SINCE THE DIAMOND, since the kiss, what’s between them is a stone rolling down a hill.

Fondness, except pricklier. Warmth, though it makes Eliza shake. A pull between the two of them that’s almost painful, like a fishhook.

Lister helps her on with her Spencer, in the mornings, and Eliza makes both their beds. If ever Lister has a stomachache, Eliza goes to ask Mrs. Tate for a hot brick. Lister lays a snowdrop on Eliza’s washstand one day, a primrose the next. She proposes a ramble whenever they have half an hour of the afternoon free. Eliza’s never walked so much in her life. Out by Gillygate and north as far as the first turnpike; by Monkgate, and around the city walls; over Ouse Bridge and back by the Lendal Ferry to the Manor Shore. The two of them watch farmers sow spring fields with barley and wheat. They seem to be in conversation even when they’re silent. Rain doesn’t stop them. (Raine, it says, Raine!) Lister has a gentleman’s umbrella she carries by a leather strap through the handle, huge enough to cover them both.

They sing together as they walk, softly enough not to be heard and reported for caterwauling in the street.

Fare thee well the love I bear thee,

Hopeless yet shall true remain,

Never one I loved before thee,

Ne’er thy like shall see again.

Some of their other favourites are “Abroad as I Was Walking,” “Black-Eyed Susan,” “Loose Every Sail to the Breeze.” Eliza finds a sheet of music on her pillow, “Je suis Lindor,” with a message pencilled at the top: Sung by the Count in disguise as a poor man, not to be played too often for fear of catching the infection of love!

The weather gets bitter again as March goes on. Eliza wears a pelisse to the knees now, and gathers its loose sleeves in her hands; she adds another flannel petticoat, and fingerless mittens up to her elbows. But still she trembles, sitting still in class, and when called on to repeat the lesson, her teeth chatter.

Miss Lewin seems to suffer less from her flushes, but she wipes the end of her dripping nose a lot. “These long winters!”

“From whereabouts in the South do you hail, madam, may I ask?” That’s Frances.

“Hammersmith, Miss Selby. A delightful little town to the west of the capital. Among our neighbours were counted poets, painters, musicians. . .” Miss Lewin sounds rather peeved to be in Yorkshire.

Everyone seems irritable these days, except Eliza and Lister. What’s between them grows like a creeper that covers the ugliest bricks and drainpipes in living green.

Margaret hasn’t heard from Betty, and hasn’t written. A jerky shrug, when Eliza asks at lunch one day. “Our paths are unlikely to cross again.”

“Oh, Margaret, whyever not?”

“Don’t be naive. School friendships are just that.”

For you, Eliza wants to say. She won’t believe this time at the Manor is a childish approximation of real life. Friendship, true and living friendship, has proved to be a bottomless well of surprise. Lister kissed her, and what’s more, etched it on glass for ever; will always prize Eliza and care for her more than anyone else in the world. Now Eliza will never be alone.

Across the table, Nan looks up from her letter. “I have a brother. Well, a half-brother.”

The Middles congratulate her.

“So, just six months after the wedding,” Lister comments.

Nan grimaces. “Almost seven months. I’m told he’s very small.”

“The infants who come so, ah, early, shall we say, are generally described so.”

“Leave her alone, Lister.” Fanny with unusual firmness.

“It’s all right,” Nan tells Fanny. In a baleful whisper: “I’m not one bit surprised about the timing. Really, my father’s new bride is nothing more nor less than a dirty har—”

“Nan!” Mercy interrupts the offensive word.

“Don’t you dare report her,” Margaret warns Mercy. “Hasn’t Nan enough to bear?”

Eliza picks the last of her roast gudgeon off the bones. Having wedded this woman of barely twenty, in the nick of time, Mr. Moorsom seems to have saved her reputation, just about. But people will still talk; people can’t be stopped from talking.

“I had a letter from Sam,” Lister says that night in the Slope, yanking off her false curls. “Our progenitrix continues to embarrass us.”

Eliza doesn’t know the word but guesses: “Your mother?”

“I suppose I should admire her for being spirited, and going her own way, but she will make a pet of a young man and fawn over him, and she drinks a deal too much too.”

Eliza’s found that Lister is even more frank with her, since the kiss. “How does your father bear it?”

“Oh, the Captain drinks just as much as she does, but no one judges a man for that,” she snaps. “He stays out in low taverns, running up bills he can’t pay. Really there’s little to choose between the two in point of vulgarity.”

Eliza slides her hand into the crook of Lister’s elbow.

Lister presses her arm to her side, trapping Eliza’s fingers warmly. “They’re an insufferably vulgar pair, and I wish my uncle and aunts at Shibden would adopt me outright.”

“But your parents must be very fond of you, at least. They’re surely proud of your talents?”

Lister snorts.

“If they understood your nature—”

“Who does, Raine? Except for you.” Lister’s eyes latch onto Eliza’s so hard that she has trouble catching a breath. “I’ve never had anyone I could tell these dreadful things.”

“Nor I.”

“To unburden, and consign my troubles to a bosom where I know they’ll be kept as safe as treasure. . .to spill myself like ink onto your paper. . .”

All Eliza can do is nod.

“The relief, it makes my heart race. Feel.” Lister lifts Eliza’s hand, setting her hard-knobbed wrist in its curve.

Eliza tightens her fingers; Lister’s narrow wristbones roll. “I can’t tell whether it’s racing. I think it may be my own I’m feeling,” she confesses.

That makes them both laugh.

Next Wednesday, as a very great treat, the young ladies are to go to the Theatre Royal around the corner in Mint Yard.

“It testifies to the dull tenor of our routines that this announcement has caused such a stir,” Lister points out.

“Oh, shush,” Eliza tells her. “It’s the most exciting news of the term.”

“Mr. Butler’s company does a circuit of the North Riding every winter,” Nan says. “I’ve seen Inkle and Yarico and all sorts.”

“The Kembles came up as far as Newcastle when I was a child,” Margaret says. “Mrs. Siddons played a rather antique Ophelia one night, and a buxom Hamlet the next.”

“Oh, my father brought me to those performances,” Frances remembers, smiling. “I couldn’t be convinced that she wasn’t two different persons, an actress and an actor.”

Lister says, “All I’ve seen are fantoccini booths—puppets on strings, you know—and a harlequinade at a fair.”

