ELIZA’S TRAINED HERSELF to wake at seven, just before the bell.

She sleeps in a garret, too low to allow her to stand up except in the very middle, beside her narrow cot. None of the Manor School’s bedrooms have carpets that might trip the girls or hold dust, but this one is the barest; the floor unwaxed. Eliza rooms by herself, since Jane (two years her elder) refuses to board. Among so many pairs and trios of sisters—two Misses Parker, Peirson, Simpson, and Dobson, three Burtons, and a full five Percivals—Eliza is effectively an only child.

Of course having a room to herself could be considered a privilege. No one else’s noises or smells to impinge on her; no one to break in on her thoughts or disturb her sleep. It might be a mark of the Head’s trust in Eliza’s good conduct. Respect for her fortune too? Perhaps her guardian, Dr. Duffin, even pays Miss Hargrave extra for this privacy; Eliza’s never mustered the courage to ask.

She catches herself in the mirror on the washstand. Of course she’s wondered whether Mrs. Tate—who sees to all housekeeping matters for her sister, the Head—was made nervous by her first glimpse of Eliza and chose to sequester her far from all the other boarders. A young lady of colour, though that common phrase irks Eliza, since everyone’s some colour or other. As little girls in India, the Raines rarely gave the matter much thought. But when they lurched off the King George in Kent, Eliza, at almost seven, felt transformed by the spell of a wicked fairy; so many English stared, pointed, or sneered, as if the sisters’ tint was all they could see.

Years later, Dr. Duffin came all the way south to Tottenham to bring his friend and colleague’s orphans back with him to their father’s county of Yorkshire. Eliza remembers Miss Hargrave assuring Dr. Duffin that first day, “My sister and I see no colour,” which sounded more kindly meant than convincing. Introducing the Raines to some forty pupils at dinner, the Head quoted Moses in her rich, low voice: “The stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself.” Still, surely the sister proprietors feared some of their less enlightened boarders might be loath to live at close quarters with this particular stranger, in case Eliza’s difference somehow rubbed off? That would explain why Mrs. Tate tutted over her list, remarked that the south range was overcrowded—quite true—and led Eliza into the north wing and up to an attic floor occupied only by servants, luggage, and broken furniture.

She reminds herself that it matters very little why she was assigned this room; on the whole she likes it. The one low dormer faces northwest. Eliza dips down now to catch a distorted picture, through its uneven diamonds, of fields stretching away towards Clifton village. Closer, to the left she can just glimpse St. Olave’s, which is the Manor’s own church and a remnant of its ancient abbey, once the richest in the North.

August, with the summer break behind them, and the grey sky’s threatening rain. Eliza steps away, in case any labourer’s at work in the grounds so early, since staring out of the windows while in partial undress earns an indecorum mark, as does allowing oneself to be seen.

She dresses fast, which comes of having had no help since she was six. (At the Tottenham boarding school, Eliza deduced that the rich send their daughters to these establishments to live as if poor; “roughing it” is believed to build character.) She swaps her night shift for a day one and scrubs underneath, using the permitted third of a jugful of water; she dries herself on the limp roller towel. Her short buckram stays hook at the front. The only frock allowed at the Manor is white muslin, which saves the trouble of choosing; she slides her arms into the long sleeves, tugging them down over her shift’s linen ones, then contorts herself to button it up at the back. The green ribbon belt that’s the sign of the Middle Form (ages fourteen and fifteen) sits high up on her ribs. A lace tucker over her neck and chest, its strings knotted behind, and a cotton shawl on top. After tying on her stockings with garters, she steps into her pointed kidskin slippers and laces them up tight enough so they won’t sag over the course of the schoolday.

Pupils are allowed a single flounce at the hem, or a silk shawl instead of cotton, without getting a vanity mark, but Eliza doesn’t risk it. It gives her a secret gratification to confound expectations. Restraint in dress is not a virtue looked for in a little Nabobina, as she heard Betty Foster call her under her breath, that first week. Their classmates seemed disappointed by the Raines’ lack of splendour—no decorated palms, thumb-rings the size of walnuts, ropes of pearls, belled ankles, or gold nose-jewels.

Eliza practises her gleaming smile in the speckled looking glass. The well-mannered call her complexion foreign-looking or tawny; the insolent, swarthy, dusky, dingy, or plain brown. She reminds herself that her skin is clear, her features generally thought pleasing. She pulls her pomaded hair into a tight knot. Its straight black silkiness is inconvenient, since fashion requires some ringlets to frame the face, so she has four twists of paper bouncing on her forehead, which she undoes and unrolls now, fingering out the curls that have dried in place overnight. Eliza pulls a baggy white cap over her head and sets the wide band so her ringlets show just beneath its starched frill, and laces the sidepieces under her chin. A guiding principle of British dress is: make something just so, then tuck it almost out of sight.

She checks all yesterday’s linen is in her laundry bag, because she once earned an inattention mark when a housemaid (the tall, mean one, no doubt) reported a stocking on the floor. To remember all the rules, Eliza finds it simplest to imagine a great eye ever fixed on her.

Downstairs, she hurries outside through the mild morning air to use the necessary, trying not to think about spiders under the seat.

King’s Manor is an irregular quadrangle, of which the School occupies less than half. Where the massive city walls around its grounds have crumbled, in recent centuries they’ve been patched with narrow stonework. Eliza spots a pair of red-belted Seniors pressed against the iron railings at the ruined gatehouse facing Marygate, in conversation with a weedy youth whom one or the other would, if challenged, likely claim as a cousin, therefore a permitted acquaintance.

When Eliza first came to the dilapidated Manor, she found it a labyrinth and, to her mortification, sometimes blundered in on other tenants: a wood-carver, workshops of comb cutters and glove makers, not to mention the huge boar that occupies a small room on the ground floor.

She squeezes into the refectory by the rear door now. She has to veer around Margaret Burn (dark curls) crushing Betty Foster (a porcelain figurine) to her bosom—“I trust you slept well, dearest?”—because those inseparables always perform ecstasies at meeting, like heroines reunited at the end of the fifth act.

At the disgrace table in the back, which has no benches, two blue-belted Juniors and a Senior stand bent over their bowls of gruel, trying not to splash. Mrs. Tate hovers, gaze flickering over the crowd for any infelicity that might disturb the Head. Eliza glides past, as upright as a lily, on the off chance of picking up a deportment merit, but Mrs. Tate turns away to shush a noisy pair of girls, finger to her lips: “Piano!”

A tiny wave from Frances Selby, soft curls of straw-gold fringing her mobcap. Eliza throws her a smile and plants herself in the space Frances has saved on the bench just as Mrs. Tate, behind her sister’s carved chair at the top table, jangles the bell. The last girls swarm in, picking at knots in their tucker strings or shoving hair into their caps. Just as the ringing stops, Betty and Margaret land on the bench on either side of Mercy Smith like a pair of trained doves.

Mercy’s a stickler, disliked not so much for being a charity case as for her evangelical sternness. Eliza thinks it a shame the girl can’t convert some of the merits she earns for accurate memorisation of lessons into more useful coin, such as raspberry acid drops, to buy a little popularity. At school a best pal is as indispensable as a chair or a pen, but somehow Mercy trudges on without one. Though it strikes Eliza that since seven is an odd number, one of the Middles of necessity would have to be left on her own. It reminds her of the game A Trip to Jerusalem—when the fiddler stops, all players grab new seats except one, who’s out.

Frances is telling her the entire contents of her father’s latest letter from Swansfield, their estate in Northumberland. He’s hoping to put up a monument to Peace, to go with the tower and the gothic folly, “the very moment the French surrender.”

That first week in Tottenham, Eliza, only seven, learned what it was to have no friend to shield her. The Londoners didn’t offer any direct insults, only barbed compliments: “What good English you speak, Miss Raine.” Not even the girl from the West Indies would pair up with her.

No one until Frances, years later, here at the Manor. Wealthy, her widowed father’s darling, universally liked, Frances is so innocent of bias that she can’t seem to recognise it in others. Whenever Eliza senses a flicker of an eye, a stiffening of the back, a drawing up of skirts, Frances frowns in distress and says her friend must be mistaken. And since of course Eliza would prefer that to be true, she does her best to believe it.

Miss Lewin is overseeing the Middle Form this breakfast, wig slightly askew so Eliza’s fingers itch to tug it into place; the mistress is all mind, never seeming to care how she looks. The housemaid—the tiny, friendly, hunted-looking one—sets down the jug of water. Eliza fills a glass and tries not to wrinkle her nose.

“Greenish today,” Nan Moorsom mutters. “It’s sure to make me sick.” Always longing to be home in Scarborough, Nan takes pride in the variety of her ailments—sore lips, inflammation of the eyes from weeping, oppression in the head, and that’s only the ones above the neck.

“I assure you, Miss Moorsom, our Ouse water is filtered through the purest charcoal, no matter how it may taste.” Miss Lewin speaks slightly indistinctly, her hand hovering in front of her teeth in case they slip, but with a South of England diction on which Eliza does her best to model her own.

Mulish, Nan dabs one eye. Across the table, Fanny Peirson tries her own water, and makes a tiny grimace in Nan’s direction. Eliza would call Fanny even more of a dimwit than her bosom friend Nan, but a sweet one; all the Seniors make a pet of Fanny, and not just because of her withered arm.

Looking out into the courtyard, Eliza breathes in the traces of honeysuckle and rose. Instead of the sour water, she pours herself a cup of chocolate. “Miss Selby, may I help you to a slice of toast or a roll?” To offer is the only way to ask.

Following the formula, Frances answers, “No thank you, Miss Raine,” and passes the platter. Eliza nods her thanks and takes two slices. Three are allowed, but any pupil who sneaks four will get a greed mark, as well as no bread at the next meal. One slice is thought best, since underfeeding strengthens the female constitution (though Eliza’s never understood how). She spreads butter on one slice and marmalade on the other, then presses them together and takes a small bite, relishing the compound tang. When she grows up and comes into her money, she means to spread marmalade and butter on every slice, and thickly.

The Middles have most of their lessons in a long upstairs room with windows on both sides and an old plaster frieze just under the ceiling. This morning: History, Grammar and Literature, Accounts, and Geography. Nan earns a lesson card by failing to fit Jamaica into the jigsaw puzzle. Finger on the terrestrial globe, Miss Lewin prompts them: “King George the Third’s Empire has spread order, industry, and civilisation four thousand miles west of here to?”

“Rupert’s Land,” a few voices chime. Betty, peering out the window in hopes of red uniforms, is not even pretending to move her lips.

“And ten thousand miles to the southeast,” Miss Lewin goes on, “to?”

Just Mercy this time: “New South Wales.”

Dwelling on these distances gives Eliza vertigo. The world’s so wide; sailing here around the Cape of Good Hope took a year of her childhood.

“The Empire is made up of?”

They chorus, “Great Britain and Ireland, together with His Majesty’s colonies, protectorates, and dominions.”

“It is populated by how many Britons?”

Fewer voices: “Sixteen million.”

Miss Lewin asks, “And their less fortunate brethren?”

It comes to Eliza, like a drip of rain down her back, that the mistress means less white.

Margaret hazards a guess: “Thirty—”

Mercy corrects her, precise as ever: “Forty-four million, madam.” Though the charity girl’s accent is broad York, she always speaks with stiff correctness, avoiding dialect.

Eliza tells herself that none of them are turning to look at their less white classmate. Could she be counted under both headings? No, that would be bad bookkeeping; as the daughter of a Company surgeon from Scarborough, surely she’s a true Briton, no matter her shade?

In the afternoon, masters come in for French, Drawing, Dancing, and Music. (Mercy, who can’t afford Accomplishments, swots in the Manor’s library.) At the end of today, Nan is downcast, because no one else in the Middle Form made an error substantial enough to earn a lesson card, so she can’t get rid of hers. Any girl who hasn’t been able to pass her lesson card on to another offender must memorise an assigned piece for that subject, on pain of earning an additional card; Nan and her friend Fanny are often a task or two in arrears.

