone else, someone tolerable, at least for long enough to secure a proper reference. This man did not know her. He could not possibly know what she had done. She pulled her commonplace book from her pocket and checked the instructions sent by her new employer. "A place called...ah—Mossgaan."

The woman in the cloche set down her knitting and tilted her body to the side, getting a better look at Ismay, and Mr. Williams peered down his nose at her. A suggestion of intrigue plagued the corners of his mouth. Ismay had the feeling of stepping off a pavement taller than she'd realized.

"Are you going to work for Diarmid 3 Underhill?" The curve to his mouth revealed itself to be not a smile but a sneer.

The question pressed thorny against her skin. "His children need a tutor."

"A governess," he almost hissed. "Fascinating."

The woman in the cloche clicked the varnished nails of one hand against the windowsill, and Ismay's gaze flitted between her and Mr. Williams. Something had been set into motion within this carriage, over which she had no control, and apprehension burned her throat.

"I'm not a governess," she said. She would not give him her name. That much she could withhold. "Children ought to govern themselves. As I say, I'm a tutor. Do you know Mr. Underhill well?"

"I know enough. Has he explained why his children aren't in their local school?"

"This poor woman has been interrogated enough now, Paterson." The woman in the cloche was standing in the aisle. Mr. Williams twisted toward her, growing somehow even paler.

He had not realized she was in the car with them. "Don't pay him any mind, petal. Why don't you come and sit with me?"

Ismay swallowed hard, wavering for a moment before sliding out from her seat and following the woman to the back of the car.

"Do you know Mr. Underhill too?" Ismay folded her hands in her lap to keep the woman from noticing how they shook.

"I've known Diarmid a long time." She spoke quietly—perhaps so Mr. Williams might not overhear—and picked up her knitting again, a violet mitten the same color as her hat. "I knew he intended to find a tutor for the girls, but I had no idea you were arriving so soon."

Ismay ached to ask her what Mr. Williams meant, why the children were not in school, but it made no difference. She herself had asked Mr. Underhill almost no questions about the post at all. Without suitable references, as she was, Ismay could have been offered a job tutoring feral wolves and still been grateful for the opportunity.

"My name is Ismay, by the way," she murmured.

"Caroline Rennie, but please, just Caroline."

"Will Mr. Underhill be very upset about my delay? He'll be waiting at the station."

"Ismay," she said, not with suspicion but true curiosity. Beneath her hat, silver curled around her ears. "What possessed you to take a position all the way out here?"

"I rather fancied a change." She had practiced this reply in the mirror, and so she made herself smile, not too wide, and looked the woman square in the eye. A glint in Caroline's stare indicated how little she believed this explanation, but she said nothing.