Eliza’s never been to the theatre either, but wouldn’t admit it in company. She’s rather braver than she used to be, but still not half as brave as Lister.

According to the bills nailed up, the famous comedienne Mrs. Jordan is to give As You Like It. In class, Lister manages to persuade Miss Lewin that they should read it aloud in preparation for the outing. “And I’ll be Rosalind, if you please, madam.”

She shakes her head. “I want you for the melancholy Jaques.”

Lister groans.

The mistress pretends to misunderstand. “Exactly—he’s prey to all the sorrows of the world. Miss Smith, as you read with great correctness, you may take on the role of Rosalind.”

“Is she the one who wears men’s clothes?” Mercy asks warily.

“Yes, but you’ll stay in your own.”

“I won’t be going to any theatre.” The ring of a boast.

Miss Lewin is steadfast. “All the more important for you to develop an appreciation of our national poet in the classroom, then.”

Eliza is assigned the role of Celia—the daughter of one duke and the niece of another, confusingly.

Lister groans again.

“Is it so far beyond my capacities?” Eliza whispers.

Lister shakes her head, as if unable to explain.

The play is in the eighth of twenty-one volumes of Shakespeare’s works; the seven girls pass the tome among them as they read aloud.

By the time they’ve gone through the first few scenes, Eliza understands Lister’s discontent: clearly she’s longing to read Rosalind to Eliza’s Celia, because it sounds as if the cousins are more than cousins. Intimates, in fact, in the extraordinary way Lister and Eliza are. If Celia’s father means to banish Rosalind from court as a traitor, Celia dares him to also exile her (his own daughter): I cannot live out of her company. With an extraordinary confidence, Celia declares to the world what Eliza would have expected her to keep private:

We still have slept together,

Rose at an instant, learned, played, eat together,

And, wheresoe’er we went, like Juno’s swans,

Still we went coupled, and inseparable.

This play from two hundred years ago is somehow blabbing their secrets.

Under the curving wave of her skirt on the classroom bench, Eliza grips Lister’s hand, feeling for the mingled percussion of their pulses. She thinks of the proud swans on the river, coupled, and inseparable.

She soon decides Rosalind is a thrilling character, even with Mercy doing her best to flatten the lines. Especially in the next act when she swaps her skirts for breeches—oh, Lister adores this bit—and calls herself Ganymede. Far from being awkward in her disguise, Rosalind seems set free. Another girl (a silly shepherdess called Phoebe, read by Frances) starts flirting with Rosalind-as-Ganymede, who warns her, Do not fall in love with me, for I am falser than vows made in wine.

Miss Lewin comes down on Frances hard for failing to stress any word in particular. “It is a pretty youth—not very pretty. That line makes no sense unless you stress the word very.”

Frances tries the line again, blushing, a great weal rising on her neck where she’s scratched it. Eliza hopes Miss Lewin will know better than to make this mortification, too, the subject of rebuke, plunging Frances into a vortex of self-consciousness about her self-consciousness.

The scene goes on.

These late March evenings, the refectory fire is so ineffective that the Middles send Lister up to charm the proprietors, and she comes back with permission for them to play any games that will warm them up “without making too much noise.”

For Squeak Piggy Squeak, the Farmer’s blindfolded and spun three times in the Pen (a circle of chairs) till she’s dizzy, then given a pillow. She chooses a Piggy by pointing at random, places the pillow on the Piggy’s lap, and sits on it. From the Piggy’s squeak the Farmer must guess her name, whereupon that Piggy becomes the next Farmer. But if she guesses wrong, she stays trapped in the Pen and must be spun again, over and over, as many times as it takes. One evening Fanny has to stagger dizzily out to the necessary to throw up, and it takes all the rest of the Middles to persuade Mercy that it’s not her duty to make a report to Mrs. Tate.

Eliza likes Here I Bake, which starts with all the girls taking hands to form a circle. In the middle, the Bride touches one pair of hands, “Here I bake,” then another, “here I brew,” then, “here I make my wedding cake.” Finally, she dives at a pair of hands with “Here I mean to break through”—and pushes hard and fast enough to part them. Most girls claim they dread being the Bride, but Eliza finds it rather exciting: the slow pacing around the circle, then the glorious licence to be violent. If the Bride escapes, the girl whose hand first gave way has to take her place, but if the escape fails, the Bride must try again. If she fails three times, she pays a Forfeit, such as having to tell a grave secret, or stand up on a stool as a Statue and let the others place her limbs in any grotesque positions they fancy.

In the Slope, that evening, Lister asks Eliza to trim her hair with her nail scissors. Perhaps it’s to save the expense of a hairdresser, but Eliza feels honoured. She’s nervous at first, then starts to enjoy herself as she crops her way around Lister’s head.

“Take off my front hair too.”

“Oh, but surely—”

“I have my artificial curls. Go on!”

Snip, snip. Done. Startlingly short. Lister’s whole face, like a flame suddenly uncovered.

Hearing Mrs. Tate’s steps in the passage, Eliza snatches up the fallen strands to put in the basket. Lister pulls on her nightcap to cover her bare head.

Once Mrs. Tate’s taken away the lantern, Lister produces her hidden taper, and the eighth volume of Shakespeare, which is too big for any pocket.

“How did you smuggle that out of class?” Eliza asks.

“Between my thighs, squeezed tight,” Lister boasts. “The tricky part was getting up all those stairs.”

They turn straight to As You Like It, and the cousins’ scenes. When the duke calls his daughter’s bluff, Celia doesn’t quail: Shall we be sunder’d? Shall we part, sweet girl? No; let my father seek another heir.

Lister plays Rosalind like she was born to the role: “O how full of briars is this working-day world!” When she hatches the disguise plan, she leaps to her feet to act it out:

Were it not better,

Because that I am more than common tall,

That I did suit me all points like a man?

A gallant curtle-axe upon my thigh,

A boar-spear in my hand—

“What’s a curtle-axe?” Eliza wants to know.

Lister shrugs. “Sounds like a cutlass.” She snatches up Eliza’s hairbrush; slashes, feints, and parries.

Eliza’s glad that Celia’s not all talk, like some girls. I’ll go along with thee, she promises, and that’s just what she does, leaving everything behind as the two run into the woods.

Now go we in content

To liberty, and not to banishment.