Dinner’s at five. Yorkshire puddings (served first, to fill the girls up), giblet soup, mutton, and beans. The three at the disgrace table lap their soup neatly and eye the delights they’re denied. Eliza stood there in her third week; she can’t remember what she’d done, but it was nothing dreadful, just some confusion about the rules. She found disgrace so humiliating—all those eyes on her, in pity or perhaps confirmation of what the girls had heard about Asiatic tendencies to sloth, slyness, or sensuality—that she barely ate for seven days. That was when Eliza resolved to give no one grounds to suspect her. To be known at this school as impeccable.

There’s no teacher at the table this evening, so the Middles may chat if they keep their voices low. Betty praises the local regiment’s new uniforms, and Margaret reports on a terrible breach between two close cronies among the Seniors. Eliza nods wisely as if she already knew the tale but was too discreet to repeat it; she doesn’t care to admit that her sister, Jane, never tells her anything.

There’s Jane’s friend Hetty Marr on her own at one end of a Seniors table, taking more beans; she always seems to be eating. Hetty’s a day girl but generally stays for dinner, whereas Jane dines where she sleeps, at the Duffins’ house on Micklegate. This doesn’t seem to conduce to anyone’s comfort, since Jane constantly provokes the doctor. Eliza finds this baffling; for all his rough edges, Dr. Duffin’s the nearest thing to a father they have left.

Fanny tells the Middles that her big sister has had three teeth pulled and the rest filed smooth so there’ll be nowhere for food to get caught, with the unfortunate result that her whole mouth is now painfully sensitive. Nan tops this with a description of a time a dentist broke off a piece of her jawbone, which brought on an abscess, “and I had to be plugged up with cotton soaked in eau de cologne for a month, and Mama feared for my life!”

Nan likes to keep her mother’s memory alive by mentioning her, Eliza’s noticed—something Frances can hardly do, never having met hers. Fanny, like Eliza, lost hers too young to remember much. That’s four of the seven of them at this table who have dead mothers; it strikes Eliza that motherlessness could be considered the natural state of affairs, at least at this school. And Margaret will never speak of her unknown mother, which comes to much the same thing.

Rain’s starting to spatter the tall windows now. Giving up on the last tough end of mutton, Eliza hides it in her napkin. (Failure to clear the plate earns a mark.) Beside her, Frances chews on placidly. Eliza’s staring up at the rain lashing the windows when there’s a stir at the back of the refectory. A new pupil, it looks like, shedding a huge greatcoat.

Not pretty, Eliza decides; soaked front hair escaping from a crushed bonnet. Half-boots and hem rusty with mud. A shrimp of a thing, with neither height nor bosom, but as upright as an officer.

“We expected you in a hack, Miss Lister,” Mrs. Tate says fretfully.

The stranger chuckles. “I only walked from the White Swan, not the whole twenty miles over Barmby Moor, though I daresay I could’ve managed that, at a pinch—my brothers and I think nothing of going ten miles in three hours.” The voice is deep and carrying, the accent rather Yorkshire.

“The young ladies of the Manor School do not stride about town unaccompanied.”

The newcomer nods, as if noting that.

“And where’s your trunk?” Mrs. Tate asks.

“They’re sending it over on a barrow.” Miss Lister wipes rain off her spectacles with the dun sleeve of her travelling costume, and shoves them back onto the bridge of her nose. She scans the gleaming phalanx of maidens in white caps and frocks.

Eliza waits for the moment she’ll be spotted: the odd one out.

Miss Lister’s light blue eyes move on, to the end of the row of Middles, then double back to meet Eliza’s; they narrow as if taking aim.

The Head has finished her coffee and is gliding down the middle of the refectory. “I bid you welcome, Miss Lister. You have not been at school before?”

“Haven’t needed to be, madam, not since I was ten, and I’m fourteen now.”

Miss Hargrave blinks, head tilted. “You. . .haven’t needed to be?”

“I teach myself—with a little help from the Vicar—for ten hours a day, not counting the flute.”

This sets off a susurration of whispers.

“You teach yourself what, exactly?”

“Geometry, astronomy, heraldry,” Miss Lister throws out, “various modern languages, Latin. . .”

This last raises gasps.

“Your efforts sound creditable,” Miss Hargrave concedes, “but there is so much more to the moulding of a young lady than—”

“Oh, I know.”

Has the new girl just cut the Head off, mid-sentence? Eliza’s transfixed.

“Really I’m here for a quick polish, and new connections, of course,” the Lister girl says, “so I can move up into the realm I was born to occupy.”

Titters ripple along the refectory.

She quivers like a deer. Then manages a cocky smile, as if she’s made the joke instead of being the joke.

Eyes on the ceiling, Miss Hargrave draws the moral: “Half the miseries of mankind arise from pride.”

Her sister spells it out: “Kindly acquire the rudiments of common courtesy, miss, and learn not to interrupt anyone, but especially not your superiors.”

The Head murmurs, “The savage must be tamed before being polished.”

Finally a pinking in the girl’s flat cheeks.

“You may join your form.” Mrs. Tate gestures, and the Middles squirm along their benches to make room.

The newcomer offers vigorous handshakes all round; she doesn’t flinch at Fanny’s child-sized right arm. Clearly unaware that the way to get a particular food is to offer it to your neighbour, Miss Lister helps herself to every dish within reach, and piles her plate high with the last of the mackerel. Eliza’s never seen anyone but a grown man tuck in like this.

“Any relation to the Listers of Heighholme Hall?” Nan’s asking. “My father in Scarborough is to marry one of that family next month.”

“The bride’s barely twenty,” Fanny complains in a mutter, on her friend’s behalf.

Miss Lister chews and swallows. “Mine is the Halifax branch of the ancient county lineage. Shibden Hall’s been in the family for two centuries—a timber-framed manor house, built five years after Agincourt,” she says fondly. “The Listers were once the greatest landowners in the district.”

This bit of swank makes eyebrows go up. Margaret exchanges a smirk with Betty and says, in a dangerously civil voice, “As it happens, I went to school in Halifax myself—the Misses Mellin—till my guardian moved me to York to keep me under his nose.”

“I’ve studied with those ladies,” Miss Lister says, nodding.

“But I hadn’t heard that the master of Shibden Hall had any children,” Margaret adds.

Eliza’s pulse speeds up; the stranger’s been caught out in a lie.

“Also, you said you came by Barmby Moor, and that’s not Halifax way.”

Miss Lister gives her a candid grin. “What I meant to say was, Shibden belongs to my uncle, but I spend my holidays there. Almost the whole year there when I was eleven. I’m the general favourite.”

Betty cuts through that: “So where in fact do your parents live?”

“Ah, at the moment, a farm on the edge of the Wolds—just west of Market Weighton, in the East Riding.”

In other words, the middle of nowhere.

Betty probes. “Your father keeps a carriage, does he?” Trying to place this interloper on the Manor School’s chessboard, without demanding outright whether Mr. Lister counts as a gentleman.

The newcomer glides past the question: “Being a captain, he’s obliged to go about the country a lot, recruiting for the French War.”

Eliza tries to think of a friendly remark. “If I may—what’s your first name?”

Those disconcerting small eyes turn on her. “Anne.”

“Miss Ann Moorsom here goes by Nan,” Frances tells Miss Lister, then points at herself and Fanny: “Mercifully you’re not another Frances, as we’ve two of those already!”

Here comes the tiny housemaid with a redcurrant tart. Eliza concentrates on her slice and lets the conversation run on, until she hears Miss Lister quip, “I do hope I haven’t fallen in with utter ignoramuses.”

The word lands like a great gobbet of horse dung.

Betty and Margaret draw back, readying themselves to strike. Betty looks more outraged, but Margaret’s faster: “Shouldn’t that be ignorami, since you claim to be a Latinist?”

The Lister girl answers easily: “In point of fact, Miss Burn, ignoramus can’t take that plural ending, as it was never a noun in Latin, only a verb, first person plural present indicative of ignorare, meaning”—her gaze skims the group—“we do not know.”

The bell rings, and the Middles leave Miss Lister eating on as if to prove herself unrattled by the skirmish.

There’s no going out for Recreation on such a wet evening, even though the August air is soft enough that Eliza would rather like a stroll through the dripping grounds, where the Middles could cut the new girl’s character to pieces without being overheard.

There’s a rule against idle hands at Recreation. In the classroom, the pupils who are sewing press as close to the lamp as they can get, but those who are reading want the light too. Mercy’s working a sampler in cross-stitch.

The busy bee, with ceaseless hum

Morn, noon, and evening, sucks the flowers.

Think you such honey e’er will come

To those who waste their fleeting hours?

Whenever Eliza’s eyes fall on the lines, she’s tempted to ask, And what are you doing, Mercy, but wasting hundreds of your fleeting hours on these garish yellow-and-black bees? Not that her own sketch of the Manor Shore—the public promenade between the school grounds and the river—is a much better use of her time on earth. Eliza’s been fiddling with it for a fortnight, but still the strolling ladies and gentlemen look as flat as silhouettes in cut paper.

After a glance at wan Miss Vickers at the top of the room, to make sure she’s buried in her magazine, Betty whispers: “Vulgar and horrid.”

No one disagrees, not even Mercy.

“Her ancient county lineage!” Margaret scoffs.

“Lister means dyer,” Betty points out. “I bet her forefathers sold cloth by the bale.”

Fanny surprises Eliza by speaking up with a mild heat. “Well, what if they did? I don’t mind admitting we Peirsons were tanners before founding our bank. And didn’t your father start off sewing sails, Nan, before he set up his?”

Her pal doesn’t look happy to have this brought up. She jerks her head at Betty: “Well, I bet Mr. Foster sawed up trees, in his youth, and built ships with his own two hands.”

Betty glares.

“Come now, ladies,” Frances protests, “don’t we all come from trade, if we look back a few generations? Let’s not allow silly prejudice of rank to creep in.”

Her friend’s liberal spirit touches Eliza. But it’s easier to ignore the fact that there’s a ladder if you’re perched at the top.

Betty hisses, “I wouldn’t have let a word pass my lips if the Lister brat hadn’t put on such airs.”

When Eliza carries the horn lantern into her garret, an hour after the sun goes down, it’s all wrong. Another small bed’s been wheeled in, and Miss Lister’s sitting cross-legged on it, in a welter of books, with her spectacles dangling from the neck of her night shift. A second chest of drawers has been jammed under the slanted ceiling, and another lantern is taking up most of the washstand.

“Good evening, Miss Raine. I imagined you’d rather keep the window side?”

“Miss Lister—”

“Lister, please.”

“Isn’t that what I said?”

“I like my friends to drop the Miss.”

Surname only? “Like a boy, you mean?”

“Why not?” She springs to her feet, this young person, this Lister-no-Miss. “And you, your Christian name’s Eliza?”

Was that a tiny flicker of hesitation before Christian? Eliza’s as Christian as anyone here; William Raine drove each of his baby girls to be baptised in Madras’s Anglican church. To punish her, Eliza says, “I only like my friends to call me that.”

“I’ll call you Raine, then.” Bluff, impudent.

“Miss Lister—”

“Just Lister, if you please.”

With an effort, Eliza remembers the point at issue. “What are your things doing in my room?”

“Our room now, it seems.” The Lister girl starts to stash books in her bottom drawer.

