CHRISTMAS. TWELFTH NIGHT. Plough Monday. The days have dragged by at the Duffins’ house on Micklegate. Eliza’s thought Lister might write. She hasn’t dared send the first letter herself, even though there’s no reason why it should be Lister who takes the lead. Eliza knows these are cowardly qualms, but school is its own little world, and out of term-time it’s hard to trust that a friendship hasn’t evaporated like dew.

January’s halfway over by the time the Manor opens again. Snow scores the fields, and leaves white touches on the abbey ruins; hoarfrost silvers the grass. In the hack rattling through town at a quarter past eight in the morning, a low red sun rising through the smeary window, Eliza adds to her Lister list. Opposites; paradoxes; impossible combinations.

Precise. . .yet slapdash.

Energetic. . .yet prone to ennui.

Punctual. . .yet devil-may-care.

Tolerant. . .yet irritable.

Grim. . .yet cheerful.

Comical. . .yet heroic.

Courteous. . .yet haughty.

Fantastical. . .yet practical.

Generous. . .yet a hard bargainer.

Honest. . .yet sly.

Can all these contraries be true at the same time? Or is Eliza simply too dull-witted to make sense of the most intriguing person she’s ever met?

A worldly wise romantic.

A businesslike daydreamer.

A provincial cosmopolitan.

An awkward charmer.

An ambitious joker.

A serious clown.

At least there are some absolutes:

Lister is quick.

Lister is odd.

Lister is Lister.

No use: the scrap of paper’s full and Eliza’s no closer to a conclusion. She crumples it up into a little ball and slides down the window an inch to throw it into the flooded gutter before the carriage turns into the loop of gravel driveway to deposit her at the ancient doorway of King’s Manor, with its lion and unicorn.

She’s hoping to catch Lister upstairs, in their little Slope. I found I rather missed you, she’s going to say. But all she finds there is Lister’s battered trunk and bags.

Her friend is drinking milk in the refectory, her nose and chin sunburned.

“Where were you to get so tanned,” Margaret’s inquiring, “Gibraltar?”

“Timbuctoo?” Nan’s trying to keep the joke up like a shuttlecock.

Lister directs a long grin at Eliza over their heads before she answers. “Just Halifax. Our mother’s breeding again, which wears her out, so Sam and John and I spent our holidays with our uncle and aunts at Shibden Hall, and climbed dozens of trees.”

“Lovely! Do you hope for a boy or a girl?” Frances asks.

“A newborn’s a mere scrap of flesh,” Lister tells her. “Do you know the plates of its skull aren’t fixed in place, which allows the head to be squeezed, as it comes out, instead of getting wedged tight?”

Groans of protest. Nan clutches her belly.

“She might be pretty, if she’s a girl,” Fanny says.

Lister raises her eyebrows. “Can’t we admit that babies are weird little monkeys, until they fatten up a bit?”

“Now you sound like an ogre,” Eliza murmurs.

Eyes twinkling, Lister bares her teeth.

“You’ll think your own are ravishing, when you have some,” Nan assures Lister.

Who makes a face. “It’s a messy business. I like the grapes, but I wouldn’t want to be the poor vine.” And she mimes being dragged down by the weight of fruit, which makes them all laugh.

Eliza never knows how to talk to Lister in a group; repartee ricochets too fast. Mostly she watches, listens, forms questions for later.

“But really,” Margaret wants to know, “would you rather another little sister or little brother?”

“Frankly, I’d rather my parents marshalled their efforts to rear the four of us they have already.”

“The half-cracked things you say!”

“I can be odd without being mad, I hope. Unique.”

Betty titters at that.

Lister strikes a pose. “Etiam si omnes, ego non, as Peter said to Our Lord. Which means—”

“Did we ask?” Margaret protests.

Lister translates anyway: “Even if all others, not I. Oh, Betty, I must break it to you, I saw in the paper that our landlord’s married.”

Betty scowls. “Lord Grantham? Are you sure?”

“I am capable of reading a name, yes. She’s an earl’s daughter.”

“Wouldn’t you know it,” Betty mutters. “Birds of a feather peck any newcomers who try to join the flock.”

The Middles speculate about the death of Prime Minister Pitt, at forty-six, of a burst stomach. “Dr. Duffin called it a consequence of overindulgence in port,” Eliza mentions.

Lister makes a sceptical face. “Or overwork, no? It must be rather a strain, running Britain and her Empire, especially in wartime.”

“Don’t worry, it’s not a responsibility that’ll ever land on your shoulders,” Margaret teases.

“Death just happens.” Mercy speaks so sepulchrally, the Middles stare. “I don’t suppose it does any good to try to predict the cause, any more than the date. We should live in expectation of our ends.”

“It’s this kind of cosy, jolly chat I’ve really missed,” Lister murmurs, and they all laugh, even Mercy.

The classroom in which the Middles spend most of their day has a huge Tudor hearth, but with only a tiny fire in it. Eliza’s fingers stay numb right through this morning’s lessons.

The refectory, likewise. At Recreation, in the evening, Mrs. Tate and Miss Hargrave sit right by the fire with a screen on a stand to shield their faces from the heat.

“They could shift their derrieres and let us warm ourselves for a minute at least,” Nan whispers, winding her second shawl around her neck.

At their cold end of the hall, the Middles are playing Conundrums—except Mercy, who’s committing to memory French irregular verbs.

“Why, when you’re completely stripped, are you the most heavily clad?” Margaret asks.

“But what can you possibly be wearing if you’re not wearing anything?” Fanny wonders.

“I expect it’ll be a play on words.” Mercy’s eyes are locked on her page. “Frances, how do you pronounce this?”

Frances leans over. “Elles paient, they pay.”

“Do you all give up?” Margaret wants to know.

“No!”

“Again: why, when you’re completely stripped—”

“Wait,” Lister says. “I think I have it. Bare. . .a bearskin!”

Margaret smiles in congratulation. “Your reward is, you must come up with the next.”

Eliza can never invent on demand; she knows hers is an intelligence like a flower that only opens when it’s not watched.

Lister snaps her fingers. “Got one. Why is a sash window like a woman in labour?”

The indecent topic makes Fanny wave her hands as if to banish smoke. “Mrs. Tate will hear, and you’ll get us all a mark.”

“I’ll assure her that the indecorum is all my own,” Lister promises. “So. Why is a sash window—”

“Oh, oh,” Fanny whispers, “I think I have it. Something about a pane?”

“Very good, pet,” Lister says, surprised. “Because it’s full of panes.”

Eliza’s reminded of Mrs. Lister, with her growing belly, who’s lost two previous babies of her six, and must fear that this one might be snuffed out by the hard winter. Betty’s mother too—she’s been able to hold on to just five of her nine. Eliza shivers and rubs her arms through the tight sleeves of her Spencer. She can’t imagine how these women can go through all that, and feed and lull their infants, only to have to bury them as often as not.

“Mrs. Tate?” Lister calls out.

“Piano!”

Lister goes over to say, in a quieter voice, “We’re perishing here. May we play a running game to warm up?”

Mrs. Tate supposes she can make no objection.

Lister gets the Middles to set chairs in a circle. A couple of Juniors petition to join but are herded away. “I’m the Asker, and you’re all the Sayers,” she begins, in the centre. “Do you love your neighbour, Fanny?”

“Uh. . .”

“Say yes.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Margaret, do you love your neighbour?”

“I suppose so.”

“Do you love your neighbour?” Lister’s fixing Eliza with her gaze. She doesn’t call her Eliza as any other girl might, but nor does she say Raine in public, because the surname is still a private name between them.

“I don’t,” Eliza says, just to see what happens if she breaks the pattern.

“Then I’ll call out, ‘Change chairs, the Queen’s come,’ and all of you except the Naysayer”—pointing at Eliza—“run around the outside of the circle and find a new seat, which may not be the one just vacated by your neighbour. Understood?”

They nod.

