A SMOKY NOVEMBER evening, and Lister’s dangling her head out the window of the Green Room.

“Don’t,” Mercy pleads.

“Tell me truly, Mercy, who down there in the street tonight would tell the Head we were leaning out the window? They’re all up to far worse.”

Mercy steps back, scowling, arms folded as tight as ropes.

Back in the Michaelmas term, the prig of the Middle Form might very well have reported her classmate for rule-breaking, Eliza thinks; by now no one can resist Lister. Eliza is her best friend, but everyone has caught the habit of calling her Lister.

Mischief Night: the eve of Guy Fawkes Day. Tomorrow York’s very own traitor—born around the corner on Stonegate—will be burned in effigy, with fireworks representing the bombs he and his Papist conspirators didn’t manage to detonate, exactly two hundred years ago. On this chilly autumn night, dozens of Manor girls have crammed into the one bedroom with a window facing east towards the town, to catch a little of the hullabaloo. They’re hopeful that even if Mrs. Tate hears them running about overhead, she won’t bother to come upstairs until she collects the lanterns at nine.

Fires billow from tar barrels at crossings, in the streets below, and the clanging of saucepans makes rough music. “Oh, to be down there,” Lister groans with longing. “Look, there’s a pair of mischief-makers trying to climb up a chimney with a bag, to cover it and smoke the householders out. . .”

“Dreadful.” Margaret sounds thrilled.

“I’d be petrified,” Fanny says, coughing into her sleeve. (Even though Nan’s always claiming to be ill, it’s her pal who has a bad chest every winter.)

“Me too,” Eliza admits. “Especially on such a night, with villains chasing cats. . .”

“And insulting anyone in skirts,” Nan adds.

“And a boggart lurking in every shadow, likely,” Fanny adds.

“You don’t really believe in boggarts, do you, Fanny?” Lister teases.

She doesn’t answer, only hides her face.

Nan confesses, “After dark I fall prey to every bugbear. I’d be a martyr to nervous insomnia if I didn’t take my sleeping draught.”

The first firecrackers go off like gunshots, and Lister whoops.

Mercy warns: “If your noise brings a mistress upstairs, and we get a general punishment—”

“We won’t,” Margaret reassures her. “Did you smell those wonderful beefsteaks browning? I’d lay a guinea the teachers are all swigging hot punch in the Head’s parlour.”

Giggles at that. “Not Miss Lewin, surely,” Betty says. “She’d stick to healthful broth.”

“Or arrowroot.”

“Sipped lukewarm, so as not to shock the stomach.”

The Misses Parker in their red belts push into the room now, insisting the Middles let them have a turn at the window.

“This time last year,” Lister tells Eliza, “I was cantering around Halifax with Sam and John, waving our punkie lanterns, smearing honey on doorknobs, banging on knockers and running away. . .”

“You expect us to believe that your people let you run wild on Mischief Night, like some. . .” Betty trails off, as all the epithets she might choose are too offensive to pronounce.

“What’s a punkie lantern?” Eliza wants to know.

“Carved from a turnip, or a mangel-wurzel at a pinch,” Lister tells her. “Haven’t you ever made one?”

Amused, Eliza asks, “Where and when would I have been taught to whittle vegetables?”

Lister’s struck by that. “School has been all you’ve known of England, I suppose.”

“Ooo!” the Middles cry out as more fireworks burst, spattering hot orange across the night sky.

Margaret breaks into a song.

The roads they are so muddy

We cannot walk about,

So roll me in your arms, my love,

And blow the candle out. . .

Eliza wonders what it would be like to be rolled in a man’s arms. The fresh dark after the light’s snuffed; the unspeakable secrets to follow. How does any bride summon nerve enough for the wedding night?

Lister asks, “Who knows the glee ‘Miss Bailey’s Ghost’? Come, you’ll all pick it up as quick as anything.” She begins the verse, in her deep alto:

A captain bold in Halifax

Who dwelt in country quarters,

Seduced a maid, who hanged herself

One morning in her garters.

Hisses of disapproval. The Parker girls, Roman Catholics, cross themselves in protest.

“Seduction and self-murder, really?” Mercy sounds as if she’s about to pop.

Lister thrusts her way back to the window and leans out so far that the other girls have to grab her skirts to make sure she won’t tip out. “Tantalising, to glimpse all the fun from up here, like so many Rapunzels. . .”

An hour later, Eliza and Lister have sloped off to their Slope, as Lister puts it, and each is shivering under her blankets. Girls who share a room often bundle together for warmth on a cold night, despite the rule, but somehow Eliza feels that wouldn’t do, with Lister.

In the dark, she’s still struck by the image of Rapunzels locked in their tower. “My father was a prisoner for four years, in India.” (Not even bothering to lower her voice, as the servants are still carousing in the kitchen.)

“Four years!” Lister marvels. “Which war was this?”

Eliza’s glad Lister didn’t make the mistake of asking for what crime William Raine had been jailed. “Our Company’s, against Mysore, a southern kingdom whose ruler was in league with the French.”

“The East India Company, this is?”

“Those of us born into it simply call it the Company. The most powerful firm the world’s ever known,” Eliza boasts, “with its own coinage and taxes.” According to Dr. Duffin, the Company’s composed of two hundred clerks in a small office in London, backed by a hundred and fifty thousand soldiers abroad: We hold two-thirds of India already, and rule her better than her princelings ever have. But she’s meant to be telling the story of Father’s captivity. “Our forces were facing an appalling new weapon, Mysorean war rockets.”

“What on earth are war rockets?”

“Swords, propelled hundreds of yards through the air from exploding iron tubes.”

Lister whistles.

“Colonel Baillie’s imperial troops were cut to pieces, British and native alike,” Eliza tells her. “The Mysoreans dragged the few survivors off to Bangalore Fort, including Father and another injured doctor—he died in a matter of days. It was a medical miracle Father ever got his own wound to close up.”

“I revere an indomitable spirit,” Lister says.

“You really should have been born a boy.”

She half laughs at that. “I’m rather an enigma even to myself. Nature was in a funny mood the day she made me. Perhaps I’m the connecting link between the sexes.”

That notion makes Eliza blink. Who could think such a thing about herself—say it out loud, even—and not be mortified? It’s a sign of how much Lister’s come to trust her, she reminds herself.

“Where was your father injured?”

“A place called Pollilur, inland from Madras,” Eliza says.

“No, where on his person?”

“Oh, he never said.” William Raine was rather a private man, and touchy if questioned. “He nursed the other captives, as well as the family of the Qiladar—the governor of the fort—who was so grateful, he struck off Father’s irons.” Eliza treasures that detail.

“Until that moment, he must have thought it was all up with him,” Lister remarks.

“I suppose so.” Eliza considers the matter as she never has before, as if she didn’t know the turn his story was about to take. “Past forty, in a filthy dungeon, leaking pus. . .” Yes, how could Father have warded off despair? Eliza finds it hard enough to keep her spirits up some winter afternoons when the Manor reeks of boiled fish and gloom creeps in like smoke under the door. If she were a shackled prisoner with little hope of ever getting free. . .well, she could imagine turning her face to the wall and refusing food, even though self-murder is the worst of sins.

“And to think,” Lister says, “around a blind corner, he had another whole stretch of life. It all goes to prove, one never knows.”

Eliza nods in the dark. “Sixteen more years of health and prosperity, waiting for him.” In a lovely villa, with a lovely wife.

“And two daughters! My own father was never captured,” Lister says, “but he was wounded, back in the seventies. You’ve heard of the city of Boston?”

Eliza doesn’t want to say she hasn’t.

“Well, Ensign Lister wasn’t part of a detachment ordered to retrieve a cache of arms, but a certain lieutenant shammed Abraham—pretended to be taken ill—so Father volunteered to go in the coward’s place, for the honour of the regiment.”

“And there was a battle?”

“Was there! At a place called Concord the brave Redcoats found themselves outnumbered.” Lister springs up in her bed now, its wheels squeaking. “They sent for reinforcements but were refused—told there were surely enough of them to defend a bridge. Well, the skulking Rebels harried the British detachment savagely. My father proposed to tear down the bridge rather than let the Americans take it. But before he could pull up the first plank, his right elbow was shattered by a bullet.”

Eliza flinches.

“Imagine the chaos. The poor Redcoats limping and bleeding all the way back to Boston under a constant hail of gunfire from behind the hedges.”

“So they retreated?”

“Those were their orders,” Lister says sharply. “My father was feeling faint, so he borrowed a mount, but just when he rode past another horse, with an injured soldier on its back and three more hanging off its sides, he saw a Rebel gun it down. So naturally he handed over his own to the wounded. All told, he marched sixty miles in twenty-four hours, the last thirty-six of them dripping blood.”

“And his arm, did he lose it?” Eliza asks.

“He came perilously close. The next half-year he spent in agony—twice the surgeons had to lay it open, taking out pieces of bone the size of hazelnuts—and only Jesuit’s powder twice a day prevented mortification.” Lister’s tone lightens. “Father always says he was in more danger of dying from the invalid diet. Only after he was allowed a morsel of meat and a spoonful of wine did he finally begin to mend. Then he was invalided home to Yorkshire and made a lieutenant.”

Silence stretches in the cold, stuffy dark. “And if they hadn’t endured, and survived,” Eliza says, “they wouldn’t have become our fathers. We would never have been. . .begot.”

The biblical word makes them both giggle. “No you, nor me,” Lister murmurs.

Eliza knows she’s lucky, too, that Father didn’t leave her and Jane in ignorance of their origins. He gave them his surname, rather than some alias. Really, they can reproach him with nothing. “I hate it when people ask if my father was a nabob, as if every Briton in India pillages every village he enters, and sails home laden with tusks and diamonds.”

“So how does a doctor make eight thousand pounds?”

She blinks. But Lister’s questions always seem to rouse a similar forthrightness in Eliza. “No one’s ever given me any details. I suppose Company men receive gifts, and are in a good position to engage in trading on the side. At any rate,” she adds crisply, “he didn’t live to enjoy it.”

“How old were you when he—”

“Nine.”

“I’m sorry you lost him.”

The phrase makes it sound as if Eliza mislaid her father somewhere. She supposes the day William Raine was more or less lost to her and Jane was three years earlier, when he took the little girls in a coir-woven skiff across the Madras sandbar, through the terrible breakers where the sharks hung waiting, to deposit them on the King George. Like parcels; valuable ones, but parcels nonetheless. His parting words would turn out to be the last Eliza ever had from him—if only she could remember what they were.