Eliza’s face is hot. If this disagreeable rustic has been sent up to share the garret, it’s not only inconvenient. It means Eliza’s been unwanted all along—stashed up here like some uncouth article of furniture, under a dust sheet—and now two such items have been crammed in together willy-nilly. She’d like to slap this Lister, with her shabby clothes and countryfied manner, her pretensions to intellectual superiority and cravings for social advancement. This awkward hobbledehoy, who can take her lantern downstairs and bed with the pig for all Eliza cares—

Miss Lister turns to her. “I am sorry. That is, I can’t regret that I’ve been sent up here, for you to keep a strict eye on, but I do apologise for the invasion.”

Eliza purses her lips. “Are you such a troublemaker that you need to be watched?”

“Born unto it, as the sparks fly upwards.” A perverse cockiness in the girl’s voice.

Eliza turns her back and pulls the curtains against the summer night. She shakes and thumps her feather bed to smoothen it out under the sheet. Then she pulls the upper sheet and blanket taut. She undresses at speed. She’s scrubbing her teeth with a rag, the scent of clove and cinnamon rising, when Lister sniffs appreciatively and asks, “What’s your tooth powder?”

“Crushed coral, I believe.”

Lister’s getting the last specks of food out of her teeth with a steel pick; she licks it clean before putting it away in her etui. (Only a worn green leather cylinder, nothing like Eliza’s hinged box of ivory and tortoiseshell with blue velvet compartments for everything from pins and needles to brightening washes.) “I rub plain salt on my gums.”

Why does Miss Lister think Eliza cares?

“I like to close my eyes and imagine I’m eating some tasty winkles with a pin.”

“Good night, ladies.” Mrs. Tate, opening the door. She gives motherly kisses to her favourites, but Eliza’s never been one. “Miss Lister, here’s your green belt, the sign of the Middle Form. Lights?” She always takes away the lanterns at nine to make sure the pupils don’t waste candles, or injure their eyesight or health by staying up late reading, or risk starting a fire.

Eliza wants to pour out her grievance, but to try at this hour would probably earn her a disputatiousness mark. Better to bide her time and wait for this hoyden to commit some grave offence.

“Good night, madam.” Lister hands over both lanterns.

In the sudden dark, Eliza’s cot creaks as she clambers in. The lumpy feather tick spreads under her weight.

The truckle bed skids on squeaky wheels. “What coarse sheets,” Lister remarks. “And could the blanket be any thinner?”

She speaks as if she’s used to finer at home, which Eliza doubts very much. Eliza answers, “If they hear you speak that way of the bedding, they’ll take it away for a night.”

Silence, then, at last.

On Tuesday morning at breakfast, the water’s fresh—last night’s rain, collected in barrels. Eliza nibbles her hard triangular roll, which tastes faintly of nutmeg. Sitting too close beside her, in the uniform white frock and cap, Lister drains a large glass of milk.

“Tea, coffee, or chocolate, Miss Lister?” Fanny offers.

“No thank you, Miss. . .Pearce, was it?”

“Peirson, of Peirson’s Bank in Whitby.”

Lister nods, as if recording the detail. “May I ask, your arm. . .”

Nan sucks in her breath. “You may not, if you’ve any manners at all.”

“I don’t mind,” Fanny assures her friend.

Meeting eyes with Betty, Margaret weighs in. “What an appalling breach of—”

“Truly,” Fanny pleads, “I’d rather people ask than always be wondering.” She turns back to Lister. “I was only two years old when I shattered it. I tripped on the cliffs and tumbled a little way, and a passing gentleman climbed down at great risk to himself and carried me up.” Fanny holds up her short, skinny arm in its taken-in sleeve. “The bone never grew back properly after that. But I thank heaven, because I might have died like my poor nursemaid Meg! Trying to block my fall, you see, she plummeted all the way down and was dashed to pieces on the rocks.”

“Miss Peirson, what a tale.”

Fanny’s glowing in the sunbeam of the newcomer’s attention.

“May I help you to a slice of toast, or a roll, Miss Lister?” Mercy holds out the dish of bread.

A shake of the narrow head.

Eliza’s disconcerted again: no hot drinks and now no bread, even?

“Care for some gruel?” Nan asks.

Some girls find it comfortingly bland but won’t take it, as they’re unwilling to be seen eating what’s served at the disgrace table.

Lister shakes her head and fills up her glass. “I’ll just have more milk.”

“You ought to eat some breakfast,” Frances advises.

“Milk’s very nourishing. Calves live on nothing else.”

“But something solid, for your health, surely?”

“I enjoy excellent health, thanks, Miss Selby.”

“At times I’m so low-spirited, I’ve no appetite at all,” Nan boasts, “and Dr. Mather has to prescribe me sugared calf’s-foot jelly from the chemist.”

Fanny and she bicker about whether the jelly is delicious or disgusting, which Eliza considers pointless, since the matter is quite literally a matter of taste.

Lister cuts in: “What depresses your spirits so, Miss Moorsom?”

A blunt question, but it gratifies Nan. “Homesickness. Sometimes I have such heartache, it brings on a nervous debility.”

Lister’s eyebrows lift. “Scarborough’s not that far off.”

She remembered the name of Nan’s hometown, Eliza notices. Does Lister have a little file in her head for each of the Manor girls already?

“Forty miles,” Mercy specifies.

Margaret snorts. “I come from Newcastle, which is twice as far.”

“It might as well be four hundred, if I can’t get home till Christmas,” Nan groans. “Oh, to hear the crash of the waves. . .”

“Scarborough’s genteel enough to have some good schools,” Lister says. “Why didn’t your father choose one of them?”

Nan huffs. “Not far enough away from home to please his new bride, I suppose.”

“You’re sure you won’t have a small roll, even, Miss Lister?” Frances holds the dish out.

Lister only smiles, as if that was a joke. She leans back, and murmurs in Eliza’s ear: “Is bread compulsory in Madras?”

The question throws her, as if the city’s name is blazoned on her face. No, clearly Lister’s managed to extract Eliza’s history from some gossip already. Unable to improvise a rebuff, she says, “We had curry and rice.”

The fact is, Eliza’s bluffing; she remembers tastes, but not which foods they had at which meals. She pictures Myrtle Grove in a far-off way, like a dollhouse kept behind glass. For eight years she hasn’t talked to anyone about home; Jane has no patience for harking back. Eliza has inherited some of their parents’ personal effects, but no letters, no drawings, nothing outside herself to prove the existence of Myrtle Grove; she couldn’t place it on a map of Madras, if she owned a map.

She does recall running through the villa, anywhere she liked, with her ayah hurrying after. She can conjure up glimpses of Father’s apartments and Mother’s, the kitchens, the servants’ quarters, the verandahs where a visiting Englishman might be found sleeping or a cross-legged tailor sewing shirts. Walls flecked in places with red from spat paan, and the warm scent of joss sticks. In her mind’s eye she calls up the shimmer of lacquered brass lamps. Low hum of conversation and snores at night, tom-toms in the distance. The swish of Mother’s sari in the passages. Eliza’s own room, with the high bed in the middle, canopied with mosquito nets. Bearers dozing in a doorway until you needed them to fold and carry a chair, let the blinds down, take the stinking pot away, massage your head, bring you a cool drink, fan you, carry you to the bazaar in the shaded palanquin. Eliza doesn’t remember any rules in Myrtle Grove, though she might have forgotten, of course. Every year since leaving, her untouched memories shrink, flatten, and fade a little more, like pressed flowers.

“Curry for breakfast, really?” Lister murmurs. “Fascinating.”

Eliza shrugs.

“Why not, I suppose. How arbitrary these customs are.”

“Private whispering earns an indecorum mark,” Betty tells the two of them.

“Apologies, mesdemoiselles. I’m learning.” Lister stands and bows to the whole table before she walks off with her unused plate.

Grammar and Literature. The girl inserts herself on the bench beside Eliza, penning her in.

Miss Lewin tells Lister not to cross her legs.

Lister gives her a rueful smile: “I find it most uncomfortable to keep them straight.”

“If that’s so, it suggests the error of crossing them has become habitual.”

“You’re quite right, madam. But until I manage to break the habit. . .”

Miss Lewin’s more interested in their learning than their legs. “Well,” she says impatiently, “for now, you may cross them at the ankles, but never higher.”

She tests the Middles on yesterday’s pieces out of Elegancies of Poetry by the Most Eminent Authors, Compiled for the Improvement of Young Persons. Mercy recites “Expelled from Paradise” with leaden rigour. Betty always picks something about lovers, this time “Edwin and Angelina.” Eliza manages two verses from “Thoughts on a Tomb” with only a couple of trip-ups.

Lister rattles off twenty lines from “The Deserted Village.”

Goggling, Nan asks, “When did you have time to—”

“I knew it already,” she said, tapping her temple.

Next Miss Lewin has them open their copies of Mrs. Devis’s The Accidence; or, First Rudiments of English Grammar: Designed for the Use of Young Ladies. The very sight of the cover makes Eliza yawn behind her teeth. Today’s passage starts,

The Imperfect, or imperfectly past time, is so called, because it imperfectly partakes of both present and past—shows that something was then doing, but not quite finished.

Eliza’s stuffed her head with so many dry pieces out of The Accidence, the volume has the uncanny familiarity of a dream. She whispers the set paragraph now, ten times through, at which point it means as little to her as when she began. I was reading; the reading was happening in the past, and no information is given as to whether it has stopped yet, but shouldn’t she assume it has? Surely, if the reading were still going on, the statement would be in the present tense, or the present perfect continuous. So in what sense does the imperfect tense imperfectly partake of both present and past? Eliza presses hard between her eyes.

Beside her, book shut, Lister is craning up at the plaster frieze.

“Miss Lister,” the mistress asks ironically, “may I presume you’re ready to favour us?”

She recites it, word-perfect.

Miss Lewin is taken aback. “Ah. . .you should correct a slight tendency to gruffness.”

Betty lets out a tiny snort. Lister lifts her eyes back to the frieze overhead.

The mistress goes crimson from bosom to forehead, and pulls out her ivory-ribbed gauze fan to flap at herself. Miss Lewin’s time of life is known as dodging, one of many indignities of the female condition; the word makes Eliza think of ducking to avoid hurled vegetables.

Mercy, called on next, must be rattled by the new girl’s powers of memorisation, which rival her own; she somehow leaves out a whole sentence.

Fanny’s turn. She dries up at the start of the second clause.

Betty stumbles through the piece; Miss Lewin tells her she’s “rather too shrill.” Asked to explain a point, Betty can only paraphrase it.

“It’s necessary, but not sufficient, to con the passage by heart,” Miss Lewin reminds them as Mercy collects the seven volumes and stacks them on the bureau. Next she sets them to show their understanding of the same loathed section by parsing it, one word to each line.

On Eliza’s other side, even Frances lets out a tiny sigh as they reach down for the escritoires at their feet.

“I left my writing-box in my room, madam,” Lister tells Miss Lewin.

“Take an inattention mark, then.”

Lister cocks her head. “I’d have to be aware of a rule to break it, no? I’m afraid I thought the classroom would have desks and materials.”

Is she really sneering at the Manor School’s facilities?

“Now I know, I’ll be sure to come equipped tomorrow. Or should I fetch it now?”

Her daring makes the air quiver.

Overheating again, Miss Lewin tugs at her fichu. “Share with Miss Raine, then.”

Eliza’s forced to flip her escritoire open and slide it over so it wobbles on her left knee and Lister’s right. It belonged to William Raine—dark teak, with dented brass at the corners and surround—and she’d really rather not have anyone else touch it, let alone use her snowy paper and excellent ink. Teeth set, she lifts the hinged slope and gets out supplies before she fits it back into place and unscrews the ink jar.

It gives Eliza some satisfaction that Lister’s writing is awful: a cramped hand full of abbreviations, smudges, and words and phrases inserted as afterthoughts. The two of them have to lean so close together, pressing on the slanted leather surface, that Eliza feels the other’s breath hot on her ear, like a dog’s.