Wednesday at last. The theatre’s packed like a barrel of salt beef. Eliza’s never been in such a throng; the auditorium seats more than five hundred, according to Miss Lewin, who’s sitting with a friend but close enough to keep an eye on the pupils. Every Middle and Senior except Mercy is there, on two benches in the pit, very near the stage. Frances and Margaret are side by side, and chattering away, Eliza notices; could the two, bereft of their former friends, be palling up? Sensible of them, she supposes; a second choice is better than none.

The theatre’s so bright and noisy, Eliza finds it hard to concentrate on the performers. A military band plays, which goes down very well with the crowd, and a fat man comes out to lead them in “Rule, Britannia!” Next up is a shrimp of a boy called Master Betty who swaps hats and turbans to perform speeches from various plays, comic and tragic, all with the same grandiose waving of his arms.

“He’s only thirteen,” Nan reports. “When he came on at Covent Garden last year, people were trampled.”

“What, you mean to death?” Lister asks, dubious.

Nan shrugs as if that’s a mere detail.

The people of York don’t seem half as impressed by Master Betty; they talk so loudly that Eliza can hardly hear him. Up in the gallery, the working folk start thundering with their heels to encourage the boy off the stage. Eliza’s boiling hot and fears she needs the pot already; she crosses her legs and puts it out of her mind. When she feels something burning on her neck, she jumps, thinking someone’s thrown something at her—but it’s only wax from a candelabra overhead.

The main piece begins, and Eliza’s glad to have read As You Like It, as otherwise she’d have trouble following in all this hubbub. The famous Mrs. Jordan is awfully natural and pretty, with a plump girlishness and warmth. She comes on all hangdog as Rosalind, pretending to be down in the dumps—“Dear Celia, I show more mirth than I am mistress of, and would you yet I were merrier?”—and the audience applauds and stamps because yes, merrier is exactly what they demand. Mrs. Jordan winks; she strikes a playful pose; she makes them hoot and roar. “What shall be our sport, then?” she asks her coz, but her flirtatious gaze takes in the whole crowd.

Eliza likes her even better in the second act when she swaggers on in ribboned pantaloons and the action has to stop for her to take several bows. You really wouldn’t know she is Irish, from her accent. Or past forty, from her face, and her light-footed gait.

“Apparently she’s had dozens of children for the Duke of Clarence,” Lister says in Eliza’s ear, which she finds hard to believe; wouldn’t it leave some trace? She wonders where they are now, these royal cloud-fallers, these colts-in-the-woods.

So this must be what it is to be a star. Mrs. Jordan’s genius is a sort of generosity, Eliza decides; she lavishes her looks, gestures, and words on five hundred people. (And not just tonight but every night.) She makes almost every line funny, except for the ones she delivers like urgent messages. “Love is merely a madness,” she throws straight out at the pit, as if to Eliza alone, “and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do.” She’s teasing the Orlando fellow, but she sounds as if she means it too. As if love is a nonsensical derangement, and also the only thing in this world that makes a tittle of sense. It’s a cruel line, though. Eliza supposes madmen might require darkness and even whipping, at a pinch, to subdue the most violent cases, but—deserve?

The wrestling scene has been swapped for a fencing match, which does seem more genteel. Touchstone the Fool seizes every chance for acrobatic tricks, dropping through a trapdoor or being catapulted on or off stage. Eliza’s disconcerted when the whole play halts in the middle for a pantomime called Robin Goodfellow. There are thrilling effects: fires, explosions, trees suddenly growing out of rocks. What surprises her most is when Oliver drops dead at the end, and Celia marries Jaques instead. “They’ve changed the story,” she protests in a whisper to Lister.

“Oh well, Shakespeare’s in his grave so long, I doubt he’ll mind.”

A farce with songs is announced, but Miss Hargrave rises to her feet. Mrs. Tate jumps up at the other end of the row and beckons to the pupils, as if the late hour is somehow their fault. They all squeeze out, past a mob of newcomers pushing in to take their seats at half price for the rest of the evening’s entertainment.

Outside in the chill and the dark, Mrs. Tate summons a tiny link-boy to light their way to the Manor with a reeking torch. He leads them home like a line of ants.

At the back, Lister struts and strikes poses. Just before they pass under Bootham Bar, she points up at its three half-size stone figures and remarks, “They always look to me as if they’re contemplating taking a great leap and doing away with themselves.”

“What a morbid notion,” Eliza says.

Lister grabs her hand, winds her up like a top, and sets her spinning across the cobbles.

Mrs. Tate calls, “Miss Raine!”

“Beg pardon, madam,” so helpless with laughter she can barely form the words.

It’s so late now, but Eliza and Lister have never been this wide-awake in their lives, and the Slope, with its curtains drawn wide, is bright with starlight. They talk in whispers, not to disturb the maids who lie sleeping on the other side of the box room.

The question Eliza’s been needing to ask swells like a great berry in her mouth, and all at once she’s not scared to let it out, not scared at all, not scared of anything. “Lister, do you think you and I might be. . .like in your story?”

“Which story?”

“The one from olden days, about the people the gods split.” Eliza waits, pulse banging in her chest. “The double-female ones, parted from their missing halves—what were they called?”

“Children of the Earth.” Lister’s tone is thoughtful.

“You don’t believe we are?”

“We can’t know for sure.”

Eliza’s spirits sink. “I suppose not.”

“Not unless we try.”

She blinks in the luminous night. She doesn’t follow. “Try?”

“To be made whole again. To become one.”

“One. . .”

“Double-person,” Lister says.

“Oh.”

“We should take off our clothes.”

Eliza swallows hard. But yes, she can see that all this fabric is in the way. So she sits up and wriggles her night shift off over her head, then pulls off her cap, for good measure. Now it’s come to this, she sheds everything as easily as a chestnut its shell.

Lister’s gleaming, her bare torso like one of those old Greek marbles; the small breasts of a huntress. Eliza’s dazzled.

Very low: “Let me look at you, Raine.”

Eliza shakes under this hard gaze. She straightens her back.

“We’re not the same,” Lister says. “But close enough to fit.”

“Let’s be closer.” Eliza barely voices the words.

“Do you think?”

Thinking is not what this is.

“Closer still?”

“Closer and closer,” Eliza breathes.

“As close as possible.”

“Closer,” she insists.