“So. If you move before I say ‘the Queen’s come,’ or if I say ‘the Queen’s not come,’” Lister tells Nan, who’s hovering over the edge of her seat, “you get a slap.”

Nan shrinks back in her chair.

“Perhaps not on the face,” Eliza murmurs.

“On the hand, then. A loving pat.” Lister demonstrates with her own right hand on her left. It sounds like a stinging blow, but Eliza knows that when you hurt yourself it lacks the element of shock. “So, Miss Raine, do you love your neighbour?”

“I do not.”

“Change chairs. . .” She makes them wait. “. . .the Queen’s come!”

The thunder of feet and whirl of white skirts. Lister drops into the empty seat beside Eliza and beams at her.

“I’ve no chair,” Nan complains, hovering.

“That means you’re the Asker now.”

As soon as the game starts to flag, Lister introduces a complication: “The Sayer may exempt a particular neighbour from having to give up her chair by saying, ‘No, except for her who begins with an. . .F,’ say, in the case of Fanny here.”

“That would mean Frances too,” Betty mentions.

“Then to avoid confusion you’d say, ‘Who begins with an F and has brown hair.’”

The game goes on until they’re all scarlet and panting; warm, at least for the moment.

Before bedtime, the whole school kneels in the refectory. Tonight the psalm is read by Frances, as diffident as ever.

“Miss Selby,” the Head sighs, “I always advise my young ladies to cultivate a chest voice and speak in a low register, with moderated tones, but really yours is too subdued, as if you dread to annoy your listeners with Holy Scripture.”

“I will try harder,” Frances says faintly.

Half the Juniors are hiding yawns, so Miss Hargrave dismisses the school at last. The sisters stand at the bottom of the staircase. “On going to bed,” the Head says, “ask yourself what you have done this day to satisfy your two great obligations to society: to be useful and to be agreeable.” Each pupil in turn makes her curtsey and says good night. “Miss Percival, I am sorry to see you are lifting your skirt higher than required for mounting the stairs.”

A gulp of apology from the mortified child, which turns into a cough. In stays already, Eliza notices, which is ludicrous; really some of these children are too young to be boarders, but the five Percivals insist on moving as a pack.

Mrs. Tate gives a kiss to one Senior and promises to come up and dress her chilblains. She tells a Junior that she’ll bring her some syrup for her throat, and says the same to Fanny. It’s known that Mrs. Tate can’t bear to hear a rasping cough, having lost one of her own children that way.

Now, at last. Eliza and Lister on their own in the Slope, for the first time since before the winter break.

Although once the door’s closed behind them, and they’re unhooking each other’s frocks, and swapping day shifts for night ones and bed socks, all Eliza can think to remark on is Lister’s fresh haircut, and the harsh weather.

“Eh, it’s right parky and I’m fair nithered!” Then, dropping the broad Yorkshire accent, Lister asks, “Were you always shivering, your first winter in England?”

Eliza’s realising something: Lister’s managed to change the way she speaks, little by little, in less than five months since coming to the Manor. She wonders how much of an effort it’s cost. It’s rather unnerving to watch someone tinker with herself. She wonders how else Lister could transform, if she set her mind to it. And are there parts of the self that are unalterable?

“Raine?”

“Sorry. It was so long ago, half my life.” She strains to call up the year she was seven. “I do remember the meals at the Tottenham school tasted of nothing—pretend food, as when children make mud-pies.”

Lister chuckles at that. She scrubs at a few pimples with a mixture of sand and soap. Eliza can feel a hair coming on her upper lip, so she takes out her tweezers and peers into the glass to pluck it out.

“Did you have some fun over the holidays, after all?”

“Well. . .” Eliza tries to think of something. “We saw a longsword dance.”

Lister snorts. “I saw three. You can’t take a step in Yorkshire at Yuletide without tripping over a longsword. The last performance was so interminable, I was longing for a dancer to lose his grip and sever a finger.” She nibbles at her thumb and pulls off a bit of dead skin. She holds it to the candle, scrutinising it. “Look at that. The print goes all the way through.”

“Ugh, throw it away,” Eliza orders.

“Don’t disturb me at my prayers. I’m marvelling at the wonders of Creation.” Lister often uses a flippant tone when she’s more than half serious. “I’d like to know exactly how many layers we have. And every time we lose a piece of skin, how does it grow a perfect patch to mend it?”

Eliza’s busy dampening her front hair at the washstand and working on her four obligatory curls. She wraps a curling paper around each section of sleek black hair and coils it up on a pencil, then secures the strip by knotting it.

Lister jumps in between her sheets. The blanket heaves as she moves her legs like a galloping pony, to take the chill off the sheets.

“I bet Mrs. Tate has put a stone bottle to warm Miss Hargrave’s bed already,” Eliza says.

“Yes! Why do mistresses always consider that having the smallest of fires in their bedrooms would corrupt the temperament of schoolgirls?”

Eliza laughs under her breath. “As if austerity forms the character, like setting a jelly.” She unrolls the last, botched twist and remakes it. If they had even a tiny fire, she could use curling tongs instead, though she did once burn herself that way at the Duffins’. She feels an impulse to confess something of how dreary the long time apart has been. “You know, holidays are rather a trial to me.”

“Whyever—”

“Oh, I hardly know.” She can’t say, Did you never think to write? “Without classes, the day seems to have no shape, and Jane keeps stalking out of the room as if I’m an irksome kitten at her heels. Dr. Duffin beats me at chess, every day, and scolds me for my lack of application.”

“It sounds miserable. You should have come to Shibden. My brothers and I shake off school discipline there and do as we please.”

Neither of them mentions the fact that Eliza wasn’t invited.

“I don’t think you have any cousins to entertain you?” she asks.

“Oh, my uncle and aunts are brother and sisters, all unmarried,” Lister explains. “We’re not a family much given to wedlock. Father’s the only Lister who’s produced any progeny.”

“Ah.” Eliza grasps what this could mean. “So your uncle’s estate. . .”

“Will likely go to Father, or Sam, in the end. I’d make a much better master of Shibden, but Uncle James doesn’t believe in female inheritance,” Lister says with bitter humour.

It strikes Eliza that if she and Jane had been unlucky enough to have a brother, he’d likely have inherited most or all of the eight thousand pounds.

“Still, I hope to end up there with Sam and John, quite comfortable.”

How odd to think of Lister as a spinster perching on the lives of her brothers like a bird on a fence. “Unless you were to marry.”

“Raine. Really. Can you picture that?”

Eliza tries it, then shakes her head.

Lister speaks quite plainly: “It would be against my nature.”

But it’s for marriage that they’re being trained, Eliza thinks, so what have their natures to do with it? And how else is a female to spend her life?

Lister lies watching Eliza brush out her long hair. “I must admit, my holidays were rather too long, like yours.”

“What, even with all that tree-climbing at Shibden?”

“Now I’m growing up, I find I require a mind in unison with my own. Without it, all the world’s a desert, and I feel alone in a crowd.”

Eliza’s suddenly warmed, as if a great invisible log is flaming and crackling between them.

Sunday afternoon. St. Olave’s is just across the long grass from the Manor, but the proprietors always walk their pupils around the long way, by Marygate, to make a respectable showing to the rest of the congregation.

As the crocodile of girls turns the corner, Lister hangs back and points out the ragged round wall of St. Mary’s Tower. “Guess who blew this up with a mine?”

“What kind of mine? A coal mine?” Fanny asks.

“Oh, you dear noodle,” Margaret says. “All these years of schooling, and haven’t you learned anything?”

Nan snaps back in defence of her pal: “All these years, and you still have the sharpest tongue in the Manor.”

Margaret blows her a scornful kiss.

“A mine is a tunnel dug under a fortification to blow it up with gunpowder,” Lister tells Fanny. “Well, it was Oliver Cromwell! Or his Roundheads, at least.”

“I used to think the Parliamentarians had unusually round heads,” Eliza confesses.

This raises a laugh, though Fanny looks a little nervous, as if she thought that too, until just now.