At lunch Eliza takes some cold ham, pickles, and chutneys from the long sideboard, as well as two slices of wiggs, fresh-baked but so strongly flavoured with caraway that it makes her cough. No sign of Lister, which on the whole is a relief.

Once again, the little Dern at one of the Junior tables is weeping. Not to be unfeeling, but the child (almost twelve) has been at school since the start of Michaelmas term last month, and is no better; her muffled sniffles jar Eliza’s nerves.

The Head speaks from the top table, in sweetly ringing tones. “Miss Dern, do dry your eyes. As the proverb has it, Time and thinking tame the strongest grief. The Manor School is a family concern, founded by our grandparents”—a sisterly nod takes in Mrs. Tate. “In time it will become your family too.”

A sob bursts from Miss Dern.

“The poor duck just wants her own people,” Frances says under her breath. Which counts as a sharp rebuke to the proprietors, coming from her.

It occurs to Eliza that by now Miss Hargrave must have informed the Derns of their daughter’s persistent grief. So the only logical explanation is that they don’t want her back, or at least not as she is at the moment, with her squeaky voice, spotty chin, and helpless sorrow. If ever Eliza’s inclined to bewail her orphan state, she should remember that possessing a pair of parents is no guarantee of a happy home with them.

The Head’s lovely face tightens, and she looks to her sister.

Who springs into action: “Off to the storeroom, then, child, until you choose to be quiet.” Mrs. Tate hurries to lead her away by the hand.

The thick-doored storeroom off the refectory is used to contain any uncontrolled emotion: fits of rage or laughter, but mostly plain tears. Eliza’s never crossed its threshold. She does wonder if little Miss Dern may find it some relief to be left to cry in private, on a sack of flour rather than at table with forty girls giving her irritated stares.

“I’m the same way,” Nan murmurs to the Middles, hand on heart. “I can hardly get to sleep without the sound of the sea, it’s in my blood so, what with our mother’s father having been a ship’s captain.”

Margaret claps down her knife and fork. “You spend every holiday and half-term in your beloved Scarborough, Nan, so let’s hear no more about it.”

Fanny begins, “Oh, but—”

Margaret holds up one palm. “Furthermore, that Dern child’s sorrow has become a fixed habit, and one she needs to break.”

“Surely she would if she could?” Frances asks.

Sometimes it strikes Eliza that the sharp-witted Margaret would be a more entertaining best friend than Frances, who’s rather too much of a saint. But of course such a pairing would draw too much attention to the obvious flaw Margaret and Eliza share: having been born to a mother not lawfully married. So Eliza looks away from the dispute, and works the pit out of an olive with her tongue.

There’s Jane among the Seniors, making them laugh. Her eyes don’t stray in her little sister’s direction. The Raines have never been close, but they were once rather closer than this, weren’t they? Eliza’s sure she remembers Jane braiding her hair. On the King George from Madras, when Eliza was six to Jane’s eight, they slept back-to-back in a bunk, shoulder blades like swords in a rack. Then at their first school, in Tottenham, Eliza clung to Jane like a drowner, as long as Jane let her.

Someone hovering. “I’m off to explore—unless you’d care to show me around,” Lister says in her ear.

“This is lunch,” Mercy says, as if explaining an unfamiliar word.

“I’m rarely hungry in the middle of the day, Miss Smith.”

“But we always eat lunch,” Nan objects.

A snort from Lister. “What, yet another school rule? The best medical authorities agree that more people die of eating too much than too little.”

Eliza swallows her ham fast—a hard lump in her throat—and slips the second slice of wiggs into her pocket. She’s on her feet, lifting her dishes. “I suppose one of us had better see she doesn’t go astray,” she tells the others in a mildly put-upon voice.

“How kind of you,” Frances whispers.

First Eliza leads the way upstairs for her umbrella.

“It’s a very fine day,” Lister points out.

“I need it against the sun.” Eliza was raised never to let sunlight touch her face, but she’s not going to spell that out.

Ahead of her, Lister takes the steps two or three at a time, as if she were a giant, instead of shorter than Eliza. Despite her skinniness, she seems awfully strong. A bulky rectangle distorts the line of her frock.

“Is that a book?”

“Oh, I’m never without one. I can’t stand to be bored for a moment.” Lister lifts her skirt to reveal a pocket sewn onto her petticoat and tugs out the volume, straining the stitches. It’s the third part of something called Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady.

Eliza gestures for her to hide it away again. “If you’re caught with a Book Not Approved, they’ll confiscate it and give you a deceit mark.”

Lister jerks her chin. “Care despised, say I! Clarissa’s worth the risk. The part when she loses her mind—it simply harrows me.” Out of her tight sleeve she pulls a tiny notebook, with a stub of pencil attached by a string. “I always have this on me, too, for noting down facts of interest. Forbidden?”

“I’m not aware of a rule against notebooks,” Eliza concedes. As they go up the next staircase, she lays out the whole system of marks, merits, lesson cards, Judgement and Consequences.

Lister snorts. “This sounds as complicated as the rules of All Fours. At my first school they simply whipped me every day.”

“They did what?”

“Oh, I deserved it. I’ve been a great pickle since I could talk, so when I was seven my mother packed me off to Ripon in the West Riding.”

“Whipped at a girls’ school? Every day?”

“Almost.”

Which Eliza takes as an admission of exaggeration. “Both your parents are still living, are they?”

A nod. “And two brothers, Sam and John, at school near Pickering. Also a sister of eight, Marian, a great annoyance. That makes four of us still standing, out of six—our first John was before my time,” Lister adds, “and little Jeremy died when I was eleven, though I barely knew him, as he was put out to nurse ten miles away.”

Most families have lost children, but few will offer this private information. Eliza doesn’t know what to say.

“I’ve no grandparents left,” Lister goes on, “but a horde of uncles and aunts.”

Eliza finds herself volunteering, “My sister, Jane, and I know of only four relatives aboveground.”

“Which ones?” Lister asks.

She numbers them on her fingers. “Our father’s sick old brother. Their feebleminded sister. Her daughter, who’s estranged from a cruel baron husband. And her brother, who’s so disreputable that no one will pronounce his name.”

Lister takes all this in stride. “And on the Indian side?”

All Eliza can do is shrug.

A little stiff: “Pardon my curiosity.”

“No,” she assures Lister, “I don’t mind the question, it’s only that. . .I’m not sure whether any of our mother’s people are still alive.”

Eliza puts it that way to make it sound like an ordinary family. The fact is, she only remembers Mother gliding through the rooms of Myrtle Grove alone, like a ghost attached to its old house. She doesn’t recall her ever taking tea with relatives, or friends—only smoking hookah with Father in the evenings, or calling for her little girls for an hour. (Her musical laugh. The tiny, juicy sounds she made when she chewed sweet paan.) Eliza can’t remember any Indians at Myrtle Grove, except those who came on business. Did Mother fall completely out of touch with her people when she became an Englishman’s wife? (That’s the word she used, and Father too: wife. A country marriage, people sometimes called it; nothing particularly illicit about it.) Or perhaps Mother hadn’t lost her relations, they just didn’t live near Madras. Or perhaps they did visit Myrtle Grove, but Eliza was so young that she’s forgotten. She wishes she had some sense of how much has slipped her mind since she was shipped out at six years old, even if the details are irretrievable.

Lister nods. “Not a full deck of relatives so much as a few dog-eared cards, then. Just as well Dr. Raine left you rich, at least.”

Eliza blinks at this candour. Or is it plain rudeness? “One thing can’t be set in the scales against the other. I don’t suppose you’d swap your family for four thousand pounds.” She names the figure deliberately, to show she can guess how much Lister’s found out about her already.

The little mouth twitches doubtfully.

“You would not!”

“Don’t tempt me,” Lister mutters.

Eliza laughs, despite herself, imagining how appalled the family in the Wolds would be to hear this.

She hurries along the creaking passage to the fourth door, their garret room. “We’re not allowed to be up here during the day, but if we’re seen, I’ll explain.” She nips in and grabs her green oiled-silk umbrella.

Coming out and past the box room, she glances through the crack and spots a familiar figure, hands knotted, stooped over. She whispers, “Mercy Smith—she holes up in there to pray sometimes, when she can snatch half an hour during the day.”

“For what does she pray, do you think?”

“That the Smiths will prosper, and the rest of us will go to hell?”

Lister lets out a cackle.

Eliza tugs her away. Down on the first floor, she says, “Oh, and never knock on a locked door, such as this one, as they’re the tenants’ rooms.”

“What, Miss Hargrave has to let out part of the Manor?”

She keeps her voice low: “I don’t believe the family’s ever owned an inch of the property. Lord Grantham leases the place from the Crown, you see, and rents most of it to our school, and smaller parcels to various tradesmen. There are woodworkers that way, and a granary through there, in the old ballroom.”

“A granary!”

“Well, so I’ve heard.”

On the ground floor, Eliza spots Miss Vickers in conversation with old Mr. Halfpenny; the hollow-eyed mistress never hides the fact that she dislikes her situation, but she seems to have a soft spot for the drawing master. Eliza pivots and hurries out the nearest door, Lister on her heels.

The sun lifts her spirits; she basks in its warmth on her neck through her lace tucker, though she’s careful to put up her umbrella to shield her face. She breaks her wiggs into pellets to slip into her mouth as they stroll.

“Is that a crime too?”

Eliza laughs under her breath. “As long as it was in the refectory, the bread was licit—”

“Almost compulsory, as I recall,” Lister says.

“But it became contraband as soon as I took it outdoors. . .for which I blame you.” Eliza leads the way around the jagged square building, with its one long block coming off a corner to make the shape of a capital Q. “You can see the plan of the Manor better from outside.”

Lister curls the arms of her spectacles around her ears and blinks up at the chimneys. “Plan hardly seems the word for it. Not a straight line in sight. Almost every second casement is blocked up too.”

True, the stairs and storerooms are always dim. “Perhaps the old glass is cracked?”

“More likely our thrifty Head means to cut the window-tax in half.”

Eliza never knew there was a tax on windows.

“Limestone and brick and. . .is that timber?” Lister asks. “Cobbled together over the centuries into a rambling, crumbling pile. A higgledy-piggledy jumble. But so picturesque, in its decrepit way. That arcaded nave over there with its trefoil traceries.” She canters through the long grass towards the most dramatic remains, one long wall with a dozen Gothic windows arching up, far overhead. “How I love to tread in the footsteps of the ancients.”

Eliza’s never heard anyone their age say such a thing. “Mind you don’t tread in the cowpats.”

A whoop of merriment.

As Eliza tries to keep up with Lister’s stride, the girl fires off a barrage of questions: how many, how high, how old? What’s stored in the greened-over ruins under the great alders? “I’m curious where those hundreds of monks went.”

“When?” Eliza asks, at a loss.

“When Henry the Eighth came to stay with his fourth queen—or was it his fifth?—and put down the abbey, and seized the estate for himself.”

This girl’s only just arrived, but she seems to know more about the history of King’s Manor than Eliza.

“Did he expel all the monks overnight?” Lister wonders aloud.

“Pensioned them off?” Eliza suggests. Though that may be wishful thinking.

“Back to their families, I suppose.”

“Those who still had families living.”

“I hadn’t considered that,” Lister says, chastened.

“And even if they had. . .how strange it would be, after living in a monastery, to have to go home and put on breeches again,” Eliza says.

“Wouldn’t it!”

Lister’s tone turns practical again as she speculates about how many head of cattle can be grazed among the ruins. She assures Eliza that the prices of hay, flax, coke, and steel are all set by something called the invisible hand of the market. This Lister’s like some middle-aged man of business in the body of an adolescent female, and very fond of the sound of her own opinions. “What’s behind that wall?”

“The river.”

“Can we—”

“Not today. Lunch must be nearly over.” Eliza steers them back towards the Manor.