There is one thing she’d like to know: was he expecting his daughters to come back to India when quite schooled and grown? Or never—did he consider his job done, once he’d packed them off to be thoroughly Englished? “He took furlough, the year I was nine,” she tells Lister. “His ship had almost reached the island of St. Helena, far west of Africa, when he died.”

“He was en voyage to be reunited with you, then?”

Eliza hesitates. No letters came in response to those the girls, under instruction, sent their father. They’ll never know how he meant to settle his affairs, except that his will named them as beloved Daughters to the tune of four thousand apiece. Is this a set phrase that the lawyer would have suggested? Or was it William Raine who told him to put beloved?

“Buried at sea, then,” Lister murmurs. “Something magnificent about that.”

What Eliza remembers from her year in mourning, at the Tottenham school, are the clothes: little buckled shoes, black bombazine. “I can really only picture him from the portrait at the Duffins’ house,” she admits. Much like every other gentleman at half-length: a pale round face above a sombre suit.

Lister’s voice deepens as she recites:

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made.

Eliza’s shaken by the image: a scarlet, coral-boned skeleton.

“The Tempest,” Lister adds in explanation. “You’ve read Shakespeare?”

“Ah. . .some of the sonnets.”

“Oh, you must go all the way through the plays. This is from a sprite’s song about a drowned man.” She bursts into verse again.

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Eliza imagines William Raine in the portrait, but sea-changed. This singular young person can take something awful and make a thrilling show of it. Now Eliza will always think of her lost father on the seabed of the South Atlantic, as a bronze carbuncled Neptune glimmering in the dim, a bejewelled nabob of the deeps.

Since winter’s drawing in early, modified rules of dress apply at the Manor. Thick stockings are encouraged, and as many extra petticoats as required. The white frock on top may be of bleached calico, holland, or linsey-woolsey (but not pure wool, as that’s needed for soldiers’ uniforms as long as the War drags on). Eliza likes to add a short Spencer jacket, buttoned up, and on top a Kashmir shawl that still smells of the fragrant oil used to keep off moths on the ship.

The Head and her sister have fires in their own parlours for the sake of their health, but when it comes to young ladies, frost is believed to make the plant hardier. Lister doesn’t feel the cold, even though there’s so little flesh on her bones. If the Middles are going to pass their Recreation outside the garden wall, on the Manor Shore, Eliza brings Lister’s lined cloak down from the Slope with her own, as otherwise her friend will claim she doesn’t need it. Could this be because Lister’s always in motion? She stands with arms akimbo, bouncing on the pads of her toes, or twists around in a chair with her elbow lolling over the back; her limbs bend too far. Unpleasing, the mistresses call it; what they mean is, mannish.

Lister still whistles, whenever she’s out of their earshot. She eats only when she’s hungry—hardly at all, at some meals, and at others, as if stoking a fire. If she’s reading or sewing, she pulls off her glasses, with the result that faces become blurs to her. Until the moment Mrs. Tate comes up to the Slope for her and Eliza’s lantern, Lister darns her stockings by its light and turns up the frayed hems of her frocks, to save her parents the expense of sending the things out for mending.

Also, she’s too lively to stay asleep all night. Often Eliza half wakes, hours before dawn, to find the Slope lit by a forbidden taper in a jar, and her roommate engrossed in a volume of exotic travels, or a study of husbandry—which turns out to have nothing to do with husbands—or logic. If a Cretan philosopher claims all Cretans are liars, must he be lying? Lister’s favourite poet is Virgil, from before the time of Christ, and her favourite line of his is Fata vocant, which she translates as The Fates are calling.

“So we’re in the hands of Dame Destiny, helpless?” Eliza doesn’t like the sound of that.

“Not at all,” Lister corrects her. “We answer the call or not, don’t we? So it could be said that we make our own fate.”

Lister likes to be right, a trait Eliza would find unappealing except that Lister generally is. She counts things, even her footsteps; she mutters numbers under her breath as she and Eliza hurry downstairs to breakfast. In the tiny notebook up her sleeve, she keeps a record of how many days a letter’s taken in the post, and how many degrees (by the thermometer hanging outside beside the lion-and-unicorn door) the temperature’s dropped overnight. She likes to make estimates, too, and later note how accurate she was.

Nor would Lister deny any of this; she takes a peculiar satisfaction in being peculiar. Eliza witnesses her break rules every day but get away with it, whether by evasion of scrutiny, barefaced denial, or lawyerly quibbles over the classification of the fault that go on until the mistress loses patience and lets it drop. Confidence—is that what armours Lister? Eliza’s seen her uneasy at the mirror, wrestling with those botched front curls, but as soon as Lister opens her mouth a stream of fluent language buoys her up. She may not be good at everything—her drawing’s too fast to be correct, her flute fingering clumsy—but she’s interested in everything, and remembers everything. Some of the Seniors (only half mockingly) refer to her as Lexicon Lister, or the school Solomon.

It’s become clear to Eliza that she herself is not the rara avis. Next to Lister, she’s an ordinary little sparrow. She couldn’t be more glad of the friendship, but she doesn’t feel she deserves it, and at times she’s troubled by a question: what can this prodigy possibly want with her?

In Accounts, this chilly morning, the bench is hard under Eliza’s bones. The Middles are working on small slates on their laps; just as well white dresses don’t show the chalk. Miss Robinson—a few chrysanthemums from her devoted Juniors drooping in a jar beside her—seems harried today. “A merchant at Amsterdam is indebted to a merchant at London in the amount of six hundred and forty-two pounds,” she reads, “and would pay it in Spanish guilders at two shillings per piece. No, perhaps that’s beyond us.”

Lister finishes flicking through Arithmetick Made Plain and Simple for the Use of the Young and says in Eliza’s ear, “There’s not a female in this whole book.”

At the big slate board, Miss Robinson sets them to reckon how many soldiers of the three hundred and sixty in a foreign outpost will have to be turned out so the half-year’s worth of provisions will last the remaining nine months till they’re resupplied by the next ship.

“How should I know what a man eats in a day?” Eliza whispers to Lister.

“You don’t need the specifics, only the ratio.”

“The what?”

Of course Mercy’s already halfway through the sum, her slate full of boxy digits.

“Picture each of the three hundred and sixty carrying a sack full of his food for the month,” Lister advises.

“Wouldn’t it rot?”

“Not salt beef and hardtack. Now each man’s holding six sacks.”

“He couldn’t.”

“Strong British Redcoats could,” Lister says patriotically.

“Private chatter earns an inattention card,” Miss Robinson murmurs.

Mercy corrects her: “An indecorum card, I believe.”

“We’re talking of nothing but mathematics, madam,” Lister assures the mistress. In Eliza’s ear: “So how many sacks do you see?”

Eliza multiplies 360 by 6 on her slate: 2,160.

“But the garrison has to hold out for nine months now,” Lister goes on. “How many of these sacks of food can they use up each month?”

She divides by nine. “Two hundred and forty?”

“That’s enough to ration out to how many men?”

One sack per man per month. “Ah. . .two hundred and forty?”

“So how many soldiers must be let go from the three hundred sixty?”

“One hundred and twenty.”

Lister clicks her fingers, which earns a glare from Miss Robinson. “You’re ready to be mistress of a whole fort,” she whispers to Eliza.

But Eliza’s worrying about what those hundred and twenty—stripped to their shirts and cast out—will find to eat, beyond the walls of the fort.

Lister lingers after class, fiddling with the celestial globe, which is shoved into a corner since young ladies are assumed to have no use for stars. Eliza watches her climb up on the teacher’s chair to examine the plaster frieze. Someone could walk in on them at any minute. “Get down!”

But Lister still can’t quite see the details, so she stacks three copies of Elegancies of Poetry and steps on, to compound her crime. “The plaster-carver told me these are the arms of the Earl of Huntingdon, President of the Council of the North in Queen Elizabeth’s day.”

“What plaster-carver?” Eliza asks, confused.

“Mr. Wolstenholme.” Lister jerks her head towards one of the Manor’s forbidden areas. She fingers the ornate plaster moulding.

Eliza tugs at Lister’s dusty hem. “We’ll be late for lunch.”

Lister intones, “Man shall not live on bread alone. Hm. Here’s a bear with a ragged staff, but is that an orange?”

“A pomegranate,” Eliza corrects her.

“That’s a legendary fruit, isn’t it? Something like a unicorn or a griffin?”

She laughs. “It’s quite real, you ninny. In Madras we used to eat pomegranate sprinkled on everything—they have these lustrous seeds, like rubies.” Oh, the tart-sweet crunch of the seeds’ facets between her teeth. More than half Eliza’s fourteen years fall away and she’s a six-year-old with a red-stained mouth again, in a gauze-draped dhoolie swaying from the poles on the shoulders of two bearers.

Lister gazes down enviously. “Really, Raine, how can you bear plain old England?”

“When I came here, it seemed more strange than plain to me.”

“But now, when you haven’t had a taste of pomegranate in, what, eight years?”

Eliza shrugs. “Give me a fresh-baked cake any day.”

Lister lands lightly on the desk, then on the floorboards, like a goat. She brushes her footprint off the top copy of Elegancies of Poetry.

“Lunch now?” Eliza asks.

But Lister picks up the chair and plants it by the windows over the courtyard, where generations of Manor girls have made their prisoners’ marks on the diamond-shaped panes. “I just want a proper look at some of these scratchings.”

“Lister!”

Lister goes up on tiptoe to read the highest one. Haltingly: “Had I been Paris & Miss Senhouse there, the. . .the apple had never fell to Venus’s share. Signed Nanny Wrightson. Very romantic,” she comments, “though fell is ungrammatical.”

“This one’s touching.” Eliza puts her fingers to one she remembers, down at her waist level: “I hope Dame means to let me go to another play this winter,” she reads aloud. “Do you suppose they addressed all their mistresses as Dame, in the last century?”

“Why don’t we get taken to the theatre?”

“You should propose it to Miss Hargrave.”

“Why me?”

“Because there’s no one like you for cheek, Lister.”

“No one in the school?”

“Perhaps no one in the world.”

That makes Lister grin. She taps a pane. “Look, a title. Lady Christina Elizabeth Keith came to the Manor, 1786.”