“I got the whole story out of the animal-doctor who came to dose the cows,” Lister tells them. “The brave Cavaliers were holding our Manor for its King, when boom!—the walls were breached, close combat”—she slashes and stabs the air—“till the orchard and the bowling green were strewn with bodies.”

Eliza rather wishes the Manor still had an orchard and a bowling green.

Halfway down Marygate, the Head and her sister look back and beckon crossly.

“You’ll be put in disgrace if you’re reported for talking to strange men,” Betty tells Lister.

A snort. “I like that, from you!”

“What can you mean?”

“Admit it, my love, you’re the greatest flirt in the school.” Margaret’s the only one who could get away with this.

Betty smirks and tucks her hand through her inseparable’s arm.

At the medieval church doors, the proprietors stand waiting. “Take an indecorum mark, Miss Lister,” Mrs. Tate hisses.

“I will, thank you, madam.”

For a moment it seems to Eliza that this pert response will earn Lister another mark, but which would it be? Not disputatiousness so much as cheerful cheek.

With a pained face, Miss Hargrave gestures for them to hurry into the church.

Really, Eliza decides, the system doesn’t work for geniuses. Lister can earn any number of marks for bad behaviour in full confidence of wiping them out by as many memory merits. Perhaps there should be two categories of punishment and reward, one moral and one intellectual, but the whole thing already seems absurdly complicated. Perhaps that’s Lister’s influence; so many aspects of life that Eliza never thought to question till Lister came.

“Remember,” Miss Hargrave whispers in the aisle, “we expect every young lady to join in the psalm, singing no more loudly or softly than her neighbours, and maintaining due reverence of the eyes.”

St. Olave’s has a peculiarly dank sort of cold. The hangings are dirty baize, and the hassocks (embroidered canvas work, fraying) are almost as hard as the flagstones. The reason service is so late in the afternoon is that this old abbey church has only a part claim on Reverend Worsley, who spends his Sabbaths scurrying among four York congregations. Most of the Manor School’s teachers prefer the town’s great Minster, with its glorious high nave and Mr. Camidge’s virtuosic organ-playing, but the proprietors won’t stray from the Manor’s own church.

Reverend Worsley’s sermons, not improvised but out of his book, are so dull that once Eliza’s made a note of the subject—this week it seems to be civility—she casts about for something to read. She finds the Bible slightly more entertaining than the prayer book.

Lister cranes her neck to scan the wall monuments, then the gravestones set into the floor. She nudges Eliza and nods at one beside them with a winged hourglass. “Tempus fugit,” she mutters. “I prefer Virgil’s version, Fugit inreparabile tempus, meaning, It flees, irretrievable time.”

“Shh.” Eliza’s eye falls on a broken marble plaque in memory of a wife. The folded hands are still visible but the head’s gone.

She was, but words are wanting to say what,

Think what a woman should be and she was that.

Nineteen words, and the widower’s managed to say nothing about her. It fills Eliza with gloom to think that the best the Manor girls can hope for is to be described in such terms someday—the pristine blankness of a good woman’s life.

Well, any of them except Lister. What on earth would her plaque say?

Lister huffs out her breath. “Such a waste to have that huge organ and no one touching it. I’d love to have a go at a simple tune. ‘Now Thank We All Our God,’ perhaps, since the first line only has two notes—”

Eliza steps hard on the edge of Lister’s shoe, to hush her.

The two of them are nothing alike, but every day Eliza finds another respect in which she and Lister are like-minded. Kindred sympathy grows between them like a flowering weed.

Even though the two indulge in none of the showing-off of bosom friends—never a dearest or a darling—the other Middles have noticed. Eliza has overheard references to her and Lister as confederates, familiars, or shadows, always at each other’s elbows, hand in glove. Why does the language of affection have something so secretive about it, as if a pair of girls amounts to a conspiracy?

One morning Eliza wakes and hears a faint squeaking from the other bed. She lies puzzling over the sound. Could Lister be shaking with laughter? Sobbing silently? Rocking back and forwards, as she sometimes does at dull moments when her energies have no outlet?

Eliza heaves over in bed to face the hard curve of Lister’s shoulder. Studies the back of her head, the cropped hair sticking out in all directions. It strikes her that from behind, you’d never take her for a girl.

The squeaking has stopped. Unless Eliza imagined it?

“Awake?” she whispers.

“Barely.” Listers offers a great yawn, stretching her arms wide. There’s a book in her left hand.

“What are you reading?”

“Just the dictionary.”

Eliza’s unconvinced. Once they’ve dressed, she finds an excuse to stay behind while Lister hurries down to breakfast. She looks through the Pronouncing and Explanatory Dictionary, wondering whether Lister was studying the meaning of words or their correct pronunciation.

She spots a faint pencil dot beside certain entries. She flicks through the pages, hunting the mark.

Virgin, n., a woman unacquainted with men.

Scrat, n., a goblin, monster, devil, hermaphrodite.

Love, n., the passion between the sexes.

Grubble, v., to feel in the dark.

She’s blushing, obscurely troubled. She supposes it serves her right for prying. She closes the book and tucks it back under Lister’s pillow.

In French class Monsieur is setting them still more proverbs to get by heart. Il y a anguille sous roche. There’s an eel under the rock, an image Eliza finds somehow more repulsive than the English equivalent, A snake in the grass.

Ce n’est pas la mer à boire. (Eliza likes that cold comfort: It’s no great matter—you don’t have to drink the whole sea.)

Qui n’avance pas, recule. (To not move forwards is to fall back.)

Petit à petit, l’oiseau fait son nid. (Little by little, the bird makes her nest.)

Qui vivra verra means If you live, you’ll see. This one’s sharper than Time will tell; it reminds Eliza of the guillotine that Monsieur somehow evaded. She seems to remember an Indian saying along the lines of No hand can catch time.

Monsieur goes on a rant about girls who believe “Quel temps est-il?” is the way to ask the time. “L’heure means counted time, as I have told you before, whereas le temps is used for uncountable time or weather.”

Uncountable time: Eliza tries to commit that phrase to memory.

Lister mentions an English proverb, Time flies among friends—do the French say that?

The master shakes his head. “We have a different one. L’amour fait passer le temps, le temps fait passer l’amour.”

Lister’s face falls. “Mais c’est si cynique, Monsieur.”

“What’s so cynical?” Fanny whispers.

“Love passes the time?” That’s Nan.

Eliza shakes her head and translates under her breath: “Love kills time, time kills love.” Neatly phrased—the French have a knack for these jokes—but how it stings. She wonders whether Monsieur believes this sad creed. He looks like a man who’s lost a great deal already.

That Friday, the Manor girls line up for the lancet. They try not to look at Dr. Mather’s little blade, with its tortoiseshell handle. Instead they trade cases. “My aunt is stone blind, since she had it as a child,” Nan volunteers.

Betty’s brother’s wife’s brother is quite disfigured—one great pucker of scars.

The doctor scrapes Fanny’s full-grown arm above the elbow, making her squeal.

“Does it hurt terribly?” Nan asks in sympathy.

He cuts in before Fanny can answer: “It does not. A mere scratch.”

Fanny blinks back a tear. “It’s just the fright of it.”

With the tip of his finger Dr. Mather takes up a little matter from the jar and rubs it into Fanny’s arm.

Nan moans. “A stranger’s pustules, ground up!”

“As I explained to the whole school, Miss Moorsom, I use the modern process. This is only lymph from milkmaids with cowpox, a much milder infection than smallpox.”

“Hence vaccination, from vacca, a cow,” Lister says at the back of the line.

“Will that braggart never cease showing off?” That’s Jane, among the Seniors.

Eliza’s face scalds on Lister’s behalf.

“How’s your cough, at night?” Dr. Mather’s asking Fanny.

“Much the same.”

“I’ll stop in next week and try leeches on your chest.”

“Thank you, sir,” Fanny says fearfully.