Lister checks her watch: “Ten minutes yet.” She twirls it on its chain, and whistles.

“Whistling’s expressly—”

“Don’t tell me.” Lister jams her fingers in her ears. “Then I can claim ignorance.”

“That trick won’t work more than once.”

“How’s this: I promise I won’t do it loudly enough to summon the guards.”

“We have no. . .” Belatedly realising this is a tease, Eliza smiles.

Lister whistles on, like a bird in a bush. Then breaks off and points: “A Roman fortress? This alone was worth the ride from Market Weighton.”

“We call it our Multiangular Tower.”

“But the upper section, with the meurtrières, looks more medieval.”

“With the. . .what?”

“Murderers. That’s what the French call the arrow slits.” Lister capers around the massive wall. “Can we get inside?”

“We’re not supposed to—”

“Oh, it’s broken open at the back here.” Lister disappears, then calls from within: “Ten sides, I believe it used to have. A decagonal tower.”

The interior’s crammed with cracked bedsteads and rotting carts, like a lumber room open to the sky. Eliza finds Lister leaning over a stone, scrubbing at it with her fist. “Genio lou, no, genio loci feliciter,” Lister reads. “Happy the genius of this place? Or the spirit of this place, more like.”

“We should go back,” Eliza pleads.

But Lister insists that at this point it’ll be faster to complete their circuit of the Manor. As they hurry along, she comments on the weathercocks, and badgers Eliza with questions about the prevailing winds in York, as well as spandrels and soffits, whatever they are.

Eliza hopes the boar might be showing himself. Yes, by great luck, here he is, in his corner chamber—up on his hind legs with two trotters resting on the sill as he snuffs the August air.

“If the old kings could see swine running amok in their palace,” Lister marvels. “Oh, the transience of earthly grandeur.”

“Prinny doesn’t run amok,” Eliza says primly.

“You’ve named him after the Prince of Wales?”

“Who else is so famously fat?”

“Any bread left, to give him?”

“Sorry, I ate it all.”

“Raine and I will bring you a treat tomorrow,” Lister promises Prinny. She steps back, then scampers towards the wall; two steps up and she’s gripping the sill so she can pat his great bristly snout.

“Get down!” If Lister’s spotted practically climbing into Prinny’s sty, she could be sent home, and though that prospect would have pleased Eliza this morning, somehow things are different now.

Music is taught in the high-ceilinged room at the front of the Manor with unpapered walls that bear spectral traces of old bricked-up doors. Mr. Camidge isn’t come yet, so Eliza slips onto a stool and shakes out her hands to loosen them. Of the square fortepianos, her favourite is this mahogany one on a wobbly trestle stand. (Though why is such an instrument called square, when it has the proportions of a woman’s coffin?) She finds her opening chord and launches into “Rondo alla Turca.”

Betty and Margaret, behind her, guitars dangling. Betty doesn’t bother to keep her voice down: “You seem on very civil terms with that creature.”

Eliza’s hands freeze. Quietly: “I have to share a room with her, after all.”

Margaret surprises her by saying, “Oh, I suppose Miss Lister must have her good points.”

Betty looks at her friend sideways. “None that she’ll care to display to ignoramuses.”

Eliza tries diplomacy. “I believe that remark was meant as a joke. Miss Lister must have been nervous, encountering the whole school at dinner.”

Betty puffs out her breath. “No wonder. She looks like a stableboy in his sister’s petticoats.”

“Well, I for one welcome any fresh company to vary our captivity,” Margaret says.

Betty’s face falls: is her loyal lieutenant abandoning ship?

Margaret forms a chord with her left hand. “Come, my sweet, from the top?”

The pair launch into strumming and picking in unison. Eliza gestures to them to move farther away, but all they do is turn their backs.

Eliza runs through her own piece again, smoothing it a little. Then she notices Lister beside her, wiping her dripping mouthpiece. Of course Lister would have a flute—the instrument many parents won’t allow girls, because those jerking movements reveal the elbows in an unladylike way. Lister calls above the clamour, “Utter bedlam!”

“You’re just used to practising alone,” Eliza answers. “Mr. Camidge says this way cultivates concentration.”

Lister shakes her head in disbelief. Then puts the flute to her lips and plays on, with competent vigour, elbows stabbing the air as if defending herself in a crush.

Eliza reaches left to pull out the first two stops of the fortepiano so her notes will sustain longer. But she can still barely hear them. To make matters worse, Nan and Fanny are singing an Irish ballad in the corner.

What was it I wished to see?

What wished to hear?

Where all the joy and mirth

Made this town heaven on earth. . .

Eliza tries to push that tune to the edge of her mind so she can focus on “Rondo alla Turca.” How she’d like to be playing alone, in a quiet apartment of her own.

Leaning over her, flute held up like a spear, Lister improvises in a falsetto:

Where all the noise and din

Made this town hell to live in. . .

Now Eliza’s laughing too much to carry on.

“At home I play the drums too,” Lister tells her. “Be thankful I couldn’t fit them in my trunk.”

In the doorway, Mr. Camidge claps slowly until they all fall silent. “My apologies, young ladies. I was kept late at the Minster.”

“He’s the music master there, like his father was,” Eliza whispers to Lister. Mr. Camidge tends towards the moralistic—his sorrowful homilies about you young ladies of the modern day blame them for everything from narrow shoes to sleeping late to fast carriages—but his fervour for music is so genuine, they can’t help liking him.

Now, for instance, he gets them all playing a four-part round, “Oh My Love, Lov’st Thou Me,” and the mishmash of instruments chimes together quite nicely. Then they try the whole thing in a minor key, which has a certain melancholy Eliza likes even better.

At the end of class they file past the master, who scribbles a letter after each name in the ledger.

“So I earned a. . .a P?” Lister puzzles over it.

“That means Pretty Well,” Eliza tells her. “V would be Very Well, but that leads to swelled heads so the masters don’t give it often. And they save N—meaning Not Well—for when a girl covers herself in shame. Mr. Camidge generally gives us all a P.”

This evening, she’s getting ready for bed when Lister dashes in, already yanking off her creased cap. “Evening, Raine.”

Eliza’s startled to see that the girl’s back hair is cropped to the nape. “Have you had a bad fever?”

Lister grins under her gaze, and rubs it. “No, I just like it kept neat. It saves time brushing. In Paris it’s all the mode—coiffure à la Titus, as in the Emperor.”

“Bonaparte?” Eliza’s bewildered.

“No, Titus of Rome.”

“Of course.” Not that she’s ever heard of Titus. She doesn’t suppose her new classmate means to discomfit her; erudition just rises off Lister like smoke. Eliza glimpses tiny patches of pink skin through the girl’s brown pelt. She’s seen short hair on female heads in the occasional print in a stationer’s window, though so bedizened with curls, ribbons, and flowers that the effect had nothing classical about it. It occurs to her that elegant ladies might very well be walking about with cropped hair under their caps and bonnets, and as long as they keep a few ringlets on the forehead, who’d know except their intimates?

“So you’ve visited Paris?” she asks. Though this must have been a few years ago, before this latest outbreak of hostilities.

A sheepish grimace from Lister. “I’ve not yet been out of Yorkshire, except by reading and imagination.”

Eliza likes her for that admission.

“Whereas you, Raine, must have seen half the world, on your way here.”

She’s still not sure how she feels about being called that, plain Raine. She supposes Father must have gone by his surname at school in Scarborough. “Well, I was only six when I left.”

“But you’re a great observer.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Those dark eyes of yours, ever watchful.”

Dark unsettles Eliza, a little.

“I’m the same. I like to notice things and set them down,” Lister tells her. “Knowledge is power, we know from Bacon.”

She puzzledly thinks of the meat, before realising that Lister must mean the philosopher.

Lister leans against the sloped ceiling to butt it with her head. “Ugh. I hate a low room.”

“It’s not as if you’re tall,” Eliza jokes.

“Not yet, but I’m still growing.”

She doubts that.

“I scorn everything mean and confining.” Lister steps into the middle and waves an imaginary sword overhead. “What do they call this sky parlour of ours?”

“It’s a nameless little hole.”

“A cupboard for human odds and ends. Even the floor’s askew,” Lister observes. “That corner seems inches lower than the rest. The Pit of Hell, we’ll call that spot.” Reaching through a gap in the curtains, she undoes the latch and shoves the window open.

Eliza doesn’t want to be obvious and mention that this is strictly against the rules. She tells herself that nobody’s likely to be out in the fields to report them at this hour of the evening.

“The scent of York.” Lister smacks her thin lips.

“What’s that?”

“Well, there’s less in the way of sheep dung than at home. Other forms of filth, though. The river. Chemicals. Something baking?”

Hearing the familiar tread in the passage, Eliza rushes to shut the window and pull the curtain.

After Mrs. Tate’s taken away their lantern, Lister throws herself on her back. “We shall dub this the Diagonal Chamber,” she announces. “No, the Slanted Chamber, that’s more poetic. Or the Slope?”

Eliza lets her eyes adjust to the dark.

Lister murmurs, “We met before this, by the way.”

She frowns. “You and I?”

“I mean, I saw you, though no one thought to introduce us.”

“When was this?”

“Over a year ago, now. The fourth of August last, at the Hunters’. My aunt brought me.”

Dr. Hunter is the mind-doctor who runs York’s lunatic asylum. Eliza dimly remembers that party at his house on Low Petergate. Dr. Duffin likes to be seen with his wards on occasion, though Eliza finds it a trial. “Are you sure it was me? My sister, Jane, would have been there too.”

She can hear the tiny squeak of the bed as Lister shakes her head. “You were both pointed out to me, and you’re not a bit alike.”

Except in the obvious way. “Pointed out?” Eliza echoes coldly.

“Well, of course you were—a pair of mysterious orphan heiresses.”

Mysterious makes her giggle.

“You’re not like anyone, Raine.”

Eliza stiffens. “None of the other Manor pupils, you mean?”

“Not like anyone anywhere, I suspect. You’re a rara avis.”

She goes up on one elbow. “What did you just call me?”

“A rare bird. You really must study Latin.”

Her heart thumps painfully. “So you remembered me all year as an oddity.”

“No, I remembered you as the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”

Eliza’s face scorches. She supposes she should say thank you for the compliment, but instead she drops flat and turns to the wall.

After dinner on Thursday, the August evening is so mild, even those who have to study come out to join the others among the ruins. They sit on old blankets to keep the long grass from greening their frocks. As ever, Eliza is impressed by Mercy’s grim determination to keep up in French without ever having had a lesson, by learning parrot-fashion from Frances’s book.

Eliza’s trying to complete her weekly letter to her guardian. It contains no news the Duffins didn’t hear when she went to dinner last Saturday, but the doctor thinks it a useful exercise, and Mrs. Duffin likes proof that Eliza’s handwriting is improving. In Music I have been practising my Mozart. . .

Carrying her writing-box, Lister drops into the narrow space between Eliza and Frances, crossing her legs tailor-style. “What’s that, Miss Selby?”

Frances’s face lights up. “Have you never tried quilling, Miss Lister? Its proper name is paper filigree, and it’s the greatest pleasure in the world.”

“I find that hard to believe.” Lister catches Eliza’s eye.

Eliza looks away, feeling disloyal to her old friend.

Frances shows off her tools. “I use an old quill with the nib cut off and a slit made in the end to hold the paper, see? I cut a long, narrow strip of paper and roll it up into a coil, or a scroll, then I glue it in place.”

“You’re making a pattern around the head of. . .Is that Princess Amelia?”

“That’s right! On the occasion of her birthday, with velvet for a background, or perhaps crushed shells—I haven’t decided yet.”

Lister purses her small mouth drolly in Eliza’s direction.

Frances is not vapid, Eliza would like to tell her. Where’s the harm in crafting something pretty in honour of the King’s youngest daughter?