“Clearly the school’s rather slid down in the world since her day.” Eliza wonders which pupil was the first bold enough to score her words on the lead-barred cage of glass. “Some were so young,” she says, troubled. “Look: M. Boyes came to the Manor at five years old. Very creditable handwriting, for such a little girl.”

“I love Miss Parker and Miss Walker,” Lister reads, “says A. M. Armytage. Ah, Miss Armytage must be daughter to one of the baronets—several of that family have been MPs for York, haven’t they?”

Eliza wonders if the young Miss Parker of that inscription is now an elderly aunt of the Parker sisters in the Senior Form. And whether she and Miss Walker were Miss Armytage’s teachers or her friends. “All this passionate affection!” Judging by these jottings, it’s the only thing that seems to have made life at the school endurable.

“I love Miss Green better than Mi— That’s where this one breaks off. The writer must have been interrupted in her scratching,” Lister points out.

“Unless she decided against putting the rejected favourite’s name and making an enemy? Oh, I know one that’ll amuse you.” Eliza squints and bends till she’s found the maxim: “Shun all men. E. T.”

Lister roars with laughter at that, and finally jumps down so they can go to lunch.

In Drawing, another afternoon, Eliza’s fingertips grow numb. She enjoys sketching plants or people, but Mr. Halfpenny’s set each Middle to fill a whole page with various shades of cross-hatching.

“This must be wasteful of paper,” Betty laments, “which seems wrong in wartime.”

“I never understand why it’s so dear,” Nan says. “Won’t it grow in England?”

“Won’t what grow?” Margaret asks.

“The paper tree.” Nan falters, as they stare. “Unless it’s a shrub?”

Derision ripples through the class.

Mr. Halfpenny speaks up. “Paper is formed, with considerable trouble, from rags, Miss Moorsom.”

“Oh.” Nan quavers with embarrassment. “No one ever told me that.”

“Nor I, I don’t think,” Fanny lies loyally.

“And it can’t be just any old rags,” Betty adds, “only pure white ones, which are in short supply.”

“Especially in a girls’ school,” Margaret murmurs to Lister, too low for the old master to hear.

Lister gives a tiny snort.

Eliza doesn’t get the joke. A worry crosses her mind. Might Margaret be considering dropping Betty, with a view to stealing Lister? Margaret’s qualities are so much more shining than Eliza’s. The notion of having to compete to keep her friend makes Eliza contract like a snail into its shell.

Then she realises the two of them must have been alluding to that business of obscure complaints among Middles and Seniors, rags hung up to dry at washstands, hints about those and them and my time. Jane has her time, Eliza’s deduced, but won’t tell her little sister anything about it.

Nan’s still frowning. “Why do the rags have to be white?”

Lister bursts out, “So the paper will be white likewise, you noodle.”

Mr. Halfpenny says regretfully, “Take an indecorum mark, Miss Lister.”

She salutes like a soldier.

The Middles crosshatch on.

Lister stifles a yawn. “I wonder, sir, are you any relation to the Halfpenny who published that collection of the ornaments of York Minster?”

The master blinks, swells with pleasure, and tells them his whole history.

Eliza likes him for volunteering the fact that he was a mere house painter, son of a gardener, until he became clerk to the architect restoring the Minster, and taught himself engraving so he could bring its ancient intricacies to the attention of the public. Lister draws him out on his hobbyhorse at such respectful length that Betty nudges Margaret and winks, as if Lister must be pulling his leg. But Eliza guesses that Gothic stonework really might be one of Lister’s arcane interests, which include fossils, steam-powered mills, and human anatomy.

Next day, the Saturday half-holiday, and Eliza and Lister, having each paid off one mark with one merit, are walking into town to order stockings, or rather that’s their pretext for roaming through York’s tightly knotted lanes. It’s such a grey November day, Eliza hasn’t bothered with an umbrella to shield her face from the sun, and besides, the half-timbered houses leaning over the alleys shade them.

She and Lister turn a corner and come on the Minster from the side, its one squared-off tower in the middle and two spiked ones at the end. “Like a dragon lying on its back,” Lister suggests.

“Just so! With its claws out.”

Town’s thick with goods being delivered, men making deals. Boys are nailing up posters for a prizefight featuring THE BLACK TERROR BILL RICHMOND, ERSTWHILE SLAVE, NOW CABINETMAKER OF YORK; Eliza’s eyes catch the crude woodcut, as they always do the faces of the few people of colour who live here. The wife and light-skinned children of a lascar seaman, who all run a needles and notions stall at the Wednesday market; an African-looking preacher who gives fiery sermons from his crate on Pavement; a prosperous-looking wife Eliza’s heard ordering shoes in what she thinks is a Jamaican accent; various servants she’s glimpsed bearing messages; and a balladeer who wears a vast model ship glued to his hat, presumably in token of his past at sea.

She looks down at her own flat shoes, strapped into ugly leather clogs. “I’m sick of pattens, and winter’s barely begun.”

“At least yours don’t make as much of a clatter as mine.” Lister’s pattens are the crude kind, of wood and iron. “In the holidays, I prefer to ramble about in my brother Sam’s knee boots.”

“Then what does Sam wear?”

Lister chuckles. “Depends whether he’s fast enough to catch up and take them back.”

They pass the huge Black Swan on Coney Street, where there’s always a coach coming or going: Leeds, Carlisle, Hull. “London’s only thirty hours away now,” Lister says longingly.

“You’ll go, when you’re grown,” Eliza promises, stepping around some fresh horse dung.

“I’ll go everywhere, when I’m grown.”

Yellow hacks are lined up ready for hire, with drivers dressed in the same hue, smoking pipes.

“Bad women,” Lister mutters knowledgeably.

“Where?” Eliza turns her head from side to side, and spots the two Lister must mean. “How can you tell—are they wearing paint?”

A shake of the head. “Why else would they be standing about at the inn?”

“They might be waiting for someone off the coach,” she objects. But watching the two as they chat, their familiar, businesslike manner. . .Eliza thinks Lister may be right. Imagine lying down with strangers for a handful of small coin. Why don’t they go mad from the daily, hourly, humiliation?

“I used to run away from our nursemaid, of an evening, when I was very small—got out my window and went among the common people. I saw some queer scenes, let me tell you.”

The grandiosity of went among the common people amuses Eliza: like a king visiting his soldiers incognito.

She has to jump to the side of the street now to avoid a curricle shooting by.

“What a beautifully matched pair.” Lister’s eyes linger on the horses’ glossy rears.

It strikes Eliza that her friend will have to marry very well indeed. She doesn’t voice her thought, because it seems unlikely—Lister’s not the kind to attract a swarm of suitors—but it would be Lister’s only chance of winning the life she wants. Not position so much as possibility: the distant cities, the horseflesh, the liberty. . .

Eliza spots a pastry stall hanging off a donkey. She nips over to buy some flat Shrewsbury cakes. “Cinnamon or rose-water?” she calls over her shoulder.

“I’ve no money on me.” This is a euphemism; Lister never has more than a shilling or two to her name.

Eliza buys a quarter pound of each flavour, and promises the baker she’ll bring back the horn dish on their way home.

By Lister’s side again, she nods towards the next alley, so they won’t be spotted snacking in the street. Out of sight, they can even take their gloves off. “If you’re ever sulking and won’t speak to me,” Lister remarks, “I’ll only have to coax you with confectionery.”

Eliza licks a finger. “Not Pomfret cakes—nasty.”

“Ah well, the name’s a fib, as they’re just liquorice.”

“The Duffins gave us some, our first week in Yorkshire, and I had great trouble pretending to like them.”

Lister asks, straight-faced, “The Duffins, or the Pomfret cakes?”

Eliza laughs, brushing crumbs off her hands. “Likely the fault is mine.”

“What fault?”

“The awkwardness I sometimes feel, with them, on Micklegate or in their country house.” She makes sure to keep her distance from Jane’s squabbles but has a sense that both girls are in the way; even on good days, the Raines and the Duffins seem to be holding one another at arm’s length. It’s an accidental family, she supposes, formed when William Raine’s death foisted two little girls on a childless man of fifty-two. “It’s hard to forget that Dr. Duffin’s doing Father a very great favour.” A tribute to friendship and memory, one that he’s been paying for years already; one that will take at least seven more (until Eliza’s twenty-one) to work off. “Really, he manages our funds, concerns himself with our health and education. . .how can I not be grateful for his protection?”

Lister grimaces. “I suppose guardian and ward mean no more than that: the one who wards off danger, and the one he guards.”

Eliza’s never thought about the words.

“Is your sister rather more of a daughter to them, if she’s there every evening?”

Eliza shakes her head. “All the more opportunity to quarrel, and—”

She breaks off at the sight of that beggarwoman who staggers like a drunk but never has a bottle, only the sacks she drags everywhere. Eliza tugs at Lister’s elbow and leads her out of the alley the other way. Coins, she could spare, but the creature demands to be heard. Tugging her gloves back on, she whispers: “I think of this one as Mad Margery, like the lunatic in the ballad.”

Lister’s put her spectacles on to look back at the vagrant. “We don’t know that she’s lunatic, exactly. Perhaps just poor—I imagine hunger rather scrambles the brains.”

Where the most elegant shops cluster on Castlegate, the girls go into a haberdashery, lured by embroidered muslins hanging in the doorway. Eliza lets the assistant shopman show her half a dozen damasks and velvets.

“And Miss Selby,” he says, “may I ask, is she, too, in health?”

She nods, remembering coming in here with Frances to order a new frock each for last summer. Guilt, like a snap of a dog; once Lister arrived, Eliza let the old friendship drop as easily as changing her petticoat. She doesn’t regret her choice, only the way it happened—so fast, some would say ruthlessly. These rearrangements happen in every school, like swapping partners in a game, but it’s an uncomfortable business. These days Frances is friendly with everyone in the Middle Form but has no particular pal. Eliza would apologise, if there were any way to do it without making Frances feel an object of pity. The two of them never had such a closeness as Eliza has with Lister, she tells herself. Does that go any way towards excusing what she’s done?

Being with Lister is not what Eliza thought best-friendship would be: a soothing support. Lister unsettles and thrills her as if something’s about to topple from a shelf, as if a thunderstorm’s on the way.

The assistant drops hints about having some smuggled French lace in a drawer, but Eliza’s wasted enough of his time already. She and Lister go off to find the hosier’s shop. The woman stands knitting at top speed, barely breaking off to note down their order for stockings.

