When he changed her name she offered a curtsy to him, ’My lovely hosts thought it better to disassociate with my more modest English roots, than with my Grandfathers fortune.’ she explained, she owed him that explanation, at least before he asked someone else and the change spiralled into some sort of determined con game in the pages of witch weekly. ’My Russian mother, married an Englishman who my grandfather hated and his estate has passed to my sister and I.’ she divulged, ’a not uncontentious act to almost everyone on the planet it seems.’ the last brought a rueful smile to her lips, not sad exactly but resigned. ’It has made the waters I swim in…murky.’ she admitted. Disclosure was better than secrets, and if he was inclined to renew the acquaintance, it would be better to know exactly the woman she was, far away from the girl in that Russian drawing room.

He perhaps knew all of this, maybe that was why he hadn’t written back, maybe one of his family had told him to have nothing to do with the upstart Backus girl? She couldn’t be sure. But fortune favoured the bold it was said, and screwing her courage to the sticking place, ’You said,’ she started, ’That I made a good impression, might I be so bold then to ask’, she swallowed the lump that was in her throat, ’Why you did not write back?’ she tried to look at him, but settled for the apple of his throat, and brushing a stray strand on blonde hair behind her ear – a decent compromise – it was easier to wear your heart on your sleeve when you were not looking into someone’s eyes.

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