Lister leans left, to study Betty’s map. The most meticulous needlewoman in the Middle Form, Betty has been embroidering the world for as long as Eliza’s been here. “Remarkable work, Miss Foster. Why’s there no land at the bottom of the globe?”

“Because there isn’t any.” Betty taps the dog-eared engraving from which she’s copying.

“No, I mean why do you suppose it formed that way, with nothing but ocean at the Southern Pole?”

Betty gives her a blank look. “How should I know?”

“That’s how the Almighty in his infinite wisdom shaped the earth.” Mercy speaks without looking up from the French primer.

“But why aren’t the continents more evenly distributed?” Lister wonders.

“Curiosity killed the cat,” Betty snaps.

If Lister had been in Eden, Eliza thinks, she’d have bitten into the Fruit before the Serpent ever slithered by to offer it. A gulp of laughter escapes her.

“What’s so funny?” Lister asks.

Eliza only shakes her head. “Perhaps there is land down there at the Pole, but nobody’s sailed far enough to spot it.”

Lister makes her a little bow. “Now, there’s an explanation that appeals to my venturesome spirit.”

Eliza gets up on her knees to squint at Betty’s deftly threaded letters: New Holland, Siam, Chinese Tartary, Ethiopic Ocean, Arabia. “Madras should go just there,” putting her fingernail about two-thirds of the way down the peninsula, on the right.

“I’ve already put Calcutta and Bombay.”

Ah, clearly the vast Subcontinent is only to be allotted two cities, even though Europe’s riddled with names.

“And York?” Lister asks.

“I’ve only room to name London,” Betty objects.

Lister tuts. “Isn’t this the Second City of Britain?”

“No, Bristol’s that,” Mercy says.

“Newcastle, surely.” Margaret’s eyes are still on the comedy she’s reading.

“Very well, perhaps York’s not quite second in population or industry, but in genteelness,” Lister argues.

Margaret murmurs: “Only a Yorkshire girl would claim so.”

“I find this rather a sleepy old town, for all its so-called elegance.” Betty waves discontentedly at the distant towers of the Minster. “They say its Season’s not what it was. If my father meant me to be finished in style, he really might have sent me as far as London, or Bath at least.”

Eliza’s amused: Betty’s hometown, fourteen miles down the Ouse, must be a sight sleepier than York. “We’re schoolgirls, Betty. What does it matter to us how faded the fashionable round may be?”

Betty scowls, but Lister gives Eliza one of her unsettling smiles.

“York has none of the sea vistas of my dear Scarborough,” Nan sighs.

“Seventeen hundred years of history, you goose.” Lister flings out her arms. “Ancient walls to walk on.”

“If you want to sprain an ankle,” Nan grumbles. “A Junior did that and was put in disgrace for a fortnight.”

Lister shakes her head, and starts filling her pen.

Fanny leans over, impressed. “Is that a metal nib?”

“Silver.” Lister shows her, nonchalant. “I won it as a prize for writing when I was eight.”

Margaret snorts without looking up. “Writing, as in the elegance of your penmanship?”

“As in, fluency of invention and precision of construction, Miss Burn.”

A snort. “Was this the same school where you were whipped every day?”

Eliza realises, with an odd sting, that Lister’s been telling other girls her stories too.

“I was a notable pupil in several respects,” Lister murmurs as she fiddles with some black sealing-wax.

Mercy warns her, “Don’t seal your letter yet. The Head has to read them.”

Lister curls her lip. “An unenviable task, spying on school-girls.”

“It’s to preserve us from falling prey to the wolf in the fold,” Mercy tells her, “or going astray like silly sheep.”

Nan and Fanny giggle at that.

Lister taps her own page. “So does Miss Hargrave strike out whatever words she doesn’t approve, before sending it on?”

Mercy shakes her head. “If she doesn’t like any part of the letter, she’ll give it to her sister to burn.”

Lister sits up straighter. (Like a soldier in muslin drapery, Eliza thinks.) “And if I wrote home to complain about this policy of censorship?”

“She’d burn that one too, and you’d get a disputatiousness mark and lose writing privileges for a week.”

“I suppose you could always drop off a letter at the post office yourself,” Margaret says, her tone intrigued. “But what if your parents betrayed you to the Head?”

“We’ve had a Senior expelled for secret correspondence,” Betty tells Lister.

“That was with a cadet,” Margaret reminds her.

“Well,” Lister says grimly. “Good to know the number and thickness of our prison bars.”

Eliza notices something. “What on earth is your seal?”

“A pelican feeding her young with blood from her breast.” Lister passes it to her. “From my mother’s stepmother, whose first husband was a Prussian count.”

More boasting; Betty throws Margaret a look.

“What’s yours?” Lister asks Eliza.

She gives back the pelican and shows the simple French motto on her own seal: Pensez à moi.

“Think of me. How perfect for a letter.” Lister sits back and studies her own seal again. “When my sister was born, my mother let me nurse a little too. I liked it very well.”

Uneasy looks pass between the Middles.

“How can you remember your infancy?” Nan wonders.

“No, I was six years old.”

Cries of disgust.

Eliza feels the most curious sensation in her own chest, under all the lace.

“The milk’s slightly sweet,” Lister says, “like the juice of a pear.”

Mercy gets to her feet and stalks off towards the building.

But it’s clear to Eliza that Lister’s not aiming to offend her schoolmates. It’s not even that she doesn’t care whether she offends or not; the flow of her thought is as urgent and unstoppable as a spring of water.

Margaret drops her book on the blanket and says, “Let’s play something.”

“A game!” That’s Lister.

“Shop.” Betty, decisive, packs up her embroidery in her workbag.

“I don’t believe I know that one.”

Margaret smirks over Lister’s head at Betty. “You’ll get the hang of it.”

“Shop’s not a real game,” Eliza objects.

“Not the running around, merry kind.” Fanny sounds disappointed.

“You begin, darlingest,” Betty tells Margaret.

Eliza wonders how these two came to be crowned queens of the Middle Form, long before she arrived.

Margaret says, “I went to the shop, and bought an elephant’s foot umbrella stand.”

Betty takes it up. “I went to the shop and bought an elephant’s foot umbrella stand and. . .a large blue plate.”

Nan jumps in third. “I went to the shop and bought an elephant’s foot umbrella stand, a large blue plate, and a. . .” They all wait as she flails for a word that fits. “An egg.”

“My turn?” That’s Fanny, never sure of where she is in a game. “I went to the shop and bought an elephant’s foot umbrella stand, a blue—no, a large blue plate, an egg, and a pewter mug.”

Lister’s gaze flickers from face to face.

Many parlour games have, as their sole purpose, the mockery of those who don’t understand how they’re played. Really, Eliza thinks, the people in the know might just as well stand the newcomer in a corner and pelt her with chestnuts. She takes her go: “I went to the shop and bought an elephant’s foot umbrella stand, a large blue plate, an egg, a pewter mug, and a hideous hat. . .” Leaning into the double h’s just enough, her gaze on Lister.

An answering spark in those penetrating eyes.

“Hints are against the rules.”

Eliza gives Betty a blank look. “So are unjust accusations.”

“What—was there a hint?” Lister’s acting her part well. “Did I miss it?”

Margaret clicks her tongue in annoyance.

Eliza allows the tiniest curl in the side of her mouth nearest to Lister.

Frances contributes an aspic mould to the imaginary shopping list, Mercy a nankeen waistcoat. So by the time it’s Lister’s turn, she’s ready with something to match the final t of the clue word, elephant. She overdoes it, though. “. . .a hideous hat, an aspic mould, a nankeen waistcoat. . .and a teeny-tiny tea tray?”

Betty scowls at Margaret. “Eliza gave it away.”

“What?” Eliza asks, as if outraged.

“When?” Lister pantomimes innocence. “I just used my powers of deduction.”

“We should have played a real game,” Fanny says glumly. “Anyone for Blind Man’s Buff?”

At bedtime Eliza finds Lister already in her nightdress, pacing up and down the Slope, eyes half-closed. “What are you doing?” she asks as she starts to shed her clothes.

“Committing girls to memory. Betty Foster, I picture running from a great slavering dog, but the dog’s faster. Margaret Burn, I imagine standing too close to the fire, so her hem—”

Eliza holds up a hand to hush her. “No need for forty murderous fantasies, Lister.”

Who grins, perhaps because Eliza’s addressed her the way she likes.

“They only proposed that game to put you in your place, since you boasted of being related to a Prussian count.”

Her mouth twists: “Distantly related.” Then, ruefully, “If people aren’t civil, I am sometimes rather too hasty in ranking them among my sworn enemies.”

“Well, I applaud your plan to memorise who’s who.” Eliza chooses a clean page from her red pocket-case and sets it on the flat leather. She remembers making a list, her first week at the Tottenham school, a map of the social maze. Yellow Room, she writes, Betty Foster. “Betty’s father’s another banker—he as good as owns their river port.” She jots in the names of the other girls who sleep in the Yellow Room.

Lister points at a name she’s read upside down. “Two Simpsons from Whitby? I believe they have brothers at school with mine.”

“Then Margaret Burn is next door to the Yellow Room, in the Chapel.”

“Pupils sleep in a chapel?”

“Oh, it’s just a bedroom, but we like to imagine it was once used for secret worship, as the pointed windows look Gothic.” Eliza inks in the names of the other roommates under Chapel. “Margaret’s the cleverest in the Middle Form.” (Well, until Lister came, but no need to admit that.)

“Cleverer than Mercy Smith?”

“Mercy’s only the hardest working—tortoise to Margaret’s hare. Margaret is the school’s greatest fortune.”

“How many thousands?” Lister asks.

“Ten.” More than twice Eliza’s four. Girls here speak plainly or jestingly about what some of them have coming; others have only hopes, or little hope of inheriting anything. Future funds seem rather unreal, as long as the pupils are all obliged to wear the same white frocks and drink the same river water. “But on the other hand. . .” Go on, can you match this girl’s candour? Eliza chooses the politest term for the disadvantage she and Margaret both have. “She’s a magistrate’s natural daughter.”

Lister nods neutrally.

Mrs. Tate’s light footsteps. Lister whips a tallow taper out of her etui, spikes it on a candleholder, and lights it.

Eliza hisses, “No.” Private lights are strictly forbidden; two of the Seniors smuggled in lanterns last year and were reported by a maid.

Lister ducks to set it under her bed, then hurries to meet Mrs. Tate at the door.

“Not in bed yet?”

“I beg pardon, madam. Miss Raine was helping me undo a tangled lace.”

What a quick, glib liar.

“Well, you can both finish up in the dark,” Mrs. Tate scolds mildly.

“Good night, madam.” Lister starts shutting the door as she hands over the lantern, before Mrs. Tate can catch the leakage of light from the taper under the bed.

The two girls stare at each other in its glimmer. Then Eliza resumes. Green Room, Nan Moorsom, Fanny Peirson, and half a dozen other names.

Lister says, “The first list I ever drew up, at eleven, was my pedigree.”

This amuses Eliza. “Like a racehorse.”

“I’ve reckoned one hundred and thirty-eight generations from my great-grandfather back to Adam.”

She laughs out loud. This grandiosity must come of being a nobody from the Wolds; Lister’s clothing herself in tinsel, like some ragged strolling player.

Not that Eliza has any grounds for pride of birth herself. Would she swap half or a quarter of her four thousand pounds for an old county name? On the whole, she thinks not. What good would it do Eliza to be a countess, even, when the prejudiced would still look askance and call her a cuckoo in the nest?

Mid Hall: she lists the Percivals (all the mousy-haired spit of each other) and the other Yorkshire girls who fill that chamber. Double Room, Frances Selby. “Now, Frances is probably the most well-born of us Middles. Her father is agent to the Duke of Northumberland, and they have a conservatory full of exotics and a flushing water closet.”

“And she’s your best friend.”