Passing a hairdresser’s, Lister spots a clump of brown on the windowsill. When they peer through the square of glass, the thing turns out to be a fine comb that fits over the arch of the hairline, with two ringlets dangling on each side. “What a convenience!” Lister ducks inside.

The apprentice leans on his broom and says the French call it a frisette, and it’s half a crown.

Lister’s face falls. “York prices.”

“Let me get it.” Eliza has her purse open.

“No, no, I don’t suppose I really need—”

Eliza cuts in. “To stop your hapless fussing over your front hair in the glass every morning, I’d consider half a crown excellent value.”

Lister surrenders gracefully.

“To be sent to the Manor, miss?” the apprentice asks.

“Parcel it up and we’ll take it with us,” Eliza tells him, in case there’s some obscure school rule against false curls.

By the Castle, they pass a long crocodile of Spinning School charity girls in worsted grey cloaks. Eliza shivers. “Imagine spinning all day long, every day.”

“They get bed and board, and clothes, and they’re taught to read,” Lister points out. She’s gazing up at the Castle’s crumbling keep. “Look, that’s where the valiant Jews of York took their own lives.”

“What?”

“This was back in the time of the Crusades,” Lister tells her, “when a Christian mob burned down the houses of the moneylenders they owed. Hundreds barricaded themselves in there.” She gestures up at the massive walls. “Rather than be massacred, or surrender and be baptised by force and perhaps massacred anyway, each man killed his wife and children before himself.”

Sometimes Lister’s relish for the bloodier passages of the past leaves Eliza at a loss for words. How can she have a head full of such awful stories yet keep so cheerful? “I wonder whether the wives and children had any share in the decision.”

“History never stops to consult the children,” Lister says grimly.

“Some girls claim Margaret’s a Jewess,” Eliza mentions.

“But she comes to St. Olave’s on Sundays.”

“Had a Jewish mother, I mean, whom Mr. Burn couldn’t marry.”

Lister scoffs. “Men don’t need a special reason not to marry the women they’ve—” She pulls up short, like a horse at a tricky jump.

Eliza fills in the phrase: The women they’ve made their whores. And wants to say, Mine wasn’t my father’s whore. Hard to explain the custom of the country, when that country lies so far away.

Instead she stares at a large wooden needle hanging above a door, the sign of a seamstress for hire. Then at a grocery with those new plate-glass windows, displaying bowls of pears and oranges.

“I only mean, the simpler explanation’s more likely.” Lister hooks Eliza’s elbow. “Shall we go down to look at the boats?”

“Gladly, but not by the Water Lanes.” The squalid byways between the Castle and the river are out of bounds.

“I know the rule,” Lister sighs.

Today there’s a two-masted brig on the Ouse, as well as many smaller sailboats. At the muddy wharf on Skeldergate, a gigantic crane hoists sacks of cargo off a barge. Lister admires the horses towing the huge Hull coal boats. “Mercy tells me sometimes gangs bow-haul them instead, scores of fellows roped together. Wouldn’t that be a sight to see?”

“Now you sound like Betty,” Eliza mocks her, “always longing to catch a glimpse of handsome man-flesh.”

“Ah, the difference is, I’m merely curious about the world, and Betty’s a dyed-in-the-wool flirt.”

As they turn back, Lister ducks into a stationer’s for a newspaper, leaving Eliza waiting on the footpath.

She has a foolish dread of being alone in public. She doesn’t suppose people are really staring at her any more than when she’s with a friend, but on her own she’s twice as aware of her colour; the gaze of every stranger makes her twitch. So she tugs her bonnet forwards now and dips her head. On a pole beside her, she reads posters advertising lectures on astronomy and galvanism, and a bull-baiting at a cockpit.

Lister comes out unfolding the two-page York Herald.

“You took an age,” Eliza tells her.

“And you call me impatient?”

“I hate when people stare.”

“Well, can you blame them?”

Eliza bristles.

“Who wouldn’t want to look at you? Perhaps it’s envy, perhaps plain worship.”

“Don’t tease.”

“Do them that much kindness, let them see.” Lister reaches out and pushes Eliza’s bonnet back an inch. “It’s the closest they’ll come to watching a goddess tread the earth.”

Eliza dissolves into laughter.

“I need to read now. I only have it for half an hour.” Lister’s putting away her spectacles in her bag.

“I’d have bought you a copy—”

“Why pay sixpence, when renting’s only a halfpenny?”

That’s not the real reason, Eliza knows; Lister prefers to pay her own way, if she possibly can.

They walk a little way till they spot a bench to sit on. Head down over the minute, smeary print, Lister reads items aloud. The inevitable advertisement for Cordial Balm of Gilead, as well as something called Gutta Salutaris to cure unmentionable ailments with the utmost safety and secrecy. “Oh, this is intriguing: Lost, a parcel of papers, which can be of no use whatever to anyone but the owner. Was put into a chaise with a lady at the Black Swan. Or what about this? At York Academy on Blake Street, by the Theatre Royal, Mr. Williams prepares young gentlemen for universities and professions. French, German, Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, botany, chemistry, and fencing.” Lister groans. “Hebrew! Fencing! Petticoat slavery, I call it.”

It takes Eliza a moment to puzzle this out. “You believe girls are oppressed by not studying Hebrew?”

“Quite. Oh, to wrap ourselves in greatcoats, disguise our voices, and enrol at the York Academy. . .”

“No thank you. I’m far too stupid for six languages.”

“Nonsense, Raine. You’re clever enough for anything.”

Eliza wishes that were true. “I’ll stay at the Manor and flutter my handkerchief at you from the window.”

“Well, then I won’t run away.” Lister’s nose is practically touching the page. “I’d miss it too much.”

Eliza waits. “The Manor?”

“The company.”

Does Lister mean Eliza’s company? Or more generally, the company of girls? That’s one of those unaskable questions.

The next Tuesday, Miss Robinson beckons Eliza up to the desk after Accounts and tells her that she’s invited to tea in Miss Hargrave’s parlour.

At least Eliza doesn’t need to torment herself with wondering what she’s done to draw down on herself the Head’s Medusa gaze. This invitation is always extended on the second Tuesday of the month to two pupils, as a treat (so called) as well as a lesson in manners.

Today’s other guest turns out to be Frances, who musters a timid smile as they meet outside the Head’s parlour, Eliza a diffident one. They haven’t had a proper conversation since before the half-term break in September. Did Mrs. Tate couple their names as friends on a list back in July? Eliza wonders. Or could it simply be alphabetical, Raine with Selby?

Hum of women’s voices behind the door. Frances taps so lightly it’s barely audible.

In the parlour, Eliza’s eyes go straight down to the vivid Turkish carpet. Miss Hargrave and Mrs. Tate are across the tea table from the latter’s taciturn husband. “Ah, Miss Raine. How is the good doctor?” is the Head’s first question.

Grown-ups often call her guardian good or benevolent—conventional epithets, but Eliza suspects they’re praising him for having taken on his foreign wards. “He and Mrs. Duffin are both very well, thank you, madam.”

“In town at the moment?”

“No, madam, at their place in Nun Monkton, two hours from here.” Was that one madam too many? In such company Eliza has an absurd dread of making any tiny slip that might seem to betray her origins. She learned English at William Raine’s knee, she reminds herself; it’s her father tongue.

The housemaid—the tall, sour-faced one who waits on the mistresses—finally rushes in with the tea. The cups are old-fashioned fluted bowls with no handles. Eliza’s distracted by the china pot, the slightly clumsy letters that read,

Health to the Sick,

Honour to the Brave,

Success to the Lover,

Freedom to the Slave.

“Our mother’s,” Mrs. Tate remarks with a smile.

Eliza’s eyes swerve to her. “I beg your pardon?”

“Her Huguenot grandfather came to this country as a refugee from French tyranny, and as a consequence our family has always sympathised with the downtrodden. Around the time Mr. Tate and I were married, Mamma gave up Blood Sugar, in detestation of the Trade.” She rotates the pot to show the other side: a chained, ink-black female figure down on one knee.

Eliza’s hot, squirming. Is this daub what she looks like to the proprietors? She doesn’t glance sideways to see whether Frances is staring at the image too.

“My sister and I are loyal to Mamma’s memory,” Miss Hargrave says, “therefore willing to pay the premium for sugar from your homeland instead, Miss Raine, to avoid the taint of West Indian slavery.” She tongs a jagged lump into Eliza’s cup and trickles the brown liquid over it.

“In the East Indies, you see,” Mrs. Tate explains to the girls, “the cane is cut by servants who are indentured for a limited time, not sold for life like those poor chattels in Barbados or Antigua. Hence the added expense.”

Eliza knows nothing about any of this—neither the lives of those distant figures reaping the canefields of her childhood nor those on Caribbean islands. She must take Mrs. Tate’s word for it that there’s all the difference in the world between the lot of a bonded labourer and a slave.

“Will you have a queen cake?”

They’re small; Eliza wishes Mrs. Tate said some rather than a. She takes one. When she’s swallowed her first bite, she grasps at a new subject. “Cook has been making excellent puddings from those apples Mr. Selby sent down from his orchard,” she tries, nodding towards Frances.

But Frances, forehead creased, turns the conversation back into its awful rut. “I must admit, I never thought to worry about where sugar comes from.”

“From whence sugar comes,” Miss Hargrave corrects her gently.

“Yes, madam, thank you.”

“The school puddings are free of the stain of guilt,” the Head assures them. “My sister and I feel it our duty to make sure all sugar supplied to the Manor’s tables is East Indian, no matter the cost.”

Eliza lifts her cup to her lips, fingertips burning. Company tea, no doubt. Her eyes are riveted to the kneeling, shackled silhouette on the curve of the creamy teapot. She’s trying to call up the name of her father’s dead sister’s husband—Lascelles, was it?—whose family made their vast fortune in Barbados. Could that awful fact possibly be set to Eliza’s account—does it make her a slaver by association? Frantic, she considers how the subject of Mr. Selby’s apples might plausibly lead to another, such as the weather’s being fine for November.

But Frances harps on. “I believe my father’s mentioned that our Member of Parliament here is a fervent abolitionist?”

Mrs. Tate nods fondly. “A shrimp of a man, Mr. Wilberforce, but when he gets up on a trestle in Castle Yard, how his booming voice carries. God hath made of one blood all nations of men,” she quotes reverently.

Mr. Tate lets out a sigh.

Eliza wonders why the dancing master is here. Will his wife and sister-in-law not allow him to take his tea and cakes alone?

