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"When the baby comes," she said, "will I still be your daughter? Or only the one you had before you got a real one."

The question was alarming. But Phillipa knew better than to show a reaction.

"Joan."

"It is a fair question."

"It is not, actually, but I am going to answer it as though it were." Phillipa reached over and closed the book gently, taking it out of her hands. "Sit up properly. I am not having this conversation with the top of your head."

Joan sat up, arms crossed, chin lifted.

"You are not the one I had before the real ones. There is no such category in this house, and there never has been. We signed those papers, and it does not expire the day the next one arrives."

"You cannot promise that nothing changes."

"I am not promising nothing changes. A new baby changes everything in a house, ask anyone who has ever had one delivered to them. The hours change. The noise changes. I expect I shall smell faintly of milk for the better part of a year, which is not an improvement, I grant you." Phillipa reached over and tugged one of Joan’s plaits.

"I am promising that what you are to this family does not change. Daughter. Full stop, as you like to say when you think I am being tiresome. Try me on it in ten years, if you do not believe me now."

Joan considered this with the deep suspicion of someone who had once been handed a great many promises that did not hold.

"I want to help. When they come. So that you know I mean it, and am not only saying I am glad because it is the correct thing to say."

"You may hold them until your arms give out, for all I care. I shall likely be glad of the relief."

"Good." Something in her shoulders came down, finally, an inch at a time. "I have been practicing being fierce, in case anyone gets ideas about me being replaced. Tom says it is very convincing."

"Terrifying," Phillipa agreed gravely.

That, at last, won a real smile. "You are only saying that."

"I am saying exactly what I mean, which you will learn, if you have not already, is rather my habit." Phillipa stood, and held out a hand. "Come down and have your bread properly, at the table, like a civilized person, instead of brooding up here with a book you are holding upside down."

Joan looked down. The book was, in fact, upside down. She closed it with as much dignity as she could manage.

They found Gregory in the hall, on his way up to see what had become of them both. He took one look at Joan’s face, still blotchy, and then at Phillipa, who caught his eye and gave the smallest shake of her head, meaning not now, I’ll tell you after.

He asked nothing and fell into step with them both. It was not until they were nearly at the kitchen door, Joan a few paces ahead and out of earshot, that Phillipa murmured it to him quickly what had happened.

“Be gentle with her,” she said finally.

Gregory said nothing to that either, only nodded once.

By the time they reached the table he had rearranged his face into something easy, and pulled out the chair beside Joan instead of his own at the head of it.

“I’m glad you’ve made it down to dinner finally. You missed Duncan’s letter,” Gregory said. “Young Peter has taken up fencing. Badly, from what I hear and he has already put a hole through a curtain.”

“Which curtain?” Joan asked, curious.

“The good one,” he said.

“I would not put a hole through a curtain,” Joan said.

“No?” he said.

“I would put it through him.”

“That’s somehow worse,” said Gregory, and stole a piece of bread off her plate.