A statement or a question?

“Or not quite?” Lister suggests.

“Frances. . .was the first girl to show me any kindness.”

Lister laughs under her breath.

Eliza’s fingers hover near her cheek. “None of them at the Tottenham school seemed able to see past this.” Half-blooded, half-caste: the unspoken words thrum in her head.

“Nasty little bitches.”

Her eyes sting with tears and she nods. It’s not shock at the obscenity but relief, to have someone confirm what she’s felt.

“I quite see you’d be grateful to Miss Selby, then,” Lister says. “But gratitude is not the same as friendship.”

To change the subject, Eliza says, “Frances can draw on her skin.”

Lister gapes.

“With any point, I mean, such as a pencil—pink lines swell up, and stay for an hour. Oh, I forgot Mercy.” She adds the name to the Double Room.

“Is Mercy anyone’s best friend?”

“Our Saviour’s, I suppose.”

Lister snorts. “You sit in a group for long stretches without uttering a word, Miss Mouse, but tête-à-tête, you brandish your blades.”

Eliza’s face heats at the praise—if Lister means it as praise. “All I mean is that Mercy’s on the path to heaven and won’t let anyone stand in her way.”

“Mercy the merciless.”

“You know Miss Hargrave took her in so we’d get our candles gratis?”

Lister cocks her head.

Eliza nods at the leaking taper. “Mr. Smith is a chandler on the Shambles, you see. She agreed to enrol one of his daughters in lieu of paying a huge bill, or that’s the story anyway.”

“Very practical on both sides,” Lister says.

“Now, who are we missing? Among the Juniors in the Double Room are Mary Swann of the well-known York concern—”

“Friends of my aunts,” Lister says with a nod. “This place is riddled with bankers’ daughters.”

“The Swann girl’s boon companion is Mrs. Tate’s daughter, little Eliza Ann. Have a care: Eliza Ann sidles about with ears flapping and brings the gossip to her aunt.”

“Rather than to her mother?”

“Well, all Mrs. Tate can do is report to Miss Hargrave, who rules supreme, so the child prefers to run directly to the throne.”

“The sisters are Martha and Mary, aren’t they? One of them fusses over household matters, freeing the other to ponder the higher things.” Lister’s caressing Eliza’s scarlet pocket-case, with its flaps and fold-out slots that hold her letters and banknotes. “Is this from India?”

Eliza shakes her head. “Moroccan donkey-skin. Concentrate.”

“I’m capable of thinking several things at once. I’ve never seen a lady’s pocket-case that wasn’t cloth.”

She struggles to remember who sleeps in the White Room. The three little Burtons share a chamber with the junior mistress, Miss Robinson; she doesn’t know its name.

Lister reaches for the page. “Is that the lot?”

“Almost.” Eliza pulls it back and writes in the mistresses at the top, though not the masters, as apart from Mr. Tate (the dancing master) they don’t live in. Nor do the day girls, but she puts their surnames at the bottom, for completeness. “Day girls always wear an air of superiority because they come and go in the world,” she remarks, “but we rather despise them for being outsiders.”

Lister chuckles. “Thanks for this, Raine. Oh, but you must add me.”

Slope, Eliza writes in a tiny space, if that’s what they’re calling their garret now. Miss Lister, Market Weighton.

Lister makes a little face, reading that. “It wasn’t exactly an untruth, about Shibden Hall. It’s the home of my heart.” She picks up the list. “Oh, but you’ve forgotten yourself.”

Eliza takes it back and writes E. Raine. Then wishes she’d started with Miss. She could legitimately put York for her home, she supposes, because of the Duffins. Despite the fact that the doctor’s an Irishman who spent his career alongside William Raine in India, and that his wife was born there to English parents, the Duffins give the impression of being as thoroughly English as any other genteelly ageing couple on Micklegate. Eliza finds herself writing India in the home column after all—then wavers and adds in Past.

Saturday means Judgement and Consequences in the refectory, with all the tables pushed to the sides and the pupils standing. “This Manor has been a place of seclusion and study for seven centuries.” Miss Hargrave casts her sonorous voice to the back without effort. “Some eighty years ago, our mother’s parents founded the School here to train up wives and mothers worthy of the sacred charge of forming the next generation. How glorious a time this is for the education of girls!” She breaks off to beam at her sister. “So many who used to be kept ignorant at home are now admitted to institutions of learning, of which our Manor is, I believe I may say without vanity, among those of highest repute in the land.”

“The very highest in the North,” Mrs. Tate murmurs.

Miss Hargrave’s tone turns stern. “But when you stoop to behaving in ways unworthy of yourselves and your names, you betray that hallowed tradition. So we must curb your faults, using only gentle methods to teach you control over every passion.”

Here the Head always names the prevailing vices she’s observed with sorrow; this week they include hilarity, contention, and filthiness. (By that, Eliza can’t work out whether she means indecent language or tracking in mud from the Manor Shore.) Miss Hargrave calls the Seniors, then Middles, then Juniors to line up one by one in front of the mistresses’ table.

Miss Robinson’s holding a nosegay—marigold, it looks like to Eliza, with mallow, scabious, and lady’s bedstraw. Infatuated Juniors are always bringing Miss Robinson flowers, simply because she’s not old, plain, nor bad-tempered. The junior mistress has to teach everything from Penmanship to Gymnastics, and in whatever moments she can snatch, she’s rumoured to write poetry.

Pallid Miss Vickers wears her stiffest look, as if she considers this whole exercise undignified. She’s been teaching at the Manor as long as any of the Seniors can remember, and doesn’t bother to hide the fact that she’d have left long ago if any other opportunity had presented itself.

“Any marks?” Mrs. Tate asks Jane’s friend Hetty in tones of regret.

“One for greed,” she admits, cheeks purpling.

Having to confess in front of the school can humiliate even the most confident. Eliza inevitably finds herself on the brink of tears, even if she’s only admitting to having dropped a cup or slouched. Today, mercifully, when it’s her turn to answer she can say, “None.”

It occurs to her to wonder how the mistresses can possibly remember all the marks they’ve given out over the course of the week. Unless they log them in a private ledger after each class and meal? She can’t imagine Miss Vickers, for one, going to such trouble. In which case, it should be possible to underreport your misdeeds. . .but it would be a roll of the dice, of course, because if challenged, you’d get a deceit mark for each one omitted.

Lister gets four marks today, but chooses to cancel them out with the same number of merits earned in class for feats of memory. Many girls prefer to take their Consequences for marks and then enjoy the treat for merits. It happened to be gravy, one Saturday when Eliza won a merit for deportment, and although not particularly fond of the stuff, she felt a surge of excitement every evening that week when she stood up and, following the formula, called, “I claim gravy.”

Today five pupils get barred out—put facing the corners of the refectory, as a sign of ignominy. One of them wears the jingling Fool’s Hat, another the Vanity Mask (a painted face with swollen red lips, which gives Eliza the horrors). The middle Miss Burton has been caught bribing the kitchen maids to bring in ginger parkin again, so she gets the Liar’s Tongue, a great curling triangle in red cloth hanging down her front. Among the Middles, Nan, to work off five inattentions, has to wear the Ass’s Ears as she’s sent off to clean every lamp-chimney in the Manor. Betty gets debelted—made to trade her green ribbon for the childish blue of a Junior—for exchanging waves and greetings with officers in the street. Margaret (two disputatiousness marks) wears the black Quarreller’s Sash over her green belt, and presents herself to each mistress in turn to hear a remark on her character. She carries it off well, but by the end, her lower lip looks chewed raw. Finally, everyone who isn’t still in disgrace receives a half-holiday, and the Middles and Seniors go off into the countryside with no mistress in charge.

Most of the harvest has been put up in great ricks by now, but gangs of men are still stooping over and over with their sickles. Dog roses bloom red in the hedges, and a hare runs across the path in front of Eliza. Lister climbs over a stile and reaches for Eliza’s hand to help her. Lister’s fingers are a little rough, and very strong. She says, “I’m afraid I’m a desperate walker.”

“You walk very well,” Eliza says.

“That’s what I mean—I need to roam almost as desperately as to read.”

Eliza would usually walk arm in arm with Frances, the way Betty and Margaret are now. But Frances is farther back, talking to Nan and Fanny. Has she felt neglected? Eliza and she have seen almost nothing of each other since Lister came to school. You and the new girl are thick as thieves, Nan remarked yesterday, and Eliza spent so long wondering if that was a rebuke, she forgot to reply.

Up ahead, she spots her sister, Jane, strolling arm in arm with her pal. Hetty’s taken a damson off one tree and a greengage off another, as well as some blue-black bilberries and white currants.

As the Manor girls file past an old couple outside their cottage plaiting straw into broad-brimmed sun hats, Eliza has an impulse to buy one, even though summer is almost over.

“Charmingly rustic,” Betty calls as Eliza fits it on over her mobcap.

Eliza pretends not to hear the snide tone. “Thank you.” She collapses her umbrella carefully so as not to crack a whalebone strut, and furls and buttons it up. As she walks, she dangles it by its ribbon, along with her discarded bonnet.

“Let me carry that.” Lister snatches the umbrella.

The path ahead is blocked with a flock of slow-moving sheep, so Lister proposes they all turn back and follow the fingerpost towards New Earswick instead. The heather’s blazing white where the late summer sun hits it. “At least sheep can eat on the march, whereas cattle drovers have to halt and graze them on the way.”

“The things you know,” Eliza teases.

“I realise they’re not things you want to know.” Lister slashes at a yellow-sprinkled whin bush.

Eliza corrects her: “Never knew I wanted to know.”

The two of them are well ahead of the others now, because Lister moves as if in seven-league boots. “That Judgement, this morning. . .” she says, with one of her abrupt switches of subject.

“What of it?”

“Whipping might be kinder than such shaming. The aim of the spectacle seems to be to make us small and foul in each other’s eyes.”

Eliza tries to be fair: “It’s not so difficult to avoid breaking the rules.”

Lister makes a rude sound that would definitely earn an indecorum mark.

Eliza’s remembering the Tottenham school, where permission to rise, speak, eat, relieve herself, sit, walk, or sleep had to be sought, often had to be earned. The child from Madras memorised the routines as a dancer might. The Manor isn’t half as bad as that. “There’s expulsion, instead, for the worst cases,” she teases, “—do you prefer the sound of that? Last year a Senior disappeared overnight.”

“Do you suppose the good sisters rolled her up in a rug and threw her in the Ouse?”

Eliza frowns at Lister. “She’d crept out at night and seen a man.”

“Seen as in spoken to? Or worse?” Lister makes holes in the soft ground with the tip of Eliza’s umbrella.

“Stop that.”

Lister wipes it on a large leaf. “Was this girl from Yorkshire?”

“London. What difference does that make?”

“Well, a family so far away in the South will have been able to gloss it over,” Lister assures her.

“You think so?”

“They’ll have told all their acquaintances that her school was closed by an outbreak of something.”

“Or else they might have her shut up in an attic to this day,” Eliza says grimly. Then adds, “I’d have nowhere to go.”

“Oh, but Raine, surely your Dr. Duffin. . .”

“A guardian’s not the same as a father.”

Lister scrutinises her face. “Is he harsh?”

“Only a little bad-tempered.”

“You’re invited to dine every week, aren’t you?”

“Once a fortnight.” Eliza tries to think how to describe the household on Micklegate. “The Duffins collect strays.” She’s not sure why, because the presence of the young often seems to wear on the doctor’s nerves. “Their Irish nieces visit, and there’s a vicar’s daughter, a Miss Marsh, who’s always bustling in and out, and they used to have another Indian ward. . .” Dearest Anna Maria Montgomery—no, Mrs. James now, more or less lost to Eliza since she was married from the Duffins’ country house last October. Settled five miles away from York, but it might as well be five thousand. Her boy’s just been born—mother and child both safe—and according to Mrs. Duffin, so pale you’d hardly know.