“I understand the Lords have defeated Mr. Wilberforce’s bill,” Miss Hargrave mentions, “on grounds that if Britain withdraws precipitately from the market, our Enemy will engross it. French captains are known to have no compunction, and cram their vessels much more tightly. So perhaps it is better to reform the trade little by little, from within.”

“Reform the selling of human beings?”

Eliza jumps at the dancing master’s gruff voice.

His wife tilts her head. “What’s that, Mr. Tate?”

“Reform it, how?” he growls. “If I chain up my neighbour—surely the chain must be either left on or struck off? There’s no halfway.”

Squirming, Eliza keeps her gaze on her white holland skirt.

“I believe you may be oversimplifying a very complex problem,” Miss Hargrave tells her brother-in-law, “which has puzzled the great minds of our time.”

“Then the more fools they.”

“Husband, stick to dancing.”

Eliza’s never heard Mrs. Tate say anything so sharp.

She chokes down the end of her queen cake, so she and Frances can make their excuses and leave. In the passage, she almost trips over Pirate Peg—one of the Manor’s cats, missing an eye as well as a foot.

Frances gasps, “Please let them not invite us more than once a year.”

“It wasn’t worth it, not for two bites of dry cake.”

That night, on the way up to bed, Eliza almost bumps into Lister on the stairs, peeping out through a crack in the boards over a window. “What is it?”

“Just the lights,” Lister murmurs. “So many.”

“Where?” York has no street lamps like the capital.

“In the houses.”

Eliza supposes they must seem brightly illuminated compared to a smallholding in the Wolds.

As they go upstairs side by side, Lister turns her eyes on her and asks, “What’s the matter?”

“How did you know?”

She touches one narrow fingertip to Eliza’s temple. “Our minds chime, Raine. Of course I know.”

And when Eliza recounts the terrible tea party, Lister laughs and cringes with her. “No doubt they’ll have you painted on their next teapot, and display that to visitors as proof that their noble natures are utterly above prejudice.”

“Exactly!” Eliza sobers suddenly. “But I keep thinking of one of my father’s sisters—her husband made his money in that vile business. They’re both dead now. I never met them.”

“Oh come, you’re hardly the only one with relatives who’ve profited from slave labour. Fanny has a planter uncle in South Carolina,” Lister tells her. Sheepish, she adds, “My own grandfather’s brothers tried to make a go of tobacco in Virginia, but failed.”

Eliza frowns and shakes her head, still troubled by that silhouette on the teapot, kneeling in her chains.

When they’re in bed in the dark, Lister surprises her by asking, “Will you ever go home to Madras?”

Home—is that the word? “Oh, Lister, I don’t know. It’s so far.”

A thrilled murmur: “So very far.”

“The ship Jane and I came on wasn’t even a passenger vessel,” Eliza explains, “just an East Indiaman loaded with silk and jute and indigo, and a handful of us squeezed on board and ordered to keep out of the way.” She remembers scurrying around with the other children. “We stopped at the Cape Colony for Christmas—”

Lister’s voice lights up. “Africa?”

“—and the men got so roaring drunk, the second mate punched the captain and spent the rest of the voyage in chains in the hold.”

A gasp. “Was he executed for mutiny?”

“Strictly speaking it’s only mutiny if it happens on board.”

“The things you know,” Lister quotes satirically.

“He was committed for two years to the Marshalsea.” Though it occurs to Eliza now that such a notorious prison might just have meant a slower death.

“What else?” Lister asks greedily.

“Ah. . .there was a dreadful typhoon. I was sick all down myself, and Jane was convinced we’d be wrecked.”

“Why does your sister never say a word to you?”

Eliza forces a laugh. “I suppose she’s cast me off along with other childish things.”

“Who but a fool would cast you off, Raine?”

The words make her smile in the dark. “I remember a sailor shot a shark, and hauled it in with a net, and we had soup for days on end.”

Lister lets out a longing sigh. “The voyage must be shorter these days, surely? Isn’t everything getting faster?”

“Unless your ship were to be captured by the French,” Eliza suggests.

“I mean to be a very great traveller, you know.”

Not just to roam, then, but to become a traveller, as if it’s a profession; Eliza’s never heard anyone declare this ambition, least of all a girl without enough cash to pay her way to Norwich.

Lister breaks into a snatch of song:

I’m going, my Lady Nancy Belle,

Strange countries for to see, see, see,

Strange countries for to see.

A muffled rap on the wall, three rooms away, so Eliza tells her, “Shh!” (Cook and the maids have to get up so early to prepare breakfast for some fifty people.) She goes on in a murmur, “Our fort was known as White Town because it glittered. Great big colonnaded buildings along the seashore, all faced in polished plaster. Our visitors said it looked like Italian marble.” But then she’s uneasy; were the walls really the reason why that part of Madras was known as White Town?

“Your family lived in the fort?”

“No, a mile to the southwest, across two little rivers, on the Great Choultry Plain, which was a thoroughly English enclave, almost all Company families. We had a garden villa called Myrtle Grove, with views of the hills. Do you know myrtle?”

“I’ve heard of it,” Lister says, uncertain for once.

“Imagine great big bushes covered in white stars, and very fragrant.”

“A garden villa—is that like a little teahouse in a garden?”

“No, no, an extensive bungalow with a verandah—” But those are both Indian terms. A mansion, Eliza’s sometimes called her childhood home, when describing it to haughty girls. “The villa had just one huge storey, raised on a platform with terraces all around to catch the sea breeze.”

“A house with no upstairs at all?”

“No need. There was so much space, you see, that the buildings could stretch out, with balconies on all sides.” Eliza’s not choosing to mention the occasional terrifying floods when monsoon rains broke through the roof, or the smell of dung fires. Nor the white ants that gnawed their way through books and tigerskin rugs, nor the time she almost trod on a cobra curled up under the bath. She wants her friend to picture how airy Myrtle Grove was, with countless rooms opening off the hall through gauze-hung doorways. “We had gardens full of coconuts, mangoes, bananas. . .”

“I’ve seen drawings of bananas,” Lister says. “They look so unlikely, with their long yellow fingers.”

“They grow green. They only yellow in storage. Once peeled, they’re white.”

“What, like a man’s—”

She hisses: “Lister!” Horrified by this bawdiness, but tickled too.

“What does it taste like, a banana?”

“Plain and comforting. Softer than an apple, drier than a plum, sweeter than a gooseberry.”

“And were there elephants, really?” Lister sounds like a small child being told a story.

“As real as pomegranates and bananas,” Eliza assures her. “The ground shook when they lumbered by.” Also garlanded cows—how to explain them? Schools of golden fish belly-up in the river’s clouds of blue where dyer-women dipped chintz; vultures clustering over the places where the dead were set out. What would sound exotic but not bizarre? “Macaques, a kind of monkey, screeching in the trees.” Those flushed hairless faces, pointed ears, a whorl of hair above. How freely they sprang from tree to tree with a twining tail like a fifth grey limb. They’d snatch any food, scratch themselves, even do their obscene rutting in the middle of the path. “A funny thing about macaques that visitors never know, to their cost, is that their smiles mean rage.”

“Hypocrites!”

“I don’t believe the creature means to deceive,” Eliza tells her. “It’s baring its teeth. But travellers inevitably say, ‘Look at the charming little monkey!’ and try to pick it up, whereupon it bites them to the bone.”

Lister laughs under her breath. Then, “Why do you suppose your father didn’t marry an Englishwoman?”

Eliza takes a breath to buy her a moment. “There were almost none in Madras.” Though Dr. Duffin found one, it occurs to her; an Englishwoman, even if born and raised in India. (Curious to think that Mrs. Duffin spent fifty years on the Subcontinent, to Eliza’s six, but nobody would ever call the doctor’s pale wife Indian.) Perhaps William Raine didn’t look as hard as his friend did—or look at all—for a chalk-white bride. She can hear what Lister’s not asking. “It’s sometimes known as a country marriage.” How to convince her how common these unions were, how respected, how lasting?

“A left-handed marriage, I’ve heard it called,” Lister says, nodding. “Or a wife in watercolours.”

Eliza hasn’t heard that phrase. Mother in fading hues, yes, washed away little by little by the passing waves and the passing years, diluted to the faintest trace. But she needs Lister to know that Mother wasn’t some cast-off mistress. “After Father’s death, we were told she stayed on in our villa for two years. She died when I was eleven.”

“Died of what? I presume she was younger than him.”

“I don’t think the Duffins ever heard. Or if they did, they never told us.” She conjures up tiny shards of memory. The elaborate jewelled nosepiece Mother wore on one side, against infection. The padding of her bejewelled slippers, the tinkle of her bangles (glass, silver, and gold), how they chimed for good luck as she walked, chan-chan, chan-chan.

Then Eliza recalls something else. The memory, like a hand gripping her throat. “On our ship, Jane got in a spat with an English girl”—one of the whey-faced Cuppage daughters, who’d never seen England either—“and she was the first person who ever called us. . .well, a word that was new to me.”

“Ah, so many epithets to choose from,” Lister murmurs. “Such an array of insulting terms for those not responsible for the circumstances of their conception.”

Her playful tone eases Eliza’s tension. She thought the word would stick like a fishbone, but it pops out: “It was bastard.”

“Charming. Though I prefer merry-begot.”

Eliza can hardly believe they’re managing to make light of such painful matters. “There’s always by-blow. Or side-slip.” What else? “Blunder. Born on the wrong side of the blanket.”

“Chance-child,” Lister supplies. “Cloud-faller. Colt-in-the-woods.”

Eliza’s never heard those ones. Their giggles ripple through the room, growing too loud, until three rooms away Cook starts thumping on her wall again.

“If your mother was anything like you,” Lister whispers, “I can see why your father couldn’t help but fall in love.”

At a loss for words, Eliza lies very still in the dark.

Miss Lewin has the Middles memorise a page from Woodhouselee’s General History and chant it back to her in chorus.

Lister puts her hand up to remark that York is mentioned surprisingly often, considering the book covers the past of the whole world.

“Why might that be the case?” the mistress asks the class.

Mercy’s arm, always up, like a flagpole. “York may not be large, but it is distinguished.”

“You would say that, having been born in the Shambles,” Betty murmurs.

Mercy adds coldly, “No, as evinced by Constantine the Great being hailed as Emperor here in the year three hundred and six.”

Eliza wonders whether evinced is the same as evidenced.

