Status Updates From No Place for a Dame (Royal ...

Ignorance is never better. I may not like what I learn, but I would rather know the truth than naively give credence to something that does not exist.

Hasn’t your heart ever urged you to pursue where your reason resisted?

Caroline Lamb? Sounds familiar.

But I don’t recall her from “Enchantress of Numbers”, historical fiction focusing on Ada Lovelace Byron”?

Sir Jameson’s valet is apparently (according to Burke the footman) a “finical egg-peeling sort”. Finical is another word for “finicky”. I can’t figure out what “egg-peeling” refers to? Eccentric? Wants things just so? Frugal?

Ingenuous: showing innocent or childlike simplicity and candidness

Hmmm... I don’t know why I thought DISingenuous meant that. But disingenuous is instead defined as “not candid or sincere, typically by pretending one knows less about something than one really does”.

Maybe that’s what misled me, the PRETENSE of ignorance?

She had spent fourteen years living on the Marquess of Strand’s charity, and she was only ten when Dermot Quinn (her father) first asked to have her educated (as reward for taking a bullet meant for the Marquess). So Avery is 24?

Eminence grise: a person who exercises power or influence in a certain sphere without holding an official position

(How Giles referred to his now-deceased father vis a vis Avery)

Clever ruse, Avery.

She was the gamekeeper’s daughter & Giles’s dad’s protégée.

She was eleven when he came home from Eton during a break. So that would make them, what, seven years apart in age?

Giles is about to enter his 30th year.

Charnel house: a vault or building where human skeletal remains are stored

Cheeseparing: careful or stingy with money (From Merriam-Webster: Presumably, the practice of paring off the rind so as to waste the minimum of cheese was viewed as an excessive form of frugality.)