“I heard Ma go out earlier,” a jam-smeared Kitty said. She was sitting on the window seat entertaining herself by reading out loud from the gossip columns in the papers. She had recently been expelled from boarding school (arson, vehemently denied) and no one seemed to know what to do with her, so Nellie had tasked her with being the one who kept an eye on the papers for useful snippets of information—Lady Melchior has departed from Durban on the Windsor Castle and is homeward bound to Southampton, for example.