Miss Lewin nods and fingers her teeth back into place. “Eboracum, the Romans called this town. Constantine had to fight rival claimants for eighteen years to keep his crown, or his laurel wreath, I suppose I mean. But when his mother converted him to Christianity, he told his troops to paint the Cross on their shields, and they triumphed.”

“Which proves the rightness of the One True Faith,” Mercy insists.

Miss Lewin leaps ahead to the year 866, when the leading citizens of what the Anglo-Saxons were now calling Eoforwic gathered in the Minster to celebrate All Saints’ Day, and the heathen Vikings sneaked in and seized the town. They made its streets run with blood and renamed it Jorvik.

Lister, like a fly in Eliza’s ear: “Tempting to ask why the True Faithful didn’t prevail on that occasion.”

Eliza suppresses a smile.

The mistress adds, “The Vikings were led by a villain called Ivar the Boneless.”

Lister lets out a snort of hilarity. “I beg your pardon, madam. It’s just—the Boneless?”

Miss Lewin scratches under the rim of her wig. “Something may have been muddled in the translation from the Old Norse,” she admits. “Now, back to our memorised passages. Whom did I hear last?”

Just then the bells of St. Olave’s start to ring. All six of them, pealing their different pitches, in a complex sequence that Eliza expects will reach its conclusion in a minute or two, but no.

It goes on. Nan moans, “Is the city being attacked?”

“An alarm would be just one note,” Mercy roars back at her.

Yes, this is a festive composition, an extraordinary, deafening celebration.

Lister’s on her feet. “We’ll find out what’s happened, shall we?”

“What?” Miss Lewin’s clutching her wig.

“Back in a minute.” Lister snatches at Eliza, pulling her off the bench. The two dash out, the door banging shut behind them. Through the rooms, still hand in hand, down the staircase. Eliza’s breathless, her head echoing with the bells’ overwhelming resonance.

Out in the damp November, speeding across the grass. Lister pulls her not towards St. Olave’s as Eliza expected but down the drive to the Manor’s front gate. Bootham’s crammed with people, like a fair in the middle of a weekday—whirling, dancing, drinking, embracing, have the citizens gone mad? And behind and above everything, the six great bells of St. Olave’s, and all the others across the city, ring out their huge, bewildering music.

Lister shoves open the gate and catapults the pair of them into the street. “What is it?” she demands of the nearest man. “What’s the news?”

“We’ve beat Boney, haven’t we?”

Lister lets out a screech that goes higher than all the bells, and flings her arms around Eliza in a hug that robs her breath.

Over a hastily dished-up gala dinner that evening—mock turtle soup made of a calf’s head, potted trout, tongue, cold souse with brawn, batter pudding with preserved plums, Wensleydale cheese—the Manor girls get the full story. The Navy’s demolished the French fleet at a spot on the Spanish coast called Cape Trafalgar, even though the British admiral was unfortunately shot dead.

“Twenty-two ships downed on the Enemy’s side,” Lister gloats, “and not a one on ours.”

“So this means we’ve won the war?” Fanny asks.

“Well. . .it certainly should do.”

Eliza is oddly touched to realise that her friend’s at the limit of her knowledge.

“At the very least, the Enemy can’t possibly invade now,” Lister argues.

“Or only by balloon.” Eliza means it as a tease, but Lister’s face tenses up again.

“If they try that trick,” Betty says, “my brothers’ battalions will shoot their gas-bags down.”

In French, Monsieur sets the jeunes filles stupides a list of proverbs. The Middles whisper over their books, impressing the sayings on their memories.

As rapid as a lizard, he’s on his feet. “Fermez vos livres!”

They shut their volumes.

He snaps his fingers at Fanny. “Chacun voit midi. . .”

Her mouth opens, fish-like.

He repeats, “Chacun voit midi!”

She tries hoarsely, “Ah. . .chacun voit midi chaque jour?”

Eliza bites down on a smile. Everyone sees noon every day, Fanny’s said; it sounds almost plausible, one of those wise old saws that means nothing at all.

Monsieur holds up a menacing finger, meaning, mistake number one; three will earn a mark.

Fanny strains for a breath.

Betty supplies the correct proverb in a leaden accent: “Chacun voit midi à sa porte.”

“Ce qui veut dire. . .One of you,” Monsieur commands, “what does this mean?”

Everyone sees noon at their own door? Margaret drawls fluently, “Ça veut dire, Monsieur, que chaque personne voit les choses différemment.”

We all see things differently. Margaret’s answer seems to bring Monsieur no satisfaction. Eliza supposes every teacher learns, in the first week, who’s a fool and who’s brilliant, and he’d rather bring the whole class up to the same level, like spreading butter on toast.

“Next, Le jeu. . .” He waits. “Mademoiselle?”

Eliza realises it’s her turn. “Le jeu. . .” She can’t remember this one.

“Le jeu ne vaut pas. . .”

The game’s not worth . . .She scrabbles for it in the back of her mind: the candle. “La chandelle.”

“Le jeu ne vaut pas la chandelle,” Monsieur echoes, nodding. “Ce qui veut dire. . .”

Lister supplies the meaning without putting her hand up. “Pas la peine de s’embêter.”

It’s not worth the bother.

The master gives Lister a sharp look. “Vous vous exprimez trop informellement.”

“Mais j’ai raison? C’est correct?”

Several mouths fall open. Lister’s insisting that what she said was right, even if slangy.

Monsieur’s moustache twitches. With rage, Eliza wonders, or could it be mirth?

The lesson goes on. At one point he tells Nan she’s hardly trying. “Vous ne vous intéressez guère à la langue française?”

“Non, Monsieur!”

Has Nan just accidentally agreed that yes, she takes little or no interest in the French language?

She corrects herself desperately: “That’s to say. . .Je veux dire oui, si, tellement, vraiment.” Weakly: no, yes, she really truly does interest herself in it.

“Eh bien, pourquoi?”

Is his a rhetorical why? Eliza wonders.

Nan’s eyes cross.

Monsieur gestures impatiently at the next girl, Frances.

“Le français, c’est une belle langage,” she offers, an unexceptionable sentiment.

Sometimes Eliza wonders how she bore Frances’s blandness so long.

“Une belle langue,” Monsieur corrects her. “Mais pourquoi l’étudier?” Why study French?

Every civilised person should speak the language of politesse, Margaret suggests. La langue de la littérature, des arts. . .

“C’est la langue de nos ennemis.”

Monsieur spins around. The language of their enemies—of the Enemy—is that really what Lister just said? Eliza almost giggles. In a class taught by a Frenchman, has Lister broken the unspoken rule and brought up the war?

“Exact.” He nods sharply. “It is très important to master the language of one’s enemies, n’est-ce pas?”

Fanny coughs heavily. “Why? In case they invade?”

Monsieur frowns. “Well, we will pray, in our different churches, that this will not come to pass, yes?”

Lister asks why he thinks Boney, spirits unbowed, is now said to be marching on Vienna.

“Pourquoi, why demand that of me?” Monsieur protests. L’Empereur Napoléon, soi-disant is a deep-dyed, bloody, monstre sanguinaire, and he, their unfortunate teacher, is not privy to the man’s world-devouring plans.

She pushes: “Have you ever seen him?”

Monsieur chokes. “I would have you know I left ma patrie during la Terreur, at peril de ma vie, and furthermore I spent eleven years toiling as a humble provincial professeur de jeunes demoiselles stupides. . .”

Eliza wouldn’t say humble is the word for Monsieur. But she’s intrigued by this new information that he really did flee from the Regicides.

“So no, Miss Lister, I did not set eyes on the great barbarian, and if I ever did I would cracher upon him!” He spits, dryly but loudly.

Lister’s grinning. “You’re our friend, then. If you’re the enemy of our Enemy.”

Surprisingly, Monsieur laughs. “Another excellent proverb to add to our collection. Take dictation, young ladies: L’ennemi de mon ennemi est mon ami.”

They write it down.

After lessons, in the twilight of half-past four, Lister has taken to leading the Middles down to the Manor Shore. Mercy won’t come because she doesn’t believe it’s allowed. Yes, the door in the back wall is customarily left unlocked, but she argues that’s only so the labourers can get in and out of the grounds with cattle or wheelbarrows.

The great elms and oaks are leafless now. From the Shore, the Ouse looks a hundred feet wide.

“Is that blackened spot at the top of that mound a beacon?” Lister’s pointing to the other side of the river.

Margaret nods. “The fire was lit the night the news of Trafalgar came—I saw it from my window.”

A pair of swans glide by, giving Eliza disdainful looks.

“Do you know,” Lister asks, “all unmarked swans belong by rights to the King?”

A brief pause, then Betty says, unconvincingly, “Who doesn’t know that?”

Lister goes right down to the bank, and leans over.

“Don’t!” Eliza races to grab her by the elbow.

“I’m just examining the high flood line.” Lister slides her chilly fingers into Eliza’s and pulls herself back up.

The girls could almost be in the countryside except for the clanking and hissing of the steam pump filling the reservoir in Lendal Tower. The building next to the waterworks is the Baths, where Mrs. Tate leads the Manor pupils every fortnight to bathe in their shifts, maintaining the highest standard of hygiene with due respect for modesty, as it says in the school’s prospectus. (Eliza likes the hot bath, some prefer the tepid, and Mercy of course chooses the cold, like some martyr of old.)

It’s too chilly to sit on the grassy Shore, in the darkening afternoon, so the Middles pace up and down, talking about the youngest princess, the King’s granddaughter, Charlotte, who’s only nine but lives in a house of her own with dozens of servants.

“I’d hate that,” Frances says. “No schoolmates?”

“She’s a wilful, wayward thing,” Lister says. “I hear she likes whistling and horse riding, going disguised into the streets. . .even the occasional bout of fisticuffs.”

To Eliza, this sounds like a disguised self-portrait. “Oh come, Lister.”

“It’s as true as holy writ.”

“Where’s her mother?” Nan wants to know.

“The Prince of Wales banished his wife for being a strumpet,” Betty murmurs.

“Don’t say that word,” Frances begs.

Margaret says, “My cousins in London tell me the Princess of Wales is forbidden to see her little Charlotte—her only child. So she’s taken in dozens of fosterlings. Pitiful!”

Several of the Middles complain of being cold to the bone, so Lister proposes a game called Rank and File. She appoints herself captain and lines up all the others in formation. “Twenty paces forward.”

They obey.

“Quick march! Now halt. Ten paces back.”

