Ada heard a strange, muffled sound. Her mother had not come back inside after seeing the doctor out to his carriage, and now, Ada realized, standing in the garden behind the house where she thought no one could hear her, her mother was crying. In all Ada’s sixteen years, she had never heard her mother cry, but she was sure, as she knelt there, that that was what the sound was. It was the very next day that Ada packed her things and boarded the ship.