“Mercy won’t come down from the library,” Margaret’s telling Betty, “because her parents say it’s unchristian to take part of an animal into yourself.”

Lister snorts. “What does she think she’s doing when she tucks into a plate of beef?”

Nan is examining her own tiny reddened spot. “So I’m going to catch cowpox now?”

Dr. Mather shakes his head. “Some get a little scab, some a slight malaise, that’s all. And some fret themselves into a high fever,” he adds with a smile, “especially silly schoolgirls who suffer from suggestibility and morbid imagination.”

That makes them all laugh.

In Woodhouselee’s General History, Miss Lewin’s class has reached India, which merits a whole two pages. One phrase lodges in Eliza’s head—how the Company conquered and obtained possession of the Subcontinent, which sounds oddly like a man on his wedding night.

Lister mentions something about Bonaparte’s recent march into Naples to put his own brother on the throne.

“That’s quite a different thing,” Miss Lewin reproves her. “The French Enemy is brutally invading the kingdoms of Europe, rather than winning them over by patent superiority of leadership as the British have done across the Empire.”

Eliza’s favourite line in Woodhouselee is There is a high probability that India was the great school from which the most early polished nations of Europe derived their knowledge of arts, sciences, and literature. But then she reflects that if India is a school, Eliza was expelled at six years old, so it’s far from clear what she could have learned.

“Tell me more about Madras, to warm me up,” Lister orders from her chilly cot that night.

Eliza smiles as she rubs at her little burning vaccination spot. She tries to conjure it up, that perfumed lost domain of Myrtle Grove. “I remember swinging.”

“On what?”

“I couldn’t sleep without being rocked in my cradle, so my ayah had a bed made for me in a. . .” She fumbles for the word, moves her hand back and forth in the faint moonlight that leaks through the curtains.

“A hammock?”

“But made of wood. And in the gardens, too, there was a great banyan tree, and hanging from it, a swing we used to ride on.” Jane and Eliza broke off the leaves and used the milky juice on their teeth to keep their breath sweet, and it was said to ward off bad dreams too.

“Sitting down?”

She shakes her head. “Standing on the board. Like an equestrienne, upright on a horse.” She knows Lister longs to visit a circus.

“Riding the air!”

“Jhoola,” Eliza remembers. “That was what the swinging bed was called.” Unless her memory’s playing tricks. “And at night the servants would capture us fireflies in a jar.”

“What are fireflies?”

“Like glowworms, but they fly around.”

Lister marvels at that.

In his next class, Mr. Halfpenny sets the Middles to drawing from life—just faces, to avoid any impropriety. They set two benches arm’s length apart and the girls sit in pairs, sketching on their escritoires.

Eliza’s gaze locks onto Lister’s. “Don’t make me laugh.”

“I wouldn’t dream of such a thing.”

After a minute, she hisses, “Stop it.”

“What am I doing?”

“Being. . .yourself.” Keen blue eyes; small, firm mouth, a little pursed. Not beautiful. No one has ever described Miss Anne Lister as a beauty.

On both sides of them, Eliza’s aware of amiable bickering. “Look up, Nan?”

“Hold that expression.”

“What expression?”

“Betty! Put your lips back the way they were.”

“Just so. Face me head-on.”

“Chin up again?”

Eliza’s remembering when her form was set this same exercise at the Tottenham school. The London girl who was told to draw Eliza filled in the whole face with the side of the charcoal. When challenged by the master, she muttered, Well, Miss Raine is hardly paper coloured.

Nasty little bitch, Eliza mouths to herself with a silent satisfaction.

Already the models are peering at the drawings and raising objections. “Is my nose really so big?”

“I look as if I have moustaches!”

“My ear is a cabbage.”

“Beg pardon, the charcoal skidded.”

Eliza draws on. It’s a curious sensation, tracing the lines of Lister’s face and neck and shoulders. Touching them, but at a remove.

Lister won’t let Eliza see her sketch. “It’s all wrong. It doesn’t capture a tenth of your. . .” She circles her hand as if trying to paint on the air.

Mr. Halfpenny hums and haws over their sketches; Eliza can tell he doesn’t want to be unkind. Next he sets them all to draw themselves, in the hope that they’ll be more used to their own features, so will capture them more accurately.

The Middles queue up two by two, to take a minute at the overmantel mirror and copy their features with a fine stick of charcoal. Then they return to their seats to work up their drawings. This is even harder, somehow.

Lister’s done hers in a tearing hurry, and smeared it with the heel of her hand already.

“You’ve made yourself a curly-haired Roman,” Eliza observes. “A young soldier.”

Lister likes that. She appraises Eliza’s drawing. “Well. . .your left eye’s not bad. The way the curve of the eyebrow frames it.”

“No flattery, please,” Eliza says, sardonic. She studies her own imperfect features in the drawing. The most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, Lister said. Eliza can’t find it, not today; beauty seems to leak away from every inch of her face.

On the other side, Lister and Margaret are having an animated conversation about Newcastle mine-leases, whatever they are.

The most beautiful girl. Is Lister just a dissembler and romancer, a teller of tall tales? All Cretans are liars. Eliza feels shame rise in her like water in a gutter. She rips up her drawing.

The sound draws glances.

“Miss Raine?”

“I spoiled it, sir. I beg pardon. I’ll do another.”

She gathers the curling pieces and brings them over to the wastepaper basket.

At dinner, Eliza carries over her plate of toad-in-the-hole with onions, to find Lister interrogating Fanny. “I know that’s the story you were told, but it makes no sense. Your nursemaid let a child of two run along the edge of a precipice?”

Fanny is blinking in perplexity. “Whitby West Cliff, between the flagstaff and the battery.”

“The ground’s all worn away and frayed there, like the hem of a petticoat,” Nan puts in, “but I’m sure this Meg had Fanny by the leading strings.”

Lister shakes her head. “If she had, you wouldn’t have gone over, would you, Fanny?”

She frowns, rubbing her smaller arm. “Perhaps she was holding my hand? Or I was in her arms?”

“In either of those cases, the two of you would have fallen together, all the way down.”

“No need to badger the girl so,” Betty murmurs.

Lister slouches back in her chair, and makes a face at Eliza, to drag her into the argument.

“Could the wind have pulled you away from your Meg, before it bowled you both over the edge?” Eliza’s trying to remember whether heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones.

Nan nods. “In Scarborough we get terrible gusts—though our cliffs are rather higher, of course.”

Margaret swallows her last bite of sausage and says, “If you toppled over together, and were caught on a slight ledge, perhaps, but your nursemaid rolled off. . .”

“Too many ifs.” Lister shakes her head. “It allows of only one logical explanation, Fanny: this Meg threw herself off the cliff—”

Gasps of protest.

“—leaving you to your own devices, whereupon you tripped and broke your arm.”

Shoving away her cleared plate, Mercy tells Lister, “Suicide is a heinous sin.”

“I only named it, not recommended it.”

“This is not some gory tale,” Margaret snaps. “It’s Fanny’s own history.”

“All the more reason for her to know the true version,” Lister argues. “Was your nursemaid unhappy? Or disturbed in her wits?”

“Nobody ever said!”

“Fanny was only two,” Nan reminds them.

“I heard of a groom who made away with himself with a pistol,” Betty mentions, “and the inquest found it to have been an accident. Everyone knew, but no one would—”

“Piano!” Mrs. Tate appeared beside them, furious.

An icy afternoon, but Miss Robinson insists they do their Gymnastics in the courtyard, draped in extra shawls. As they hoist and lower their dumbbells in the glittering winter sun, Eliza wonders how this can possibly beautify the figure, as the prospectus promises.

“We used to perform our exercises on the front lawn,” Betty tells Lister, “until some young gentlemen of my acquaintance started gathering to watch through the fence.”

Eliza’s amused. “They were only passing by.”

Betty fixes her with a stony stare. “They were so inflamed by the elegance of our movements, the Head feared they’d make an attempt to abduct one of us.”