“When would soldiers ever be given such an order as ten paces back?” Margaret objects.

“Silence in the ranks! You’re making a controlled retreat from a great heap of smouldering gunpowder.”

They all edge backwards, giggling.

“Now fifteen paces sideways.”

“I don’t think there’s any such thing as a pace sideways,” Eliza mentions.

“Like crabs,” Lister roars, “on the double!”

They do their best, dishevelled. Nan trips on Fanny’s hem and rips it. “I’ll mend it so you can’t see it before we go to sleep,” she swears.

“Now, soldiers—”

“I believe that’s enough orders, Captain,” Eliza warns.

“One last one. Every private down on one knee.”

“We’ll green our linen.”

“You don’t do your own washing,” Lister points out. “Come on, kneel!”

So the Middles do, some more willingly than others. Lister strides to the end of the line.

Eliza’s beginning to suspect, but she doesn’t say a thing.

Their false captain gives Frances a shove so that she tips sideways into Margaret, and Margaret into Betty, and so on, the whole row of them, like dominos, crashing and wailing and laughing themselves sick in a welter of petticoats.

Before dinner Eliza finds Jane in the hall with her pal Hetty, who’s looking plumper and prettier than usual. They’re tugging on their kid gloves, and both are in the new poke bonnets called invisibles because they hide the face, with a brim that juts so far forwards the wearer might as well be in blinkers.

Hetty smiles at Eliza. “Jane, I believe your little sister wants you.”

Jane curls her lip.

“Oh, don’t tease the girl.”

Jane turns her head towards the hovering Eliza, who gabbles: “If you could bring back that novel I was reading there last Sunday—I believe I left it under a cushion—Miss Edgeworth’s Belinda?”

Jane scans the hall. “No maids here. To whom are you issuing orders?”

“I mean will you be so kind?” There’s a dear would only work on a different kind of sister. “Without letting Mrs. Tate see the title, please.”

Hetty’s holding open the small wooden door cut in the great metal-studded one. She and Jane step out, and Eliza slips after them, onto the drive. “Please, Jane. I promised to lend it to a friend when I’m finished.”

“Which friend, that gawky tomboy from the Wolds?”

Eliza decides to ignore that. “Which way do you go to Micklegate, over by the Lendal Ferry?”

“Blake Street, past the Assembly Rooms, then Ouse Bridge, where our ways part,” Hetty tells her.

Jane says, with a sudden change of subject, “The subscription balls at the Assembly Rooms start in December.”

“Oo!” That’s Hetty. She produces from her pocket a long twist of barley sugar in paper and breaks off a piece for Eliza.

Thanks, Eliza mouths, popping it into her mouth.

“I mean to get Duffin to introduce me at the first one,” Jane goes on.

Such casual disrespect; she doesn’t even grant their guardian a title. Eliza tongues the sweet to the side of her mouth. “Wouldn’t that be very. . .early?”

“Why wait? To marry well requires doing the Season in London, Bath, or York at the very least.”

Eliza shrugs. “I’d be terrified, stepping into a ball with all eyes on me.”

Hetty murmurs agreement as she crunches.

“And you suppose I won’t?” Jane demands. “But there’s no catching a deer without going into the woods.”

Her friend laughs under her breath.

Jane turns on Eliza. “Pay attention to the lesson, dunce. You and I come into our inheritance the day we turn twenty-one, or marry, whichever’s first. With our guardian’s permission we could have been married as young as twelve—”

Eliza makes a sound of disgust.

“So I ask you,” Jane goes on, “since I’ve already had to wait for my money four years longer than the law requires, what on earth could possess me to wait another five?”

Silence. Her friend snaps off a longer piece of barley sugar.

“Hetty, not in public!”

She shoves it into her mouth, where it makes an odd shape in her cheek.

They’re at the Manor’s gate now; Eliza falls back. “Good evening, then.”

Jane clangs it shut. Eliza watches the Seniors whisk away, crossing to Bootham Bar.

She’s reminded of the occasional time she passes a mirror, glimpses her own face out of the corner of her eye, and for a moment is unnerved, as if she’s surprised a burglar. Jane is her closest kin left. The same brown (Eliza whispers it in the privacy of her mind), that’s what Jane sees when she looks at her sister; that must be why she averts her gaze.

When she goes in to dinner, she finds the post has come, and two of the Juniors have learned that they have new infant brothers.

“Such a happy coincidence,” Frances keeps saying.

Eliza would dispute Frances’s notion (common among only children) that a brother or a sister is necessarily a source of happiness, but of course she doesn’t say that.

Margaret whispers across the table, “Every second baby seems to perish.”

The Middles stare.

“Every third, more like?” Lister argues quietly. “I suppose they’re so small and frail, anything can carry them off. Cholera and typhoid in the summer.”

“Influenza, in the winter,” Frances murmurs.

“Funny to think that we were all infants, and we, each of us, might have died as likely as lived,” Eliza says with a little shudder.

Her eye falls on little Miss Dern, among the Juniors, who hasn’t been weeping for some months now. Have time and thinking tamed the eleven-year-old’s grief, or has she only learned that there’s no point in expressing it to an indifferent world? She seems on amicable terms with the redhead beside her. Eliza chooses to believe that friendship has worked a cure. After all, her own existence at the Manor has been transformed by a wave of Lister’s wand.

On the Saturday of Race Week, such excitement. Mary Swann’s grandfather being one of the original subscribers to the Knavesmire Grandstand, her father has a silver token of perpetual entry, and he’s invited the proprietors of the Manor and a dozen pupils to join him for the afternoon. From the Middle Form, Lister, Betty, and Eliza are on the list; Eliza can’t work out how they were chosen.

The Grandstand is a two-mile walk. Miss Hargrave lectures as they cross Ouse Bridge: “Seventy foot in a single span! This has been described as the greatest bridge in England, but in my view it cannot hold a candle to the Rialto. In Venice,” she adds in a raised voice for the benefit of the Juniors at the back. The stones are uneven under Eliza’s boots, worn by pattens, horseshoes, and wheels.

The party troops past the Quaker school, where the pupils are clothed even more plainly than the Manor girls, if that’s possible—no lace, no coloured belts. “But Quaker families must have bags of gold,” Betty argues, “if their principles prevent them from spending any of it on drink, tobacco, or gambling.”

“I’ve heard the pupils are made to recite French verbs on walks,” Eliza tells her.

Mrs. Tate turns to remind them: “Two by two, keep in your crocodile. And don’t dawdle.”

“Remember, to waste time is to steal from oneself.” The Head’s usual calm seems ruffled by their outing. “At first I demurred,” she’s telling the Seniors now, “not thinking a sporting arena suitable for females of tender years. Until very recently, criminals used to be hanged at the Racecourse, and left dangling as a horrid warning.”

Mrs. Tate pats her sister’s arm: “These days that’s done more decently at the Castle.”

Lister says in Eliza’s ear, “I read a girl just got the noose for doing away with her newborn.”

Eliza cringes at the thought.

“These days, Mr. Swann assures me every care is taken to make the Races an elegant occasion,” Mrs. Tate goes on.

“Look, the cavalry barracks!” Betty points out the handsome building, which has a parade ground and stabling for hundreds of horses. “Lord Grantham could be in there right this minute, carousing with his officers.” Betty takes an inordinate interest in the Manor’s young landlord, who’s a major in the West Riding Yeomanry.

“It’s only a part-time regiment,” Lister says deflatingly, “so His Lordship will most likely be in London.”

“Still, a girl can dream.”

“Of what, becoming Lady Grantham?”

Betty smirks. “I give you fair warning, I’ll evict the school and do up the whole of King’s Manor as my town house. Turn the granary back into a ballroom.”

“You won’t banish Prinny, though?” Eliza asks.

“No, he can keep his sty, for auld lang syne.”

They catch sight of the Grandstand from a distance: a classical palace, two storeys tall, rearing up out of the wintry meadows. It turns out none of the pupils but Mary Swann has ever seen a race. She names legendary horses who’ve pounded the turf here: Gimcrack, Eclipse.

“May we watch from the upper level?” Lister asks Mrs. Tate.

She dithers. “That depends on the number of racegoers. We would not want to be pressed in the crowd.”

“From the balcony, then?”

Mary Swann pipes up: “There’s a viewing platform on the roof itself.”

“Oh, that sounds rather unsafe,” Mrs. Tate says.

“But there’s a low wall around it,” Betty says, pointing.

Mary’s father comes out to greet her schoolmates, hailing them too loudly: “I spotted you near a mile off!”

Eliza and Lister meet eyes: is he halfway to soused?

As a York banker, Mr. Swann seems to know everyone in the Grandstand by name. He leads the Manor party upstairs and orders tea and buns, though they have to wait an age because of the hordes ahead of them. He’s sorry they’ve just missed the six-year-olds’ race; Haphazard has triumphed, for the Earl of Darlington. The hundred-guinea plate will be run at the end of the day, by which time the pupils will be tucked up at the Manor. There’s a pedestrianism event on, but it won’t finish till the middle of night—two footmen are tramping to Sheffield and back, a distance of a hundred miles. “The record from eighty-eight still stands,” Mr. Swann crows, “twenty-one hours and thirty-five minutes.”

“Keen though I am on walking,” Lister murmurs to Eliza, “I can’t understand the appeal of waiting up for two footsore footmen to limp into town.”

Their host beckons them all onto the crammed roof. Eliza tugs her straw bonnet forwards to keep stray beams of sun off her face.

“There is to be one great novelty this afternoon, which is why the crowd’s swelled so,” he explains. “A woman is to race!”

“A woman, Mr. Swann?” Miss Hargrave echoes, in stern confusion.

Eliza’s picturing one so strong, with such extraordinarily fleet and muscular legs—who’s that goddess beginning with an A?—that she can pit herself against horses.

“A female jockey, I mean,” he says. “It’s not one of the subscription purses, of course, just a jollity on the side.”

“But in what does the jollity consist, sir?” the Head asks.

“Well, a fellow called Colonel Thornton maintains that his wife rides to hounds as well as any member of the Hunt, so he’s put her up against a Captain Flint—her own brother-in-law— and he’s backing her to the tune of a thousand guineas.”

“Oh dear,” Mrs. Tate frets, “what a considerable sum for this Colonel to lose.”

“Here she comes now,” Mr. Swann says. “I believe this is the first time such a thing will ever have gone off in the sporting world.”