They draw closer. The shock of skin. Cold, with heat under.

“Together.” Lister’s whisper is a butterfly spreading its wings in Eliza’s ear.

They press together hard, harder.

Still whispering. “Four legs.”

“Four arms.”

“Can’t tell whose.”

“All parts—”

“Hold tight.”

“Tighter.”

“We’re one. Whole.”

“Stay.”

“Like this.”

Mouths too. Lips warm and cool at once. Snake-tongued. Tangled inextricably. The embrace unbreakable.

In the morning, everything is different. At breakfast, the two of them sit among the Middles, sip milk, and rub dust out of their eyes when no one’s looking.

The day drags by with an air of unreality, as if they’re merely playing the parts of young ladies in a poorly written play. All Eliza can think of is the coming night.

At dinner, the Head reads aloud from an advice manual for young ladies; Eliza tries to close her ears to the droning. “Endeavour to derive some instruction from everything you see or hear. There are lying looks as well as lying words, and even a lying silence. Friendship opens the gates, and she who enters, if not an ally, is a treacherous foe.”

In the Slope at last. They get undressed in awkward silence, backs turned.

Mrs. Tate’s soft footsteps. Eliza rushes to meet her at the door with the lantern.

“Ready, Miss Raine, Miss Lister?”

“Ready, madam,” she assures Mrs. Tate.

“Good night, then.”

“Good night.”

In pitch-black now, without the lantern, Eliza waits for the passage to be quiet. Dreads the qualms that might slip in. Waits the space of a long breath.

Silence.

She and Lister leap at each other.

They can’t see, can only feel their way through a maze of sensations. The astonishment of nakedness. The tendrils of napes, the hang and swing of flesh, the startling to life of breasts, the tender backs of knees, the varieties of fragrant stickiness, the hard push of velveted bone. The lifting and dipping and opening. Howls quite stifled in pillows of flesh. With fingers and thumbs and heels of hands, with lips and tongues and teeth, with wrists and thighs and the very hinges of themselves, the things they find to do. . .

A great wave flings Eliza to shore. Lips salty, battered, blinded.

And again. Gasping silently; holding breath.

No need to ask. Something like a dance of their own devising, something like a storm; it requires every drop of them and leaves them wrecked, then forces them to rise and begin from the start. They’re so tired now, they slip and slide in and out of sleep. Seizing each other over and over as the first light of tomorrow cuts in between the curtains. Maddened and oblivious until the rising bell clangs.

Stuffing her hair into her cap, at the mirror, Eliza watches herself in the dawn twilight. Does this—

Would this count as—

Is this the face of a girl who’s been debauched?

She’s never felt so clean.

In Accounts, Lister rapidly chalks the long division on her slate and Eliza copies it. Lister slips her worn copy of Virgil from the pocket under her frock, and tucks it into the shadow of Arithmetick Made Plain and Simple. She puts a casual finger to a line so no one but Eliza will notice: “Nunc scio quid sit Amor.”

Eliza reads the words three times. All she can guess is, something about love?

With a lead pencil, moving so lightly it barely leaves a trace, Lister glosses it underneath: Now I know what love is.

The days go by like wisps of fog. Only the nights are real. As soon as Mrs. Tate walks away down the passage, a flint is struck within Eliza and Lister, and joy flares up, illuminating and filling the garret. Without a word, without any sound that could betray them: the loosening, heating, holding still, pulsing, lingering, hurrying, rising. Gripping and squeezing and pressing and parting and probing and piercing and mashing and crushing their bodies together till they’re bruised. All in a silence that sings with deafening sweetness inside them.

If Eliza and Lister sleep late and only the bell wakes them, they pull away as if they’re tearing their own skin, and try to keep their hands off each other while they splash at the washbowl and throw on their clothes, but sometimes they’re drawn back together despite themselves, so close, frocks yanked up in haste, with nothing dividing their tangled legs. Then the second bell rips them apart again. The room has such a curious fug, Eliza has to prop the window open to the March breezes before the two rush down to breakfast still throbbing, muffling their scented fingers in their skirts.

Each has been told she looks tired. Lister blames bedbugs; Eliza, bad dreams.

In the daytime she’s groggy and distracted, preoccupied by Lister’s wiry body, which seems to radiate through its incongruous girl-costume. The sleek kidskin of Lister’s jaw; those two muscular dimples in the small of her back; the smooth, leathery skin of her heels. And Eliza is even more unsettled by a ticklish, new awareness of parts of herself. That dip inside her elbow that Lister sucked so hard she marked it; the place on Eliza’s right shoulder blade that leaps at the slightest touch; the nook below her left ear that Lister describes as the softest silk ever spun. Her slippery wet that comes for Lister every time, the nectar that Eliza gives her, or she gives Eliza, and either way it won’t stop spilling. Her breasts that tighten and pang when Lister plays at being an infant that nothing else can soothe. And the nameless, perhaps unnameable, betweens and unders and ups and deeps inside, parts Eliza is half-convinced she didn’t have until Lister bared and brought them to life with a spark from her godlike finger.

A whole week passes before they broach the subject. (Eliza’s been afraid to break the spell by speaking—burst the bubble of their bliss. And whenever they’re alone together, it seems as if their lips are used most eloquently for kissing.) Finally, one mild afternoon, strolling along the Manor Shore and eyeing the pair of swans, she demands, “Who taught you?”

A half-laugh. “Nature, I suppose. Who taught you?”

“But Lister.” Eliza stops short. “You seem to know how—” Hot in the face. “To know everything. Surely you’ve understood this. . .” This what? “. . .all along?”

Lister shakes her head. “Only a vague, violent longing, since the cradle.”

“Really?”

“I had the impression I was one of those new forms that spring up without rhyme or reason, as when one bud on a bush blooms in a different colour. One of Creation’s little jokes.”

“You’re not a joke,” Eliza tells her.

“Not now that I’ve found you.” She takes Eliza’s gloved hand and tucks it through her arm, squeezing it tight.

“I’ve earned three inattention marks this week,” Eliza complains, “whereas you do your work as well as ever.”

Lister shrugs that off. “It’s just a knack for getting things by heart. My waking thoughts and my dreams are all occupied by you. When you walk into the room, I shake, and I ache here.” She rubs the bone in the middle of her chest. “I’m over head and ears in love with you.”