“It would have been you, if anyone,” Margaret assures her.

“No, you, my lovely.”

“Are you featherbrains really arguing over which of you would be an abductor’s choice?” Lister asks.

“No!”

“Yes, they are,” Mercy agrees.

“I don’t quite follow,” Lister says. “Do you hope to be ravished?”

That makes Betty and Margaret howl.

“Young ladies!” Miss Robinson demonstrates a new move, clinking two dumbbells overhead. “Miss Peirson, you may use just one.”

“Thank you, madam,” Fanny says.

The Middles all shuffle into line to copy the mistress.

There’s a new game that Eliza finds very irksome. It’ll start out of nowhere, for instance this evening, at Recreation in the draughty refectory. Bent over her embroidery frame, Betty lifts her head and complains, “Ah! J’ai perdu la partie.”

“You’ve lost what?” Eliza wants to know.

Margaret sighs. “And I.”

Lister complains, “Now you two have made me lose it too.”

Margaret smirks. “Well, that’s the game.”

Eliza forgets to ask Lister about it, later, when they’re in the Slope and chattering about the best books they’ve ever read.

But the very next day, at breakfast, Fanny suddenly puts her hand to her temple as if she’s in pain. “J’ai perdu la partie.”

Groans from Nan and Margaret.

“What is this game?” Eliza demands.

“It’s the game,” Fanny says in an innocent voice.

“The J’ai perdu la partie game,” Nan adds smugly.

“How do you play it?”

“I’m afraid you’ve already lost,” Nan tells Eliza.

“That’s nonsense. I haven’t even begun.”

Betty and Margaret shake their heads.

“I’m not playing your stupid game,” Eliza informs them.

“Ah, but everyone’s playing it, all the time.”

That night, brushing her hair, she remembers to say to Lister, “Explain that game to me.”

“Oh, hang it!”

Eliza’s eyebrows go up at the curse.

“You’ve just made me lose, Raine.”

“What did I do?”

“You mentioned the game.”

“Is it like the Scottish play—it mustn’t be named aloud?”

Lister shakes her head. “Even if you don’t name it, I’m afraid you’ve lost.”

“How so?”

“On that point, I’m sworn to secrecy.”

Eliza grits her teeth. “Who made you swear not to tell me? Margaret? Betty?”

“No, no, don’t take offence. It’s simply the rule.”

“What is this wretched game?”

“I’m forbidden to say.” Lister leaps onto Eliza’s bed, making the boards creak. She leans in very close and murmurs, “I really wouldn’t recommend giving it too much thought.”

“But if you lot are all playing it all the time. . .you must think about it.”

Lister nods. “And you’ve seen how often we lose.”

Eliza tries to shake off her anger and think this through. Her brows knit. “So. . .if you find yourself thinking about the game, you lose?”

A broad grin.

“It’s a game of forgetting, then?”

Lister presses a finger to her own lips.

“So the way to win the game would. . .”

“Oh, no one can win, in the end, only postpone losing.”

“By what, not thinking about the game, for a long stretch?”

Lister doffs an imaginary cap in congratulation.

“As long as you don’t think about it, you’re winning?” Eliza asks. “But the moment you become aware of that fact, you’ve lost?”

“There’s a certain satisfaction in announcing it, though,” Lister tells her, “because then everyone who hears you loses too. A trouble shared is a trouble halved, and all that.”

Eliza bursts out laughing. “Who invented this? It’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Lister shrugs. “Winter’s long.”

Snow quilts the ground in all directions. Eliza simply can’t see how having numb hands is edifying or educational.

In Grammar and Literature class, some of the Middles tuck their fingers into their armpits under their arms. Eliza studies the couplet:

Hence vain deluding Joys,

The brood of Folly without father bred. . .

“What does Mr. Milton mean by that, without father bred?” Miss Lewin asks.

A silence; is Eliza alone in finding it awkward?

Mercy’s hand is up, of course, like a lone sapling on the moor. “It’s a figure of speech, madam. Joys are personified as the illegitimate children of Folly.”

Illegitimate seems to hang on the air like a smell. Eliza glances under her eyelashes at Margaret, whose face is blank.

The mistress nods. “And why, in later lines, does the poet describe Melancholy’s face as o’er-laid with black?”

“It’s so bright, it would dazzle us,” Lister says, “so the goddess has had to shade herself with the colour of wisdom.”

Betty puts her hand up. “He just means a black veil, though, doesn’t he?”

Miss Lewin tilts her head, which makes her wig slide half an inch.

“She can’t actually be dark-skinned, no?”

Eliza wills herself to be part of the furniture, invisible.

“It says so right here, Betty.” Lister punches the page with her finger. “The poet compares Melancholy to an Ethiop queen.”

“But—”

“He could hardly have made it any clearer for readers slow of understanding.”

Betty’s eyes bulge with rage.

Miss Lewin raises her voice. “Please ask for permission to speak rather than indulging in bickering amongst yourselves.”

Lister’s lips press together hard.

“Beg pardon, madam, I don’t understand.” Fanny has her shorter arm half up. “Isn’t it an illness?”

Dark skin? Eliza keeps her head down. Could the girl in all seriousness believe it spreads like leprosy?

“Melancholy is more properly defined as a mood,” Miss Lewin explains, “which, if too much indulged, can develop into a persistent affliction of mind. But Mr. Milton is using the word here to suggest a serious disposition—hence his elaborate praise of the beauties of Melancholy. Now, each of you learn a dozen lines of Il Penseroso, any dozen of your own choosing.”

Ugh. That’s like allowing the prisoner to pick the whip. Eliza finds a passage that doesn’t seem to contain any unpronounceable words, and reminds her of King’s Manor. She reads it to herself, doggedly, over and over:

But let my due feet never fail

To walk the studious cloister’s pale,

And love the high embowed roof,

With antique pillars massy proof. . .

On their way to lunch, Lister leads her into the rear courtyard, which is lightly fleeced with snow.

“This is the wrong way.”

“Just let me show you something, Raine.” She pulls Eliza up the great stone outdoor staircase and unlatches a pair of doors.

“I don’t suppose we’re meant to—”

“It’s not barred, though, is it?” Lister asks.

The granary is enormous, and almost entirely filled with sacks, stuffed fat and tight and piled high on one another in a messy pyramid. Lit by thin wintry sun, it’s a heap of cushions for giants. Eliza’s mouth falls open. “Lister! Have you ever seen the like?”

“Reminds me of last Sunday’s verse from Genesis, about Joseph’s dream,” Lister says. “And let them gather all the food of those good years that are coming, and store up grain under the authority of Pharaoh.”

This confirms a suspicion of Eliza’s, that while she retains only random lines from the passages they’re forced to memorise, Lister keeps it all locked away in her head.

Lister sniffs the air. “I wonder what kind of corn it is. Smells more like oats than wheat, unless there’s barley too?”

With the yellow day slicing in, making sundust of the chaff that speckles the air, the granary seems otherworldly to Eliza. Like that old tale about the girl who had to spin a roomful of straw into gold.

She crosses to peek out the window, which looks down on the Ropewalk between the Manor’s wall and the old city wall. The workmen have their dusty fibres stretched out as far as she can see in both directions; they’re twisting and winding them, wrapping them around their waists, faces running with sweat despite the cold.

At her side, Lister says: “A thousand feet.”

“What?”

“Ropes for the Navy—a thousand is the regulation length.”

“The things you know,” Eliza murmurs automatically.

Lister moves back into the room and scrambles onto a grain sack. Then the next.

“Don’t you dare!”

“Oh, don’t I, though?” Lister grins down at her like a monkey from a tree. “Come on up. Unless you’re scared?”

Eliza sets her jaw, lifts her hem, and climbs the first sack. Her cold muscles protest.

Lister retreats upwards, giggling. Not looking where she’s going.

Eliza puts her arms out for balance. So high, already. She thinks of the Ethiop queen in the old poem.