Miss Hargrave begins some statement about heaven and nature, but the spectators are stirring, so the Manor pupils press to the corner of the rooftop, behind the knee-high wall (a mere kerb, really, which seems to Eliza unlikely to save anyone from toppling). They peer down at the spot where the crowd is eddying around a figure in a yellow shirt, a long purple riding habit that sweeps the ground behind her, and—incongruous—a jockey cap of the same shade.

Gripping her hand, Lister’s enthralled. “Will Mrs. Thornton ride astride, Mr. Swann?”

Mrs. Tate frowns down at her.

“No, no, sidesaddle of course,” Mr. Swann says. “Here’s her husband’s mount now, Old Vingarillo, very experienced.”

Would Lister like to be this Amazon in imperial purple, Eliza wonders, the subject of remarks and quizzing from thousands? Eliza would rather die. Really, the two girls could not be more different, but they fit together like pieces of a puzzle.

The girls gasp as Mrs. Thornton climbs onto Old Vingarillo and trots away to the starting line in the far distance.

“We won’t see a thing until it’s almost over,” Lister complains.

“Betting’s six to four on the petticoat,” Mr. Swann says jovially.

“That means most of the crowd think she’ll win,” his daughter Mary informs the older girls over her shoulder.

“Oh! I think they’re off,” Betty cries.

“I didn’t hear a whistle,” Eliza objects.

Mary says: “That’s because they’re four miles away.”

“Is the lady ahead, sir?” Lister demands.

Mr. Swann nods. “So far. Mm, well ahead now. Opening quite a gap.”

Lister crushes Eliza’s hand painfully. “She’s going to win.”

“Don’t speak too soon,” Mr. Swann says. “The race could last ten minutes.”

Eliza asks Lister, “How can you be sure?”

“Well, any man jack who rides can take part in a race, can’t he? But for a female to be put forward, for the first time in history—think how good she must be.”

“Do you think he knows?” Eliza murmurs.

Mary Swann overhears that. “My father’s a devotee of the turf.”

“No, I mean Old Vingarillo—knows a woman’s riding him.”

Lister squints down at the track, at that flying pennant of purple. “He couldn’t fail to feel the sidesaddle, I suppose, and her lighter weight.”

“And her signals,” Eliza suggests. “The feel of her hands on the reins.”

The spectators are roaring.

“She’s ahead by a length,” Mr. Swann reports.

Lister’s nails are digging into Eliza’s damp fingers. “Can you believe our luck, to be here on the very day the first ever female jockey triumphs?”

But then something happens; Eliza feels it in the low moan on the rooftop even before she manages to peer through a gap. The rider in purple is pulling up short. Sliding down the horse’s left flank. “No!”

Mr. Swann groans. “The saddle-girths have come loose, it looks like.”

“Will that stop her?”

“She could be flung. Trampled.”

“Shouldn’t this Captain Flint wait?” Lister demands. “It’s hardly fair play if her saddle’s slipped—”

But they can all see that the man’s riding on, in a cloud of dust. Alone on the track now, he gallops past the thronged Grandstand. Cheers; boos and hisses as well. Over the chalked line he thunders.

“He’s done it,” Mr. Swann reports. “Poor Mrs. Thornton. A very spirited performance.”

“That wretched sidesaddle!” Lister, too loud.

Mrs. Tate cocks her head.

“It wasn’t a fair competition,” she argues. “If she’d been allowed to sit astride and grip properly with her legs—”

“Piano!” Mrs. Tate hisses, finger to her lips. “And a disputatiousness mark for you.”

Eliza presses Lister’s hand, willing her to hold her tongue. She can’t take her eyes off Mrs. Thornton, who’s slid off the horse and is leading it along the final strength, her head high, while the crowd howl for her.

December’s upon the Manor now. The sun slips below the horizon before four o’clock, and the rising bell hauls them out of bed. No matter how weary and shaky Eliza is, fumbling her clothes on in the dark, Lister always manages to set her giggling.

It says in the Herald that Napoléon’s forces, though vastly outnumbered, have crushed the Russians and Austrians at a place called Austerlitz. “There’s none but Britain to resist him now,” Lister reports grimly. “We’re the last skittle standing.”

The Seniors are full of boasts about how they mean to enjoy their Christmas holidays. The two who are engaged plan to have their portraits painted in miniature for their fiancés. Not the whole face, just what’s called a lover’s eye—one brow, eye, and a few framing curls—to be set into a snuffbox or locket. This kind of partial portrait’s all the rage, since it lets the gentleman show his friends a glimpse of his fiancée’s beauty without revealing her full face.

Eliza usually quite looks forward to the festivities, but this year the Duffins are in low spirits, since a nephew—a cornet out in India—has died of a fever. Told there’s no question of being brought to any winter balls, Jane is mutinous. She mutters to Eliza, as they walk to the Manor one morning, “If I were a couple of shades lighter, I bet he’d chance it.”

Eliza doubts that; to parade a sixteen-year-old of any complexion around town would seem an invitation to every fortune-hunter in the North. But she won’t annoy Jane by saying so. And it’s possible her sister’s right, or partly. Bias rarely declares itself, after all; you have to peer through a veil, strain to hear the faint note, scent the trace lingering on the air.

All she can anticipate with pleasure, during these holidays, is a possible visit to the famous Grimaldi’s pantomime. The prospect of a whole month on Micklegate—in that north-facing guest room that never feels like hers—makes her feel as flat as paper. A month without Lister.

Who’ll be without Eliza but at home with her family. Will Lister miss her, or will her brothers’ company be distraction enough? To ask Will you miss me? would be pathetic; would cast Eliza as the kind of feeble, fragile, nervous friend whom Lister would find it a relief to leave behind.

The Juniors have sore fingertips (pricked with red) from forming holly garlands to decorate the school. On breaking-up day, prizes are given out in the refectory. Lister wins a copy of the New Testament in French, and Mercy a little medal inscribed EMULATION REWARDED. Margaret gets nothing this time, and claims not to give a fig.

“Be sure to write to me, over the holidays, dearest pet,” Nan—eyes already red-rimmed—is urging Fanny.

“I will, my darling.”

“I can’t bear neglect, not with my health so fragile.”

“I won’t neglect you,” Fanny says with a spluttering cough.

Listening, Eliza vows not to ask Lister for a single letter.

Now the last dance. Mr. Tate lines up the pairs—taller “gentlemen” facing their “ladies” from four feet away—and barks them through the series of figures as he saws away on his skinny kit fiddle. The merrier the tune, the more hangdog the master’s expression.

Only the top couple is in motion at any time, which gives the others plenty of opportunity for chatting. “Why do we have to dance something as disgustingly named as the York Maggot?” Betty wants to know.

Eliza says, “A maggot only means a tune that wriggles into your ear and—”

“I know that! I could shake this one out of my ear easily, if Mr. Tate would just stop playing it.”

“Well, at least it’s not a rigadoon. I can’t stand all that hopping,” Margaret sighs.

Betty nods, with a meaningful glance down at her bosom: “Everything heaves and flops.”

Across from Eliza, among the nominal ladies, Lister seems to be telling some engrossing story. So ungirlish, yet how she relishes their company; like a dog that plays with cats. Eliza sometimes wonders whether Lister would have paired up with any roommate she happened to be assigned on her first night. Is this, the first true and precious friendship of Eliza’s life, a mere matter of luck? Could Eliza lose it as easily as she won it, for as little reason?

“No letter W’s!” The master jerks his head at any sharp elbows as he moves among the girls, still fiddling. “Serpentine curves if you please, like a swan’s neck,” he orders without much hope. “Miss Peirson, that last step should have been a contretemps, not a sideways chasse.”

Fanny’s in a sweat of anxiety. “Please, sir, could we stop for breath?”

Mr. Tate gives them a minute’s grace. Then strikes up the inevitable “I’ll Gang Nae Mair tae Yon Toon,” known as the favourite tune of the Prince of Wales.

Eliza says, “I heard it was recently played at the Assembly Rooms for two and a half hours straight.”

The girls groan at that.

But when “Gang Nae Mair” is done, Lister persuades the master (on grounds that it’s almost Christmas) to let them have “Sir Roger de Coverley” for the last twenty minutes. The festive crowd-pleaser is all dancing, no thinking. Bottom gent and top lady retire and advance; top gent and bottom lady; repeat with linked arms, then corkscrew, then thread the needle. Top couple turns, each party weaves her way in and out of her line, joins up and promenades home. The dance swirls on, until everyone’s smiling.

Well, except Mr. Tate. Perhaps, Eliza thinks, it all sounds like devils making pandemonium to him.

As the pupils spill out, Lister catches little Eliza Ann Tate on the stairs. “Here, missy. Whyever did your father go into this line, since he takes no pleasure in it?”

The child juts out her chin. “His father was a dancing master. Just as Mama’s mother had the Manor School from her parents, and passed it on to her daughters.”

“What, must we all trudge in our forebears’ footsteps?”

The Tate girl looks back blankly, as if the answer’s self-evident.

Like a dance, Eliza supposes, a prescribed pattern. Do the Duffins tacitly expect Jane and Eliza to marry doctors, or Company men, and have sons who’ll be Company men or doctors? Is her course of life written for her already, when she’s barely begun?

“Since Aunt Ann has no children,” Eliza Ann Tate goes on, “she’s promised I’m to be Head after her.”

Lister laughs. “Are you indeed, you self-important infant?”

Eliza marvels at how sure of herself the Tate girl is, and how pleased at the prospect of taking her turn in the procession of generations.

After dinner, during the last Recreation before the breakup, Miss Hargrave relaxes so far as to let the Middles and Seniors play Snap Dragon—dropping raisins and almonds in a dish of brandy and lighting it. They crowd around, waiting for the moment the flame goes out, so they can snatch at the delicious fruits and nuts and lick their scorched fingers.

And when, just before bedtime, they hear the piercing pipes of the Waits—the ancient city band that still gathers at Yuletide and on ceremonial occasions—the pupils are allowed to hurry to their rooms for their cloaks and step outside to listen.

“Just for five minutes,” Mrs. Tate calls, as if she’s regretting this already.

The men are gathered with their droning wooden shawms in the Ropewalk between King’s Manor and the city wall. Invisible to the girls behind the old stonework, except where a hole gives glimpses of them in their silver chains of office over their parti-coloured gowns. They sing a carol full of fal-la-las, then lift their long pipes again and play so merrily that Eliza shares all the coins in her purse with Lister to toss over the wall and rain down on them.