Was she supposed to answer that honestly? It didn't seem like a good idea to tell a potential employer that she had no friends and no work for the same reason: people found her a bit odd. Without good reason, she thought.

"I've had troubles since my father died, miss. Not many opportunities for a woman on her own."

Everyone's relatives had to die at some point, hers had just kicked it a little sooner than some. As for the ones that might have hired her regardless, they tended to be the types that treated her like the dirt she was meant to tidy up. Had her mother been an upper class, snooty English girl, had she not left her life on a small island in the Caribbean to come here and serve the locals, would those uppity ladies have hired her daughter then?

Briar didn't have much in the ways of what rich folks wanted, but she was pretty sure she could do a better job than anyone else they hired.

"My mother was killed," she said, in that unaffected tone. "Father got sick a few years after, and my brother drowned."

He'd been in the water when she'd found him, anyway.

"I'm sorry about your father, miss. That is a shame. A daughter should have the right to bury her own."