Lister points up at a pierced feature in the ceiling: “That must be the ventilator, for cooling the place down when they had dances here.”

Eliza imagines the room full of whirling revellers instead of bagged grain. She tugs herself up, closer to Lister.

“Catch me if you can.” Then Lister tips over, askew. Her leg’s gone right down between two sacks.

The two of them might start a landslide; they could be crushed to death like the wilful children in so many storybooks. Eliza calls, “Are you trapped?”

“Not a bit. Give me a pull, will you?”

Eliza climbs up and squats to get hold of Lister by the elbow. She’s aware of skitterings and squeaking in the unstable pile; she can’t stand rats.

Lister’s helpless with laughter.

“Push yourself up,” Eliza orders. Something moves in the corner of her eye and she jumps, but it’s only Pirate Peg, who’ll see to the rats, surely?

On the next pull, Lister rears up, triumphant, and hugs her so hard that Eliza can hear her own ribs creak. Dizzy, Eliza slips onto the next sack, and before she knows it, her right stocking’s laid bare. “Oh no, where’s my shoe?”

“Where did it come off?”

“How should I know?”

The shoe—one of a dark green nankeen pair—is lost utterly. Lister laughs and laughs.

Eliza has to scurry upstairs to the Slope to change into a lace-up pair, and she gets an inattention mark for being late to lunch.

Tonight she’s first in the Slope. Looking out at the pewter fields gives her a shiver, before she pulls the curtains. That luxurious feeling of indulging in soft sadness for no good reason, like a girl in a romance.

Eliza gets ready for bed, setting her front curls by the lantern light; the papers are worn and brittle from being wetted and dried so many times. A little bored, and unused to being alone in this little garret where until August she was always alone, she looks through the treasures she keeps hidden in her bottom drawer: William Raine’s gold locket (empty), knee buckles, epaulets, a silver bell. A small domed birdcage in ivory and brass wire, full of fistfuls of coins: silver fanams and rupees, gold mohurs, pagodas. (When Jane shook her off, at the Tottenham school, Eliza took to playing with these coins, ascribing different characters to the images in low relief.) Folded fancy cloths: a painted chintz, a wavy striped alacha, a peacock-and-elephant palampore bedspread. Bengali muslin too fancy for a schoolgirl to wear, worked in gold and silver, with iridescent beetle-wing embroidery.

She looks through Lister’s bottom drawer for something new to read. The Pleasures of Hope, in heroic couplets; a history of the Roman Empire in six volumes; a Mr. Emerson on something called mechanics (with diagrams of a vehicle powered by the wind—could that be right?). Poems from the Portuguese of Luis de Camoens; Eliza reads a poignant one. She’s amused to see that Lister’s disguised several books to avoid detection by the proprietors; a French novel called Julie wears the cover of The Universal Preceptor.

From the poems of Ovid in Latin, a scrap of paper zigzags to the floor. When Eliza picks it up, she’s confused. A sketch of an eye?

Eliza’s eye. Lister must have rescued it from the wastepaper basket, in Drawing class.

Footsteps in the passage. She tucks the tiny picture back into Ovid, though she’s not sure she has the right page, and shoves the book into the drawer.

Lister rushes in.

“What kept you?”

“Cook let me practise jointing a brace of rabbits sent by Frances’s father.”

If given a week, Eliza would never have guessed that. “Is it one of your secret ambitions to be a butcher?”

Lister scrambles into her night shift. “They’re surprisingly like us, you know.”

“Butchers?”

“All creatures of the class Mammalia. Four limbs, the same organs. . .”

That makes Eliza a little queasy.

Mrs. Tate is only a few minutes behind Lister. She says good night and takes away their lantern.

In the dark, Eliza finds she’s still mulling over her paper eye. “Tell me a story, Lister.”

“Let me sleep, can’t you?”

“Why should you sleep if I can’t?”

“Oh, you nuisance, you pest, you lovely vexation!”

“One little tale,” she wheedles. “Something out of one of your books?”

“I give in. Let’s see.” Lister takes a long breath. “There’s an old legend about the gods creating the first human beings—will that do?”

“It’ll do very well.”

“Each one of these beings had two arms, and two feet—”

“Like any of us,” Eliza objects, thinking of the rabbits.

“But two heads also.”

She tries to picture that.

“The Children of the Earth was the name for double females,” Lister goes on, “and the Children of the Sun, for double males. The Children of the Moon had both male and female parts.”

Eliza’s startled by that notion.

Lister’s voice changes. “But Zeus feared these new creatures were too wonderful, too powerful, and might rise up against the Gods of Olympus. So he split each of them into two half-persons.”

“This is a strange story.”

“A Child of the Moon became a male and a female, a Child of the Sun, two males, and a Child of the Earth, two females. Each one stumbled away on two legs, on its own. Imagine the pain of being split from your twin self, Raine.”

Eliza nods in the thick darkness.

“So lonely, always longing,” Lister says, “they couldn’t eat or drink or sleep. They searched the world for what they’d lost, what had been robbed from them. And if two of them were lucky enough to find their missing matches—of course the two halves would press together and hold on tight in the vain hope of being made whole again.”

“Why vain?”

“Well, because they could only be close,” Lister says sensibly, “not one double person, not anymore. Not ever again.”

Eliza lets that sink in. “Still, they must have been glad.”

“Indeed. It was the nearest thing to happiness. So that, my dear Raine, is the story of the invention of love.”

She lies puzzling over that; listens to Lister’s breathing until it’s as softly regular as the tick of a clock.

On the first day of February, the Middles race one another to the top of Ouse Bridge’s great slippery span. Eliza staggers, almost trips. “I felt a stone lurch!”

Lister taps the chiselled figures: 1566. “Since this bridge has stood for two and a half centuries, I say it’ll stand for ever.”

“Since it’s stood for two and a half centuries,” Margaret pants, “it could be considered more likely to fall down every day.”

The Middles lean over the parapet to look for faces at the barred windows of the City Gaol. None today. “It must be so damp in there,” Frances says in a troubled tone.

Lister proposes ducks and drakes. She’s the only one who manages more than two skips, though a boatman moving downriver roars when her stone glances off his hull, and she has to shout an apology.

“I wonder if he’s going through my family’s port,” Betty says. “Foster boats work the whole Ouse, you know. We have a sloop, and a great brig, and Papa’s having another one built of upwards of three hundred tons.”

The Middles get to talking about Saint Valentine, and the pleasant superstition that the first girl on whom a young man’s eyes fall, on the saint’s day, is his true love. “It won’t count if she schemes to make it happen—lingers outside his door before sun-up, say,” Margaret teases Betty.

Who protests, “She never would!”

“Hey, I spy oyster shells. They’d work better for skimming.” Lister’s off, galloping down the slope of the bridge.

Eliza rushes to the parapet to watch her pick her way to the edge. Lister’s kidskin half-boots are dark at the toes already.

“Strictly forbidden,” Mercy calls.

Eliza surprises herself by saying, “Oh, hold your tongue, you killjoy.”

Mercy blinks, abashed.

Lister rushes back up with a dozen shells, and it turns out they do fly better than stones. The Middles play ducks and drakes till they’ve lost them all.

Next morning Miss Lewin sets the Middles a particularly long paragraph out of The Accidence; or, First Rudiments of English Grammar that starts, A subordinate clause is dependent on the main clause, as an inferior in rank is subordinate to the authority of his superior.

Lister lets out a grunt.

“Do you mean to be insubordinate, Miss Lister?”

They look around; was that the mistress’s attempt at a joke?

Lister grins. “Aren’t we rather too old for so much rote learning, madam?”

In one of her sudden heats, Miss Lewin flaps her red cheeks with her fan. “To commit improving material to memory is a cornerstone of learning.”

“Not just a corner, here,” Lister mutters, “but the whole edifice, it seems.”

“Our aim is to stock the mind with knowledge and wisdom.”

The corners of Lister’s mouth turn down. “Stored supplies can moulder, no? If we were to study more varied and difficult—”

“I can’t agree.”

