OVER THE HOLIDAYS, from the Duffins’ country house in Nun Monkton and the Listers’ smallholding in the Wolds, Eliza and Lister have written every day, using bland words to mask their meanings in case others open their post. At Easter, when Mrs. Lister has a girl born still, who is buried with her infant brothers, what Lister sends is, All I pray for is to be back in York. Eliza tells her, I think of our happy times last term with the most vivid and perfect recollection. Lister turns fifteen, and even though Eliza is miserable about missing her birthday, her spirits are lifted by Lister’s letter, which hints heavily, May the next year bring me more of that new species of happiness I discovered for the first time in the last.

May, now, at the Manor School, and the lovers are never more than an arm’s length apart; each knows, without turning her head, exactly what the other’s doing, and what expression is on her face.

With the new season, the pupils change back into lighter frocks and cotton stockings. The warmer weather seems to bring sniffles, red eyes, mild fevers. The youngest Percival girl has an irritating little cough that starts up as soon as lights are out, and keeps everyone in Mid Hall and its adjoining rooms awake; Eliza’s glad their Slope is on the other side of the Manor.

The grounds are fragrant with blossom and musical with birdsong that has an urgency Eliza’s never noticed before; feathered pairs fly back and forwards, shaping their nests. The inseparable swans have settled down in the reeds on the Manor Shore and harass anyone who comes near. Beetles cluster on clumps of tansy, which some call golden buttons. Sometimes Mr. Halfpenny can be persuaded to hold Drawing class al fresco among the ruins; he likes to point out where Henry the Eighth pulled down the medieval church, chapter house, and cloisters, keeping only the Abbot’s house but renaming it the King’s Manor to erase all trace of the poor monks.

With three shillings of Eliza’s, Lister bribes the woodcarver’s apprentice to make her a broadsword in rough pine, which she hides in a crook of a tree, and as “Captain Lister” she gives fencing lessons to the Middles, who are armed only with branches.

Nan, who was left at school for these last holidays, goes on so much about being homesick that Lister finally throws down her wooden sword. It stabs the long grass and stands upright, quivering. “This home for which you long—I take it you’re thinking of your Scarborough house as it was when your mother was alive, two years ago?”

Tears quiver in Nan’s eye. “A year and a half.”

Fanny rushes over to comfort her.

“Don’t quibble about Nan’s choice of words, as if you’re setting up for a schoolmistress,” Margaret tells Lister.

“Face facts, Nan,” Lister says, merciless. “You’ve been supplanted by your father’s young bride.”

The tears plummet.

“What you miss is the past. Inreparabile tempus, Virgil calls it—irretrievable time. You’re not homesick but past-sick, except there’s no such word.”

“Because if it’s not in Anne Lister’s lexicon,” Margaret says with scorn, “it must not exist in any language.”

Fanny slides her shorter arm around her friend. “Motherless. Won’t that word do? Just like Frances and Eliza and me, and Margaret too. You’re not alone, pet.”

Nan lays her head on Fanny’s shoulder and sobs.

On such days, when Lister’s high-handedness irritates the other Middles, Eliza’s aware of a strange gratification. She doesn’t want her beloved to be too popular; she can’t bear it when Lister chats confidingly with any other girl. This jealousy is new, for her. She’s ashamed to find such depths of possessiveness in herself. Perhaps Eliza’s always been like this but never had anything to fight for till now.

Passing outside Prinny’s sty, she and Lister always steal a minute to greet the boar. Lister makes a sling of her hands, and Eliza wipes her shoe on the grass before stepping up. Clinging to the stone sill, she leans in. Then reports worriedly, “He’s eating his straw.”

Lister tuts. “A noisome habit.”

“Or perhaps he’s just moving it about with his mouth. He seems distressed.”

“Distressed? He’s a pig.”

“Still.”

Lister leaves Eliza’s feet to dangle and leaps up unaided to hang from her elbows beside her. Prinny roams his dim chamber with a weird restlessness, nosing his bedding into a pile. He flops his bulk down.

“There you go, Your Royal Highness. Have a rest,” Eliza croons.

But he’s up and circling again. His curly tail twitches madly.

“We should tell the farmer he’s ill,” Lister’s saying, when something drops to the floor behind the boar. Not dung, a pinkish thing on a string. . .

“Oh!” A piglet: hairless, thin, stunned.

“Not Prinny at all. Princess!” cries Eliza.

(Though the real Princess of Wales, she remembers belatedly, is a strumpet who’s not allowed to see her only child.)

The sow rotates and sniffs her piglet. Eliza’s staring straight at her rear, its pink glistening. Another furious lash of the tail. The rude hole opens like the pupil of an eye and a face surges out, small snout, shut eyes. Plop, a second new creature falls on the straw. Staggering away already, trailing its wet cord, the piglet trips, circles back on tiny, confused trotters. “Oh, Lister, it’s entangled. . .”

But the flesh-string snaps and releases the newborn.

The sow shoves straw aside with her great head. “Look,” Lister says, pointing, “one more she must have dropped before we came.”

Eliza squints into the room. “No, two.”

“Three!”

They’re laughing. “And you, who reads whole books on farming.”

“The authors never said how to tell a boar from a sow.”

Both of them are going to get marks for being late, but Eliza feels she’s never paid such close attention to anything in her life.

Some mornings before sunrise she wakes in a languorous haze, still almost paralysed by sleep, to find herself already halfway to bliss—Lister urgent, on top of her in a sweat, her soaked fur on Eliza’s fur, riding and pestling. . .

Afterwards, catching her breath, Eliza treasures the sensation of her whole person having been taken, used, had hard. As the two of them get dressed, Lister begs pardon for not having so much as stopped to ask; not having had the decency to wake her beloved first; having been as greedy as a wild beast.