“Oh. Lister.”

“Raine, Raine.”

What can it mean, for the two of them to be in love? Nothing that needs explaining to them; nothing they could explain to anyone else.

Eliza wakes with a heavy, luxurious feeling. Slick, so much so that she fears for a moment that she’s wet the bed. But when she pulls up her night shift, it’s bull’s-eyed with red. She bursts into tears. “I’m damaged.”

Lister chuckles. “It’s only your French cousin.”

“Oh.” Eliza claps her thighs together. Her time, as girls say, come at last.

“Mine visits every fourth Wednesday, like clockwork. The Redcoats have landed—there’s another phrase for it,” Lister says merrily.

Eliza stares at the scarlet swath across the sheet.

“Don’t fret—cold water will take out the blood.” Lister digs a length of cloth out of her dresser. “Now, if your cousin comes on very gently, a folded napkin should do, but if it’s a soaker, you can add sheets of paper.”

Eliza watches Lister line the cloth with scrap pages covered in her own writing, as neatly as if she’s making up a parcel for the post. She puts out her hand: “I can manage.”

“I like seeing to you. Lie down and let me.”

So Eliza does.

At night, the small light of their cheap taper expands, making a glittering pool of Eliza’s Indian goods. “And this is the muslin called woven wind.” She drapes it over Lister’s lean limbs. “One sari takes months to spin—so fine it can be pulled through a ring.”

“I can’t feel a thing, and I can see right through it!”

She thinks of a story to please Lister. “There was this princess Zeb-un-Nissa, a poetess who memorised the whole Koran and never married—the Emperor’s favourite daughter. She was taking the air in the garden one day when her father stormed up and rebuked her for being stark naked, and she assured him that she was wearing seven suits of woven wind muslin.”

Lister laughs, stroking the fabric with the back of her hand. “I’m too plain for such finery.”

You, with all your other gifts, Eliza thinks, what need have you of beauty? “There’s nothing plain about you.”

“Oh, come now. . .”

“Yours isn’t a feminine loveliness,” Eliza protests, “but you’re well made. Beautifully made.”

Lister’s smile is rueful.

“Like a well-forged machine, fit for purpose.” She puts her hands on Lister’s hard shoulders.

Then she retrieves William Raine’s birdcage from her bottom drawer, and takes out the little gold locket. “I believe my eye should just fit in this.”

“Your eye?”

“The paper one that you stole.”

Sheepish at being found out, Lister corrects her: “Salvaged.” She goes to find the scrap in her volume of Ovid.

Eliza gets out her nail scissors and trims it to an oval before pressing it into the locket. She fastens the delicate chain at the back of Lister’s neck.

“I’ll keep it under my shift where no one will see,” Lister promises. She sets one palm between Eliza’s legs, over the cloth, and says, “You’re growing warm,” and Eliza’s dissolving already and rising to her touch, and it’s starting all over again.

The Juniors bring Miss Robinson cowslips and anemones by the fistful. Miss Lewin sniffs at the jars left on the desk with appreciation. “Spring at last! My friend Mrs. Morrice has already heard from our quondam neighbours that the banks of the Thames are quite purpled with bluebells.”

Lister hoists her eyebrows obscurely at Eliza.

“Did you catch that?” Lister asks in the empty classroom, after the others have rushed off. “Our quondam neighbours.”

“What does quondam—”

“Former, but my point is, in Hammersmith, Miss Lewin wasn’t living with her parents but with this Mrs. Morrice, and it sounds like they’re together in York too. Which means. . .”

Eliza belatedly gets it. “Oh, Lister, no.”

“What else can it mean?”

“Spinsters sometimes share lodgings to halve the expense.”

“But does one of them up and move two hundred miles north with her friend, when the friend takes a new job? That’s a very dear friend indeed, I say.”

Eliza forces herself to consider it: Miss Lewin living with this Mrs. Morrice—a widow, or is that a courtesy title for a woman of mature years?—something along the lines of husband and wife. The two of them in private, in the night. She covers her mouth with her hand.

Stiffly: “Does the notion disgust you, Raine?”

“Not that.” Eliza rushes to correct the misunderstanding. “I only mean, picturing them, at their age—any persons at their time of life.”

“Ah,” Lister says in amusement.

“Besides, I’d rather—” Eliza drops her voice to the smallest whisper. “I want it to be just us.”

“The only two in the world?”

She nods, obstinate. “Doesn’t it feel like our invention?”

A very fine day; Gymnastics is held on the grass among the ruins. “Dumbbells up,” Miss Robinson orders.

The Middles heave the weights aloft as they carry on discussing Boney’s character. “A tyrant may have a few sound ideas,” Lister argues. “He’s decreed the Jews should be treated as equal citizens, for instance.”

“Hear that, Margaret?” Nan asks.

Eliza cringes.

“I did.” Margaret reverses her twist, panting as she maintains her grip. “Was there some special reason I should?”

“Well.” A giggle.

“Go on, Nan.” Margaret speaks with a dangerous coolness. Her dumbbells clang overhead.

“With grace and control, young ladies,” Miss Robinson urges.

Nan raises her eyebrows at Fanny, asking for help.

“Well, but Margaret, aren’t you. . .you know?” Fanny asks.

“Am I not what?”

“A Jewess? Or half, or so?” Fanny’s voice is a squeak.

“Fanny!” Frances scolds.

“Don’t take offence,” Fanny tells Margaret. “It’s just what we—what I thought I heard.”

Nan clears her throat. “Or that your mother might have been a convert. Secretly Jewish, you know—a Murano.”

“Murano is an island of Venice,” Mercy informs her. “You mean Marrano.”

Margaret lets out a sardonic laugh. “Sorry to disappoint, but to the best of my knowledge my mother was plain Christian English.”

“So you know her?” That’s Lister, asking the unaskable.

Margaret’s going to tell them to hold their blasted tongues, Eliza thinks.

Instead she sets her dumbbells down and scans the Middles as if weighing up whether she can trust them. “In confidence. . .”

“Yes.”

“Of course!”

Margaret speaks low. “I believe she was the nursemaid who raised me until I was sent to school. In my father’s will, he left her sixty pounds a year for as long as she’d stay single and childless. If he was just her master, why would he have cared whether she ever married?”

The Middles all nod at that.