Everyone looks at Eliza, who’s spoken without putting her hand up, and contradicted her friend. She feels hot in the face.

Miss Lewin surprises her by gesturing for her to go on.

She stammers, looking only at Lister, “All I mean is—perhaps you can afford to scorn memorisation because your head is a treasury already, and never too full to fit more. You skim a book once and you possess it!” That’s a compliment, so why does it come out like an accusation?

“True,” Nan sighs.

“The rest of us”—no, Eliza can’t speak for the class—“many of us have to work hard to retain even a fraction of what we read, and we can’t determine which passage or line we may happen to recall. So learning things by heart. . .” She trails off, losing the thread of her argument.

Head leaning to one side, Lister smiles at her. “But if the mind’s constantly trained to remember rather than to reason, won’t the faculty of memory become overdeveloped and the mind be left lopsided?”

Miss Levin lets out a little snort. “I’m not unduly troubled by the prospect of any of you overdeveloping your minds. Back to the task now, young ladies.”

As a very great treat, Miss Hargrave’s brought the Middles to the Sycamore Tree in Minster Yard. She’s dubious about the prospect of entering a public house, but Mr. Black hurries over, wiping his hands on a cloth.

“I’ve been given to understand that your Rarities are educational?”

“Couldn’t be more so, madam! Marvellous objects, curiosities natural and artificial from divers parts of the known world,” he assures her.

“You’ve gathered them yourself, Mr. Black?”

His mouth twists. “Never having the opportunity to go nowhere, I rely on my agents who traverse the globe.”

Mrs. Tate negotiates sixpence per girl, though Black jokes a little coarsely that some of them look like grown women to him.

The Middles hurry through the beer-stinking common room, past long benches with wooden dividers. A limp maid is swiping at one end of the table while at the other a man sleeps with his face pressed to the board. Drunk, Nan mouths excitedly at the others.

Upstairs, the girls scatter to examine glass-topped cabinets. “Touch nowt on the shelves, if you please,” Black calls out. “Fragile and precious.”

Lister asks, “Is everything here dead?”

“Not at all,” the publican says. “That turtle. . .and the insects in that jar, they’re alive.”

“They’re not moving.”

“Asleep. Or possibly hibernating,” he pronounces.

“My brother’s school visited a collection of live beasts at Pickering,” Lister tells him.

“On trips to London I’ve seen a hippopotamus and a Bengal tiger,” Margaret says, not to be outdone.

“Well, but a menagerie’s a different thing, and right noisome,” Black argues. “This here’s a wunderkammer, a wonder-room. And this fine crocodile was alive and well when I got it,” he adds, pointing. “Used to walk around the room as gentle as a lamb.”

“What happened to it?” Frances asks.

“Went off its tuck. Couldn’t seem to take to our Yorkshire winters.”

Is he eyeing Eliza? Does she seem an exotic species to him? She looks away.

“Here, lassies,” Black calls, “have a gander at this chimpanzee posed alongside an eleven-foot boa constrictor.”

Propped up, wired to an armature of rods, the ape has an unfortunate resemblance to the crucified Christ.

The Middles mill about among the preserved specimens. Eliza’s attention is caught by the great jaw of a walrus; a little stuffed animal called a chipmunk; a bird of implausible size labelled THE GREAT CASSOWARY, which sounds like the stage name of a magician. Anne Boleyn’s straw hat (which Margaret longs to try on); the armour of a Japanese warrior (Lister, ditto); a pair of shoes from China, where women have weirdly tiny feet; and a vial of blood said to have rained down from the sky on the Isle of Wight. Shells, minerals, intricate boxwood carvings. How soon variety begins to blunt the observer’s appetite, Eliza thinks. In a section labelled NATURAL ODDITIES, she peers at a five-legged calf in a jar, and a purported unicorn’s horn.

Lister’s examining something labelled (Eliza hopes falsely) TWO-HEADED SKULL OF A BOY. “I’d like to dissect a corpse one day.”

“You only say these things to torment me,” Eliza murmurs.

Mr. Black must have overheard, because he laughs and tells Lister, “I applaud your scientific spirit, miss.”

Men can’t help but like Lister, Eliza’s noticed.

When the girls start getting restless, Black demonstrates a new kind of match that only needs dipping into a little bottle to make it burst into flame. Then an invention called a shearing frame, which allows one man turning a crank to cut as much fabric as eight using hand shears.

“Where do they go, the others?” Eliza wants to know.

“The other what, now?”

“The other seven men. Do they, ah, starve?” She can’t think of a politer word for it.

Black shrugs. “I suppose they must make their bread another way.”

Miss Hargrave says, “The tide of progress is impossible to hold back.”

Next Black makes electricity by linking two pieces of metal with a dead frog’s leg, so it leaps to life; that conjuring trick earns him a round of applause.

“There’s a man in London who does this on hanged criminals,” Lister whispers to Eliza. “Makes the cadavers blink and clench their fists.”

Eliza gives her a little shove.

Black gets the girls to hold hands in a ring and sends a shock right through them. Fanny giggles so much she squirms as if she’s about to wet herself.

The Head tells her that immoderate laughter is never in good taste.

With a great flourish, Black pulls a dust sheet off a bulky object in the corner. A beautiful blond girl doll, life-sized, leans over a desk.

“Mirabile dictu!” That’s Lister.

Eliza cranes to see past her classmates. At a touch from Black, the automaton moves the feather pen in her hand and writes on the page. “There’s ink coming out!”

Betty reads aloud, “Dear—”

“Her head follows the writing,” Eliza says. “Look.”

“So do her eyes.” Mercy sounds appalled.

Eliza reads, “Dear Young Ladies of. . .”

“Don’t touch, now,” Black warns. ”She’s more than forty years old, the jewel of my collection. Made of six thousand different pieces by a Swiss watchmaker.”

“Where does one wind the thing up?” Miss Hargrave asks.

“No need, she powers herself.”

The Head nods warily, to give the impression she understands.

The automaton writes on. Dear Young Ladies of the Manor School—

They scream at that.

“But how does she know us?” Eliza worries.

Black shrugs, smirks.

Lister says in her ear, “He must have told her, somehow.”

That’s just as unnerving. Eliza would almost prefer a doll that moves on her own than one carrying out the secret orders of her master.

As the machine finishes, and comes to a stop, pen held in midair as if she’s considering her next thought, Black whips out the page and holds it up. Dear Young Ladies of the Manor School, am I not a rarity?

And even though after that the man draws blinds down over the windows so he can scare the girls with his finale, a magic-lantern show—ghosts hovering in midair, shrinking and looming by turn, skeletons opening their own coffins—Eliza remains unnerved by the writing doll, and keeps sneaking looks at where she sits in the darkest corner of the room.

Next morning, Betty’s gone missing.

All Margaret’s able to report is that her friend was called into Miss Hargrave’s parlour. In whispers, the Middles debate what Betty’s transgression could be.

At lunch, she’s there with a black ribbon tacked a little unevenly onto the edge of her mobcap, her lovely face as puffy as rising dough. Barely touching her boiled eggs and pickled cabbage. She gives her news stonily.

It shocks them all, though it shouldn’t.

“How old was he?” Nan asks.

“Fifty-eight.”

“My father was that exact age.” Margaret grips Betty by the upper arm, as a guard might a prisoner.

“Had the poor man been ill?” is all Eliza can think to ask.

“Not that I was told.”

None of them want to be the one who starts Betty crying again.

“You should eat something, my sweet,” Margaret tells her.

Betty turns a piece of cabbage with her fork. “I must go and pack.”

“Will you stay long after the funeral?” Fanny wants to know.

Betty’s voice is faint. “I had a letter from Mother. I’m not to come back at all.”

Stares all round.

“No,” Margaret growls.

It’s Lister who puts the question: “Can’t you afford the fees now?”

“Of course she can,” Margaret barks. “She’s still a Foster. The bank, the shipyard, the shop—her brothers will keep the whole concern running.”

