Captain Corcoran's Hoyden Bride. ANNIE BURROWS

       Wanted: For Gentleman’s family in Yorkshire. A Healthy Young Person from good family, to supervise education of young children. She will not be expected to dine with servants or do any menial work. Any person able to provide proofs of their pedigree, education and character may call at the Black Swan, Holborn, on Tuesday, 6th June, between the hours of three and four in the afternoon.

      Miss Aimée Peters sighed as the church clock of Beckforth chimed the half-hour. Again.

      It meant she had been sitting on her trunk in the coaching yard of the King’s Arms for well over an hour.

      Of course, no governess could expect her employers to send one of their other servants to wait for the stage to come in, and to meet her as though they regarded her as a significant member of the household. There was not a creature on earth of less significance than a governess.

      Which had been the whole point of going to such lengths to secure this position. Nobody ever looked twice at a governess. Her background and education separated her from the servants, and her status as paid employee kept her apart from the family. She would belong neither above nor below stairs.

      To all intents and purposes she would be invisible.

      Which was exactly what Aimée wanted.

      Though—she shivered as the wind skirled round the corner of the yard in which she was sitting—it was one thing to have pulled off such a successful disappearing act, but where on earth was Mr Jago?

      He had left a letter for her at the Black Swan, telling her that if she still wanted the position for which she had undergone that rather cursory interview, it was hers. All she had to do was go to the Bull and Mouth and collect the tickets he had purchased for her transport as far as this inn in Beckforth, which was the closest village to her employer’s home.

      But what if the letter she had sent, along with the requested references, to tell him she was indeed accepting the post, and would be travelling to Yorkshire immediately, had gone astray? What if nobody was expecting her to arrive today at all? She could not just sit on her trunk in this ramshackle inn yard indefinitely!

      She gripped her overnight bag, which she had kept on her lap the entire way, a little more firmly, stood up, and brushed a few stalks of dried, muddy straw from her skirts.

      It was not as though she was not perfectly used to fending for herself. Her lips twitched into a wry smile. Her willingness to travel—nay, her experience of travelling had been, she was convinced, the deciding factor in landing her this post. Mr Jago had scarcely asked anything about her pedigree, but had sat up and looked very interested once she had told him how she had spent her childhood becoming fluent in Italian and French by flitting from one European city to the next. Naturally, she had not mentioned that these moves had usually occurred at dead of night, with outraged creditors in hot pursuit.

      Mr Jago, after pursing his lips and looking her up and down with those keen blue eyes of his, had unbent far enough to tell her that his employer, the man who had placed the advertisement in the London papers and had sent him to conduct interviews, was a naval captain who was looking for a woman with backbone. Aimée had only briefly been puzzled by his choice of words, for she perceived that a naval officer would probably need to uproot his family regularly, depending on where he was to be stationed. She saw that she would adapt to a peripatetic lifestyle more readily than any of the other applicants, and so had proudly replied that she had a backbone of steel.

      Aimée picked her way carefully through the piles of droppings, refuse and puddles that made up the surface of the yard, to the half-open inn door. If Mr