Eliza is impressed. Margaret could have kept up the mystery, could have said, My mother was a very great lady. It’s risky to admit to what some will always call base blood.

“Sixty pounds doesn’t seem very much,” Frances says sympathetically.

Margaret only purses her lips.

That night, Myrtle Grove; Mother’s ankle bracelets make their musical clinking. Eliza (very small in the dream, no bigger than a mouse) runs after her and tries to speak, but the words come out in English, a shrill, piping English that makes Mother frown in confusion.

Eliza wakes, puzzled, with such a heaviness on her chest. Mother understood English perfectly well, but in the dream she seemed to have forgotten every word of it. Why didn’t Eliza or Jane think to ask her to write to them, when they boarded the King George? (A misgiving now: could their mother write? Eliza can’t remember whether she ever saw her with a pen.) Why didn’t Eliza beg for a lock of that shimmering black hair, at least? Because she was only six, she supposes. Because although there’d never been a time when the girls hadn’t known they’d be going on the great ship to England, it had never been spelled out that the trip was to be for ever.

“What’s the matter?” Lister kisses the tears away as if sipping nectar.

“I just wish I knew whether Mother protested, when Father took us onto the boat.”

“I’d have wept, if I’d been her,” Lister says.

“You would?”

“Shrieked and fought for one last embrace.”

This is some comfort. Eliza slides her arms around Lister and holds her so close it hurts.

“Not that family are always kindred spirits, though,” Lister murmurs. “My mother bore and reared me, but you’d hardly guess it from the way we jar each other.”

Eliza nods. “Like Jane and me.” Sisters in name and face, aliens under the skin.

“Love comes not when it’s contracted for but when it will.”

“And just think, seven months ago, you and I were strangers!”

“I was never a stranger,” Lister tells her solemnly, “only your true match in disguise.”

They press their faces together till they stick.

Eliza seems to slumber through the days—doing just enough, in each lesson, to avoid punishment—and live only at night.

One morning very early she’s woken by Lister’s whisper like a moth in her ear: “Come down!”

She’s groggy, bewildered. “What is it?”

“A surprise.”

So Eliza scrambles into her frock, stockings, and nankeen half-boots galoshed with leather. The Manor’s still quiet—it can’t be much later than half-past six—so the only people they pass are the housemaids toting laundry. Eliza smiles at the tiny one, who’s staggering under a basket as big as herself.

Outside the grass is sparkling with dew. “Hurry,” Lister says, “or we won’t have time to try it.”

“What is it?” Eliza demands.

“This way.” Lister leads her to the abbey ruins, where the massive alders are dressed in their spring green already. Under the thickest tree, she and Eliza are curtained from view by the leafy branches. Eliza spots something new: a rope dangling from a point so high she can’t see where it attaches.

“I happened to find a length discarded, hanging on the wall of the Ropewalk,” Lister tells her, “so I coiled it up and dragged it around the back of the Manor, just before bed the other night. Then I tied a pebble to the end of a ball of string, and threw that over the branch. . .” Lister mimes it. “I almost blinded myself a few times when the stone fell back too close.”

That horrifies Eliza.

“In the end it went over, so I secured the rope to it and pulled that up. . .”

“But what’s it for?”

“A swing. I know it’s not a proper one with a seat like you had in India,” Lister apologises. “But I made knots at the bottom for your feet.”

Eliza laughs with delight.

The lowest knot is two feet off the ground. She’s not sure she’ll be able to manage this, after all these years, but she can’t say no. So she seizes the coarse rope above her head and jumps on, her legs flailing at first. Her heels find the knot and clamp on, even as her body’s skimming across the dark circle under the alder. A tiny scream; Eliza finds she does remember this sensation after all.

“Want a push?”

“No!”

But as she swings by, Lister takes her by the hips and shoves her so hard she’s flying. Her hands are burning on the rope, and her right foot’s cramping, and her vision spins as she rotates and whirls across the—

“Ow!” Spiked, hooked.

“You’re caught on something,” Lister calls up.

“What is it?”

“A dead branch, looks like. Let me. . .”

But Eliza’s weight is pulling her down, and as she wriggles her shoulders she hears an awful rip—

Flung to the ground. Last year’s alder cones pressed into her hands and knees.

Lister, repentant: “My love, are you hurt?”

“Only my pride.” Eliza’s up, breathless, brushing herself off, trying to gather the tatters of her frock.

Lister bursts out laughing. “Give up. It’s a rag now.”

They hurry back to the school, Eliza holding the remnants of cloth around her. They’ve almost made it up the back stairs when they run straight into Mrs. Tate.

The mistake Eliza makes is trying to make light of the incident. If she played up her sense of guilt and her bruises, she might have earned only a disobedience mark. But she’s still so weak with merriment, she makes the error of assuring the mistress that the frock doesn’t matter: “I have half a dozen just like it.”

Mrs. Tate’s face pulls tight, as if on a drawstring. “Your funds are not at issue, Miss Raine. Your guardian will be gravely disturbed to hear of your destruction of property and scorn for rules.”

Eliza casts her eyes down. “I beg your—”

Mrs. Tate cuts her off. “In disgrace for a week, the pair of you.”

Odd, how little disgrace stings, once it’s begun. She and Lister both have to wear the blue belts of Juniors, but since everyone in the Manor knows they’re Middles, the belts are really nothing more than a comical costume, like Pantalone’s slippers. The two are obliged to spend all their meals together at the disgrace table; this is the opposite of hardship, especially as they’re the only ones there this week. “Our private banquet,” Lister murmurs.

“How considerate of them to lay it out for us back here, where we can be alone.”

They have to stand, but they don’t mind that either. So as not to spill their gruel they lean right over their bowls, and their faces almost touch. “It’s taking all my reserves of self-control not to kiss you,” Lister whispers.

Strolling through the grounds, forbidden to converse with the other pupils all week, Eliza and Lister are constantly on the edge of laughter. Eliza forgets her umbrella, and doesn’t go back to fetch it; careless, she tilts her face up to the spring sun.

The rope has been cut down, they find when they visit the great alder. “But only as far as a man could reach on a stepladder,” Lister points out. The remnant dangles above them, swaying snakishly in the breeze.

In Accounts, Eliza’s entirely distracted, staring at Lister’s right hand. Such a small, pale thing, lying quietly on the desk. No one would ever guess what it can do.