They must have slowed down, because the rest of the Middles are suddenly on their heels, chattering. Lister spins around. “Frances Selby, I hear you have a secret talent for writing on yourself like paper.”

The others burst out laughing. Frances blushes up to the roots of her creamy hair and her eyes slide to Eliza.

Who fears Frances will assume she’s been making fun of her.

“It’s a curious thing,” Frances admits. “My mother had it too, my father says.”

Lister demands a demonstration, so Frances pushes up her sleeve to bare one long white forearm and lets Lister try with a fingernail. “Nothing indecent, now.”

“Don’t move.”

Frances cranes to see the weals emerge. Lister releases her wrist. Eliza goes closer to see. The flowing red script says, The Human Page.

“You’re a marvel,” Lister says. “In the Dark Ages, they’d have called this a sign of the devil.”

“Or God singling out one of his saints,” Eliza puts in, defensive.

“Does it hurt?” Lister asks.

“It only itches a little,” Frances assures her.

And then the Middles all insist on writing or drawing something, until both Frances’s arms are scribbled like a sailor’s.

Waking, on a bright August morning, Eliza watches Lister’s small eyelids, not three feet away. She doesn’t look like other girls, but Eliza can’t quite put her finger on it. Something faintly animal about the narrow face. An otter, a weasel?

Water-blue eyes blink open. “Well, once again, that was horrible. This feather bed!” Lister lurches up, and her truckle bed skews on its wheels. “I’ve never slept on such a spiky backbreaker. What tattered ducks provided these quills?”

“Chicken, we suspect.” Eliza sits up too. “The feathers do get matted and smelly if you don’t shake them out well.” She shows Lister how to take her tick off the striped under-mattress and give it a good pummelling, breaking up the lumps. “Hang it over the foot of my bed,” she offers, because Lister’s bed is just a box with no rails.

“That won’t do much, surely.”

“On the next sunny day, the housemaids will dangle them out of the windows for a proper airing.”

When both mattresses are draped over the end of Eliza’s bed, Lister gives hers a final punch. Tiny quills emerge from holes in the cloth and waft about, making her sneeze. “This school-of-high-repute is rather a sham.”

That makes Eliza stare.

“We’re camping in shabby hired rooms that haven’t been plastered in two centuries,” Lister points out.

“What matters is learning, surely, not décor.”

A snort. “And there’s the real fraud.”

The bell sounds, on the floor below.

“The library, so called, is no bigger than the box room”—Lister jerks her thumb at the wall—“with only one bookcase of schoolbooks and sermons, and a century-old, crack-backed run of The Spectator! What are we being taught but reading, writing, and reckoning, as in any dame school, topped off with a few frills to help us hook husbands? Haphazard, superficial, and tedious, say I. If they’re not drilling random passages of old books into our heads, they’re scolding us to keep our legs uncrossed. It’s not what I’d call education.”

Anxiety comes up like acid in Eliza’s throat.

Lister subsides on her cot. “Not that other girls’ schools are much better. No wonder so many of us end up with frivolous, footling lives.”

Eliza finds herself oddly defensive. The Manor is all she has in the way of a home. “If it’s so tedious, write to Captain Lister and ask him to take you away.”

Lister puffs out her breath. “I gave Father my word I’d try my best, this time, so the thirty guineas won’t be thrown away.”

Eliza doesn’t think Lister realises that this sum covers only bed, board, and basic lessons for the year, not Accomplishments, furnishings, coals and candles, quills and copybooks, washing and mending.

“Besides, when I’m at the farm, I drive my mother to drink.”

Delivered in a tone of high-pitched comedy—so Lister can deny it later, Eliza guesses. She’s beginning to read between this girl’s lines. “Come,” she says, “the bell’s gone.”

They tidy their heads in front of the small mirror. Eliza’s front curls are still more or less intact, but Lister has to chivvy hers by twisting them round her forefinger. “Why does custom insist we wrap up our heads as tight as puddings, then persuade half an inch of ringlets to peep out the front?”

“I know,” Eliza sighs.

“Shall I button you up behind, Raine?”

“Please.”

She can’t remember why she ever thought she preferred to room alone.

Going down the back stairs after Dancing, Lister says, “Well, our master seemed to find that as dispiriting as I.”

Eliza smiles. “Mr. Tate’s like that.”

“What, always sitting in the corner with his head in his hands?”

“Not always. On his bad days.”

“I thought at first he might be. . .” Lister tips an invisible glass towards her lips.

Eliza shakes her head. “Just sunken in gloom.”

“Any relation to our Mrs. Tate?”

“Her husband.” Eliza whispers: “But she doesn’t seem like a tyrant, only a worrier, so that can’t be such a crippling burden, surely?”

“Married life has its murky mysteries,” Lister says with a shiver.

“Their daughter in the Juniors, Eliza Ann, when asked to account for her father, all she’ll say is that he’s a man of sensibility—painfully sensitive feelings, don’t you know.”

Lister scoffs. “I’ve no patience for the weak-minded, with their moods and megrims and blue devils.”

“That’s harsh,” Eliza objects. “Some natures sink where others swim.”

“He’s had embarrassments.” Margaret’s so close behind them that they both jump. “The Tates used to own various properties about town, but everything had to be sold up, so they lodge here at the Manor now.”

“Oh, well, debt,” Lister says, “that explains his misery.”

Eliza’s not sure it does, quite.

After French, Lister comes over to ask Eliza their master’s name.

“We’ve no idea,” she admits.

“Not a surname, even?”

Eliza puts on a sepulchral voice: “We presume Monsieur has had to keep his identity a deep, dark secret, ever since he fled France.”

“Ah. Some stain on the family escutcheon?”

When Eliza doesn’t know a word, she pretends she does. “Or perhaps he’s a very great aristocrat who escaped the guillotine.”

“If his identity is exposed, might he be assassinated in some dark alley in York?” Lister asks.

“Oh, come, we don’t know for sure that he fled,” Frances points out deflatingly.

“But so many did,” Eliza argues.

Margaret nods: “My cousins say Soho’s riddled with refugees.”

When Eliza sees new arrivals in the street, marked out by some item of dress as well as a stunned expression, she remembers—with a twinge of fellow feeling—stepping off the ship at seven.

“The poor Frog.” As if Lister’s reading her mind. “To think, the war’s been rumbling on for as long as we’ve been alive, and Monsieur’s still stuck here.”

Betty twists her blond front curls round her fingers. “What gives me the shivers is that France practically touches England.”

“Only twenty miles apart, at Dover,” Lister says. “According to yesterday’s Herald, Boney’s army of two hundred thousand is standing by in Boulogne, ready to swarm onto barges.”

That prompts squeals.

“In Sheffield,” Betty adds, “a brick-kiln fire was mistaken for a beacon, and caused a panic, so my brothers’ Volunteer brigade was marched to Doncaster for nothing.”

Betty never passes up an opportunity to boast of her brothers, particularly the eldest, a major who advanced his whole company’s pay last year rather than have them wait for it.

“But if the French invade, we’ll blow them to kingdom come,” Lister insists.

Frances whispers, as if spies might be listening in the next room: “My father says they’re building a gigantic raft, with windmills to power its paddles.”

“Our Navy will make mincemeat of their barges and rafts,” Lister assures her. “And as a last resort, we’re building eighty-eight mighty towers to guard the coast.”

“Boney might fly in,” Nan moans.

Fanny’s eyes are bulging. “However could he do that, Nan?”

“I heard he has a fleet of hot-air balloons carrying baskets of bloodthirsty Frenchmen.”

“They’d never float this far,” Lister says with authority. “They’d burst their gas-bags on the Peaks in Derbyshire.”

“He’d only have to get as far as Windsor to kill the poor King.” A tear drops from Nan’s left eye.

“Then we’d have to speak French all the time.” That’s Fanny, practically sobbing.

How these girls can work themselves into a frenzy. “The bell’s rung,” Eliza points out.

On Sundays the Manor girls may put on finer white frocks—cambric, or silk at a pinch. The whole school’s obliged to go to St. Olave’s, except for the handful of pupils who aren’t Anglicans: the Roman Catholics hear Mass at the Bar Convent, the Methodists go to their fancy new chapel, the Presbyterians to their old one, the pair of Quaker sisters to their Meeting House, and Mercy spends the whole day with the Smiths in a room above a pub where worship is led by a dungboat-man who ships the contents of privies to Hull for some industrial purpose.

After service, the Middles are permitted to go for a walk by themselves. Lister’s Sunday frock is identical to her weekday one. Eliza wonders whether Lister genuinely doesn’t mind about clothes, or just hides it well, but it’s too delicate a subject for Eliza to probe.

The smart houses of Bootham give way to open lots and fields, and in a quarter of an hour the girls have reached Clifton Green.

“Are you waving at someone, Betty?” Lister asks.

“The lunatics on their mound.”

“That way madness lies,” Margaret quotes, pointing.

Eliza can’t tell whether that’s the Bard or the Bible.

Lister pulls off her glasses to clean them on her frock.

“Behind that wall is a private asylum,” Eliza tells her, nodding at the distant cluster of female heads, in white caps just like the Manor girls. “See, the middle of their garden’s been built up, like a hillock, so they can look out without getting close enough to climb over and escape.”

A hand goes up like a tiny white flag. Signalling back? The Middles all wave. Eliza tilts her umbrella from side to side to mime a greeting.

“Our own Dr. Mather’s one of the proprietors, along with a mad-doctor called Belcombe,” Margaret says. (Her guardian, the excise collector, seems to know everyone in town.)

“Such funny little faces they have,” Frances murmurs sorrowfully.

“You think nervous conditions alter the features?” Lister asks, squinting into the distance.

“Well. . .perhaps the patients lose their teeth,” Fanny says.

“As a consequence of insanity?” Lister asks, sceptical.

“I expect they neglect to clean them.” That’s Betty.

Eliza thinks of Mr. Tate at his most torpid.

“Perhaps they can’t be allowed toothpicks,” Margaret suggests, “in case they prick each other.”

Nan says, “Or their keepers pull out their teeth so they can’t bite?”

Fanny and Frances wail in protest.

“My cousin Lady Crawfurd has teeth of hippopotamus ivory,” Eliza mentions.

“What are they like?” Betty asks.

Eliza hasn’t seen her father’s niece in years, but she’s not going to say so. Besides, she’s estranged from her baronet husband, so perhaps she’s not the most respectable connection to claim. “They do smell, rather.”

“What do you suppose Miss Lewin’s are made of?” Margaret wonders.

“Hers must have a spring that’s too tight,” Lister says, “since they try to leap out of her mouth at every other word.”

Fanny’s walking backwards, watching the shrinking knot of patients in their garden. “But derangement can be cured, can’t it?”

“Very often,” Margaret agrees. “These are the milder cases—ladies of means who still have hopes of recovery, like the gentlemen in the house next door. The raving patients are kept under strict watch at Mather and Belcombe’s other asylum in York.”

“Didn’t King George lose his mind, before we were even born,” Betty remembers, “and a doctor got it back for him?”

“My uncle tells me he’s lost it again,” Lister says. “These days His poor Majesty is held in seclusion at Windsor Castle. Apparently he talks so much he foams at the mouth, and the pages have to sit on him.”

“I’ve never heard that,” Betty says.

“Well, the Government won’t admit it, especially in wartime—giving comfort to the Enemy and all that.”

“What’s that sweet song about a madwoman rattling her chains?” Frances frowns, trying to remember.

Eliza nods back towards Clifton Green. “These unfortunates don’t seem to be in chains, only shut in.”

“Like us at the Manor, every night, you mean?” Lister asks.

They all burst out laughing at the comparison.

She adds dryly, “So the main difference must be, we have more of our teeth.”