Quite flatly, Betty tells them: “Mother says she’ll need me at home. I’m the only unmarried girl.”

How long will Betty be needed? Eliza wonders with a sort of dread. She pictures the lovely girl, not making her début in a place of fashionable resort, not plucking the suitor of her choice from a buzzing throng. Stuck in her small town, making herself useful, agreeable, or at the very least decorative, for the rest of her life.

“Tell your mother—ask her, beg her—”

Betty silences Margaret with a hard embrace. Then pulls herself away.

In the Slope that evening, Lister’s polishing her shoes with hard strokes. “I’ve no particular penchant for Betty Foster, who thinks far too well of herself—”

“We shouldn’t speak ill of her.” And who can match Lister for self-satisfaction, anyway?

“—but it does give me the shivers to see a hole torn in our numbers. Like losing a man in battle.”

“Come, Lister, she’s not dead.” Just bereaved and banished.

“Dead to us. Betty’s education over like so”—Lister clicks her fingers—“and all because her father’s heart gave out at fifty-eight, and her mother requires a crutch, or has a fancy for one. Are we girls sent to school just to keep us out of the way until our services are required, Raine? Don’t our lives belong to us at all?”

Eliza has no answer. “Are you afraid it could happen to you?”

Lister chuckles. “What, that our mother will insist I stay and grow mouldy at home, as her prop and comfort? Marian can be that—or the one on the way, if it’s a sister. No, I have great plans.”

“Of living at Shibden with Sam and John?”

“So much more than that.” Lister’s voice goes lower, conspiratorial. “I want to be my own master and see the world. Who knows how far I could get? Sail to America. Or overland to Denmark, Russia, Persia, Mesopotamia. . .even India.”

Eliza’s blunt: “But how could you ever afford such travels?”

Lister shrugs magnificently. “I fancy I could raise a few hundred pounds at the gaming tables.”

“Lister!”

“I mean to make a name for myself. Perhaps I’ll win distinction and earn my bread by my pen.”

“You’d write? For publication?”

“Some women do. I’ve thought of trying accounts of travels, as well as translations from the classics. My nom de plume would be Viator.” She pronounces the name with relish. “Imagine if the King conferred a barony on me in the end!”

Ignoring this touch of fantasy, Eliza says, “I like that: Viator.”

“It’s Latin for wayfarer. My first destination will be Florence, in the little realm of Etruria.”

“Why Florence?”

“It’s a cultured place full of artists and foreigners, with ancient ruins, clean streets, even a queen. Or a regent, rather, holding the throne for her little boy. I can picture myself there, on the banks of the Arno, walking in the footsteps of Michelangelo and Galileo, living at liberty.”

And Eliza grasps it: what draws Lister so strongly to that particular spot on the globe may be the impossibility of getting there. As long as Boney guards the Continent like a great spider, Florence might as well be the mythical Land of Cockaigne.

After History, on the next wet afternoon, the two of them linger to read the old graffiti on the windows. Dancing is next, but Lister happens to know that Mr. Tate won’t be turning up; she overheard his little girl confiding in Mary Swann that her father couldn’t get out of bed this morning.

“Perhaps the weather depresses his spirits,” Eliza says.

“I like the rain, myself. It seems to say, Rain, rain.”

She frowns, confused.

“Your name.” Lister points straight up. “The sky’s calling out, Raine!”

Eliza feels a glow at that. A drip on her wrist makes her jump; the old roof hasn’t been mended since King Henry came with his fourth or fifth wife. She moves to one side and squints at a small lozenge of glass. “I love Miss Violet,” she reads.

“S Carville loves Miss Nelson best in the house by far,” Lister contributes.

“This girl here names her two favourites, Richardson & Duncombe. Hey, some of them used surnames like you and I do! And here’s more love avowed for Wood & Collins.” But Eliza’s thinking she wouldn’t want to be named alongside another girl, in a bland trio.

“Look,” Lister says, “Catherine Fisher loves somebody. That’s as much as Miss Fisher was willing to specify.”

“Well, would you dare write more?”

“Watch me!” Then Lister frowns. “I wish I had a diamond. They’re said to be the most precise for writing on glass.”

Eliza doubts that these generations of Manor girls had diamonds to hand; they must have made do with steel knife tips, files, or nails. But she finds herself saying, quite casually, “I have one. Shall I fetch it?”

Lister, for once, is lost for words.

They run upstairs hand in hand, making sure not to be seen. In the distance they hear the scraping of a fiddle; clearly some Senior’s been pressed into service as an accompanist for the Dancing class. Past Cook’s room and the maids’ (empty at this time of day), the silent box room.

In the Slope, Eliza opens her bottom drawer, lifts out the birdcage, and finds the fat roll of silk under the coins. The jewels spill out.

Lister whistles at the dazzling array.

“My mother gave me these, when I was leaving Madras.”

“Mine’s never given me anything but a box on the ears,” Lister jokes.

Sun and stars hair ornaments; birds and flowers in enamel. Necklaces, clasp bracelets, toe-rings, earrings with bunched pearls and suspended fish. Jade, tourmaline, topaz. Only one finger-ring: two large diamonds surrounded by a ring of brilliant chips. “This is a Golconda stone, Mughal cut,” Eliza says, “the finest kind.”

Lister rotates the ring in wonder. “The inside is almost as beautiful as the outside.”

Eliza nods, fingering the foliate engraving on the gold. “Shall we go?” Oddly shy.

They find their way back to the classroom, careful not to be intercepted. Lister finds a clear space inside a tiny pane, low down.

(So as not to attract attention, Eliza thinks.)

She sets the diamond ring to the glass.

“You wouldn’t put”—my name, Eliza almost says—“names?” She doesn’t know if she’s more appalled or thrilled at the idea.

Lister grimaces. “I suppose it would seem a little vulgar to spell them out on the glass, to be gaped at for centuries.”

Them. Does that mean that Lister wants to write Lister loves, and then add several names? “What are you going to put?”

“You really don’t want to be immortalised?” Lister’s half laughing.

Eliza does but is terrified. “No names,” she whispers.

“As you please, my lady.” Lister crouches, leans on the leading, and sets to work, scoring neat little lines to form her letters.

With—is that the first word? Eliza stoops near, only inches away. Impatience cramps her. With this. On the next line: Diamond. Oh, she sees it’s not about her at all; the gem seems to be speaking of itself. She swallows her disappointment. She reads a word at a time. With this Diamond I cut this glass.

“Wait for it,” Lister murmurs.

“If we’re here much longer we’ll be caught.” Leaving another unfinished message preserved for the centuries.

“Don’t rush me, or I’ll make a mistake that can never be erased.”

Eliza forces herself to be patient. With this Diamond I cut this glass, she reads again. Waits for the next words. With this face—

What, the diamond’s face? Or Lister’s face?

Suddenly Lister’s head turns and she’s kissing Eliza, claiming her mouth like a low-hanging fruit.

And afterwards (if a kiss can be said to have a beginning or end, when it makes such a strange, lasting lull in the spinning of the world), Lister returns to her work as if nothing’s happened.

Blinking, Eliza stares at the verse until Lister’s completed it.

With this

Diamond I cut

this glass with

this face I kissed

a lass

“No names, as requested.” Lister makes a little bow. “But it says for all to see, if only they’ve wit to read it.”

Eliza nods, unable to speak. Will any of the other pupils spot it? Will they think it an old message—maybe a boy’s message—they never noticed before?

“Here.” Lister’s holding out the ring on her flat palm, its hard gem unharmed.

For a moment Eliza thinks Lister’s asking her to write something too. But the kiss has left her dumbstruck, feeling too much for words. Besides, Lister’s the writer, the doer, the darer.

“It’s yours.”

Oh, Lister’s only returning the ring. “No,” Eliza breathes.

“Go on.”

“No. What I give, I don’t take back.”

Lister’s face lights up, and she closes her fist around the diamond.