“The Great Hall of York Assembly Rooms have thirteen brilliant-cut lustres”—Miss Robinson writes 13 on the board—“each composed of eighteen branches. How many wax candles burn there at a time? Miss Raine?”

Eliza blinks. “Thirteen by eighteen. Ah. . .two hundred and four?”

“Two hundred and thirty-four,” Mercy corrects her.

“That must cost the proprietors a fortune in lights,” Frances remarks.

“Miss Smith the candlemaker would know!” Nan snickers as if she’s said something very witty.

Later that day, Miss Lewin beckons Eliza into an empty classroom, to spout platitudes. “Friendship is of course the jewel of youth, Miss Raine.”

Eliza looks blank.

“It’s often said that the amity among girls should remain general rather than particular. Be friendly to all but worship none, the proverb has it. Affection ought to cement together the whole community, much like the mortar between these stones.” She pats the classroom wall.

“Bricks,” Eliza mutters.

Miss Lewin’s eroded eyebrows go up. “Quite right, Miss Raine, this oldest part of our ancient Manor is redbrick. Though correcting one’s elders would seem more characteristic of Miss Lister than yourself.”

Eliza flushes. Can it be true that Lister’s character is rubbing off on hers? It’s a fact that Eliza used to tremble for an hour if someone gave her a cross word. But mostly it feels to her as if the opposite is true: once you’ve found your mate, you can be all the more yourself, glad to take the opposite part in the dance.

“But my point is that I’m all in favour of particular friendships, in principle,” Miss Lewin goes on in a flustered way. “The soul recognises something in another, doesn’t it—reaches out, chooses, knits to that one and no other. I remember my own schooldays. . .Past the age of twenty, I must warn you, nothing’s felt with quite the same vividness.”

Suddenly Eliza’s dreading that the ageing spinster is going to confess something about Mrs. Morrice.

“Friendship can cheer, soften, strengthen, uplift. . .” The mistress seems to be arguing with an invisible opponent.

“Yes,” Eliza says, in case her long silence seems sullen.

Miss Lewin’s slightly liver-spotted hand flies up as if to hush her. “However, not every pairing quite fits. A mismatched bond can do as much harm as good, or more, even. Miss Lister has a remarkable quality of magnetism, but you mustn’t set her up to worship as the Golden Calf.”

Eliza’s stomach curdles. Is that how it looks, from the outside?

“Her harum-scarum tomfoolery will lead her into trouble sooner or later, and I don’t believe you’re comfortable wandering in such marshy ways, are you?”

Why not, because Eliza’s a timid mouse? Or because she’s a foreigner, only at the Manor on sufferance, so she’s risking more severe consequences than Lister?

What the woman says is true: Eliza’s never felt less comfortable. Nor ever more alive. She bares her teeth in a monkey smile. “Thank you, madam,” and she turns on her heel.

Right through the week of their disgrace, Eliza and Lister move in a magic circle, floating through the day. At night they barely sleep. Every wave of pleasure that crashes leaves a detritus of foam among the rocks, and makes ripples that grow and gather and mount up to the next wave. There’s no end to Eliza’s joy. She and Lister writhe and delve till they’re sticky and sore.

On Monday Eliza wakes with an oppression in her head, and her throat is scalding. She gets out of bed for a glass of water, but black fills her eyes; she almost falls. Tries to speak, but it burns as if her neck’s been slashed.

“My love.” Lister puts the back of her hand to Eliza’s forehead, and pulls it away. “You’re sizzling. Get back to bed.”

“Not allowed.”

“Nonsense. I’ll fetch Mrs. Tate.”

Eliza drops down on the mattress and feels as if she’ll never get up again.

Mrs. Tate recoils from a glimpse of Eliza’s tongue. “Whites on red, like a strawberry,” she says with a grim nod.

“Scarlet fever?” Lister asks almost excitedly.

She nods. “You mustn’t come near Miss Raine. Move your things to, ah, the Yellow Room—the bed that was Miss Betty Foster’s.”

Lister shakes her head. “Too late. I feel it coming in my throat already.”

“Open wide?”

She sticks out her tongue.

“No spots yet,” Mrs. Tate says doubtfully. “Well, I’ll send for Dr. Mather.”

Once the girls are alone, Eliza drags her head off the pillow. “My love, I’m so sorry I’ve passed it to you!”

“Oh, I’m perfectly well,” Lister tells her. “I’ve no intention of being banished from your side, that’s all.”

“Lister! You mustn’t catch it.”

“I’m as strong as an ox. Lie still and I’ll put a wet cloth on your forehead.”

Dr. Mather arrives and tuts over Eliza. There have been cases of scarlet fever from contaminated dairies in town. As for Miss Lister, he can’t be sure; she has no fever nor reddening of the tongue, but he’s seen some patients come right through it with nothing but a painful throat.

“Since my case is so mild, I can nurse my friend,” Lister tells him.

“Hm. I’ll send up draughts for you both.”

“Draughts of what?”

“Henbane, white poppy. . .Also some light nourishment. And no reading or writing, Miss Raine—just rest.”

“Tell them to leave everything outside the door, won’t you?” Lister asks in a gravelly voice. “As it’s so very catching.”

She goes out into the passage with him. Eliza hears Dr. Mather mutter: “Have them send for me if she vomits, wheezes, faints, or grows cold. Asiatics are often dangerously weakened by our Northern winters.”

The week that follows is the strangest Eliza can remember. Her tongue swells in her mouth like a rotten fruit. A rash, rough as sandpaper, spreads from her cheeks down to her belly, and Lister has to pare Eliza’s fingernails to stop her scratching it. Eliza should be miserable, but this is a reprieve from all regulations and routines. The real invalid and the pretender both live on bowls of broth, minced veal, chocolate, boiled blubbery, rice pudding. The raspberry throat syrups, and medicines heavily nutmegged to cover the bitter laudanum, leave them groggy and hilarious. The Slope is their hidden refuge in the clouds, and they never want to leave it.

Lister goes on at length about a pair of Irish cousins she’s read about in a magazine. Refusing to be married off or put in a convent, the ladies ran away together twenty-seven years ago, and have been sharing a cottage in Wales ever since.

Eliza’s surprised to hear they didn’t get dragged back and locked up; instead, their escapade made them famous.

She and Lister lie in one bed and gaze up at the murky stain from where the roof leaked after three days of rain back in February. Lister nestles into Eliza’s collarbone. “We really must have the ceiling raised.”

Eliza laughs feebly. “But first we’ll put in new windows. Gigantic ones.”

Lister nods. “Now, if we have the floors taken up—”

“What, quite up?”

“Every board.”

“Won’t we fall through to the rooms below?”

“My gravitational studies suggest so. But after the initial shock, we’ll find the prospect so much airier.”

Eliza points downwards. “Not with the entire Tate family cluttering up the floor.”

“Perhaps we’ll send them elsewhere. Find them a cupboard in the cellars to live in.”

“On further reflection, my love, perhaps we shouldn’t change a thing. I’m so fond of the funny old Slope where first we met.”

“You’re right.” And they start kissing again.

Eliza’s first day back on her feet, the mistresses treat her like a china saucer; no one so much as asks her to recite anything.

After French, she seeks out Lister and finds her in the courtyard, studying the wisteria that hangs heavy from a diagonal drainpipe. “Why did the Head call you out of class?”

Lister makes a little face.

“You’re not in disgrace again already?”

“Not exactly. It’s a quarter day. When rents are paid,” she adds reluctantly, “and school fees and such.”

“Oh.”

“Our smallholding is mortgaged to the hilt,” Lister says, low and gruff. “Nobody’s ever told me exactly where the money was found to send Sam and John and me to school at the same time, but. . .”

Clearly her bill is past due. “I’m sure it will be sorted, sooner or later,” Eliza says weakly.

Lister nods. “Care despised, say I!” But she doesn’t sound carefree, only defiant.

By the time of the Spring Fair, in the meadows north of Gillygate, Eliza’s strong enough to join the Middles on the walk there. It’s the second day of the Fair—less rough, rather more genteel. Lister would like to inspect the cattle on sale, but Eliza keeps hold of her elbow and says absolutely not, on account of the stink. The same goes for some cruel game in which a sparrow with clipped wings, in a hat, is put eye-to-eye with a man with hands tied behind his back, who has to bite the bird’s head off before it can peck him.

The Middles see rope dancers, a juggler with seven plates spinning on poles, and a dozen women racing barefoot to win a linen smock covered in poppy-red bows. Nan’s tempted by a gurning show, but Margaret won’t let her waste sixpence just to see someone pull faces. “Here’s one for you for free.” Margaret contorts her features horribly, till her nose appears to be growing out of the side of her mouth.

Frances assures Margaret she could make a living as a gurner if she ever loses her ten thousand pounds.

The Middles stroll past fortune-tellers, a Punch and Judy booth, and something called a Spectral Phantasmagoria, which Frances says looks much too horrifying.

“It’ll just be a magic-lantern show,” Margaret tells her.

“Still.”

There’s a woman cutting people’s profiles out of black paper, sixpence each. “That’s how painting was invented,” Lister comments as they watch over the artist’s shoulder.

“With a scissors?” Margaret asks, sceptical.

Lister shakes her head. “By tracing a profile. Pliny tells us a Corinthian girl’s lover was about to go off to war, so she drew around his shadow on the wall.”

That sounds likely enough to Eliza. Wouldn’t you do anything you could to keep your beloved’s likeness, in case the memory faded?

The Middles finally agree on paying to go into Tussaud’s Waxworks, because the sign guarantees that the huge tent holds SIXTY-NINE PUBLIC CHARACTERS MODELLED FROM LIFE. “Or death, in some cases,” Lister says. “They have a head of Marie Antoinette.”

Eliza finds all the figures inside unnervingly lifelike, but the one that moves her most is LORD NELSON BEFORE HIS DEATH AT TRAFALGAR, 21 OCTOBER 1805. It was only last November that the news of his victory reached York and made all the bells ring. She remembers whirling in the street with Lister, outside the gates of the Manor. And now, just four months later, touring the country, here’s the poor admiral in waxen form as he looked the night before he was gunned down. Emaciated, his right sleeve sewn shut below the shoulder, his head scarred and missing half an eyebrow from previous battles.

“What a fright.” That’s Nan.

Lister turns on her. “Lord Nelson gave himself to his nation piece by piece, and saved us from Boney, so show some respect, missy.”

Fanny reaches out with her little arm to touch his cuff, and the attendant barks, “Hands off!”

Four months is long enough to change everything, Eliza’s thinking; in four months, the landscape of her life has been transformed as if by a volcano.

Outside the tent in the sunshine, the Middles eat Bath buns with sugared caraway seeds that get stuck in their teeth.

They’re on the way home, almost at the edge of the Fair, when Eliza spots three words over a small booth: THE LIVING CURIOSITY. She hangs back to examine the signboard. The faded picture shows a hugely fat female, half-nude, skin mud-brown and. . .furry, could it be? An elaborate jewel pierces one side of her nose. DO YOU DARE TO SET EYES ON THE SAVAGE? 2D LECTURE AND TABLEAUX.

Lister’s by her side. “Probably just a Yorkshirewoman daubed in shoe-blacking,” she says awkwardly.

Eliza can’t swallow this stone.

Lister tugs her away.

When Eliza catches sight of the other Middles, she slows, not wanting to talk to them, dragging like an anchor on Lister’s arm. “Tuppence to view a human oddity.” It comes out more furiously than she expected. “That’s me, no?”

Lister turns and meets her eyes.

“Is that what—was that what drew you to me,” Eliza demands, “that I’m. . .” Which word, of all the words? “. . .an exotic?” She’s counting on an outraged, or at least reassuringly firm, denial.

But Lister says, “I’ve never cared for the commonplace. Perhaps it was your singularity that first attracted me.”

Eliza’s so angry, her vision swims. “You mean you saw my colour—”

“I saw you, Raine. All of you. I fell in love with you, in all particulars.” Lister’s gripping Eliza’s hands, the heat surging through two layers of kidskin.

“But why me?”

She’s expecting Who knows, or Blame Dame Destiny.

Lister shrugs. “Because I’m a great oddity myself? Don’t let’s waste time fretting. Who wants to be ordinary, anyway?”

“Almost everyone!”

Lister leans in close, as if to kiss her, right here in the middle of the dirty path, in front of the whole world. “Let’s be a pair of originals instead.”

And Eliza’s courage flares up once more.