Eliza smiles lazily. “I’m yours,” she reminds Lister, “waking or sleeping.”

What she relishes most of all is the knowledge that this highly rational Solomon of the School turns cracked with desire at the first dawn glimpse (or murmur, aroma, stroke) of the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.

Their walks take them farther afield, now that summer’s begun. The fields seem all at once full of livestock and herders—dogs driving red-marked sheep into streams for washing, and cattle released from their barns to graze.

Princess has a litter of nine, or at least that’s how many Lister and Eliza have been able to spot in the straw; it’s hard to count creatures that keep wriggling past their brothers and sisters to fight for a go on one of her teats. The next time the girls have a chance to visit Her Royal Highness, the pigherd is there, dosing the sow. Eliza tries to slip away, but Lister peppers him with questions.

Princess has an infection—yes, farrowing is a perilous business.

“I count only eight today,” Lister says.

The man nods abstractedly. “Bit the runt, didn’t she? It must have strayed too near her head. First-time sows scare easy.”

“Will she die?” Lister wants to know.

“Nah, she’s mending—should live to have many more litters.”

“But this litter? What’ll become of them?” Eliza asks.

“Master will sell them in July, except for a pair Miss Hargrave wants fattened for Christmas.”

“We should go now.” Eliza drops to the ground.

Running’s forbidden, as much as being late, so they glide-scuttle along the path. “Did he really mean Princess killed her own piglet?”

Lister nods, frowning. “In her fever, in a panic. Like that girl hanged at the Castle for smothering her baby, I suppose.”

But the cases are not so very alike, Eliza thinks, because the sow can’t have been driven by shame. Human beings have invented so many new sources of pain.

Another day, she and Lister are walking along Coney Street, past the beggar Eliza thinks of as Mad Margery, who sits on the flagstone crooning a waltz:

Rich and rare were the gems she wore,

And a bright gold ring on her wand she bore,

But oh her beauty was far beyond

Her sparkling gems or snow-white wand.

Head down, Lister nearly walks into a donkey-cart; Eliza has to haul her out of the way. “What are you reading that engrosses you so?”

Lister puffs out her breath and taps the tiny print. “In Cheshire. . .the arrest of some two dozen members of a secret club.”

Eliza waits.

“They seem a motley lot—a few gentlemen, some waiters, everything in between—a youth of seventeen and a greybeard of eighty-four. One is charged with committing an unnatural crime on another, and a third with having suffered it to be committed upon him.”

But how can you allow a crime to be committed against you? “I must confess I don’t—”

“Buggery,” Lister hisses.

Eliza gives a little shudder. She thought that was only sailors.

“It says here they all addressed each other as brother.”

“Why is this agitating you so?”

“They’ll all be executed,” Lister mutters.

“I’m very sorry for it, but—”

“You’re being rather stupid.”

Eliza takes a step back.

“Acts contrary to decency and good morals,” Lister reads. “Might that not be said of us too?”

She’s flabbergasted. To associate their beautiful nocturnal invention with what those men get up to in their sordid den— “It’s not the same!”

“I know. We’re only following our natures. I’ve never swerved from my earliest bent,” Lister insists. “Whereas the other act. . .for one thing, it’s specifically forbidden in Scripture.”

“Well, then.”

“But I doubt the world would see the distinction.”

Eliza’s dizzied by a sensation of being looked at from the outside, as if by an angry archangel in the clouds.

“If it were merely a selfish taking of pleasure. . .but between us, it’s more a matter of giving.” Lister sounds as if she’s arguing with herself. “Love surely justifies it.”

“Love justifies everything.” (But Eliza’s troubled by the thought that those men, those brothers in Cheshire, might make the same claim.)

Lister seizes her hand and holds it as they walk.

Eliza feels an irrational impulse to pull it away before anyone notices.

“You’re the chosen tenant of my heart,” Lister tells her.

“Just the tenant?” Flippant, to lighten the moment. “That sounds temporary. As if I could be evicted.”

“The occupier, then,” Lister says. “No, the owner.”

Eliza manages a smile.

“What’s between us is a private marriage.”

That does excite her. To be a wife. . .but to Lister. She tries out the word: “Husband.”

Lister quivers. “You’d take me as your husband?”

Eliza doesn’t have to pause to think. “Out of all the people in the world.”

A sort of wedding, then? A private one, like Juliet and Romeo’s. To make good on all Lister and Eliza have said in the dark; to make their union settled, and right, in the eyes of heaven.

The next Saturday the two of them ask permission to take a walk on their own. They hover on the porch of St. Olave’s until they’re quite sure it’s empty. In they venture, down the nave that’s so chilly all year round, with its grubby hangings. They kneel together in a pew, gripping each other’s icy fingers. They’re not wearing any special clothes, and of course there’s no music, nor any minister or witnesses. But the church feels so old and holy, Eliza’s almost sick with excitement.

What would Dr. Duffin think of her (not yet fifteen) taking such a solemn step as this marriage—vowing herself, for life, without his permission, without even his knowledge? Which is absurd, Eliza tells herself, because how could he give permission? This is something beyond the reach of her guardian’s comprehension. He’d call it playacting, absurd, sacrilegious. Little he knows.

Lister picks up a worn copy of the Bible and whispers, “I wish I had a ring to give you in return for your diamond.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Eliza says. “You’ve given me so much.”

“But if I’m the husband, as it were. . .”

Eliza looks around in a sort of desperation. Here’s a bit of straw on the flagstone. She snatches that up and coils it around her fingertip three times, twists it till the circle holds. “Will this do?”

“Yes.” Lister has the diamond ring out, and swaps it for the straw, so each has one ready to put on the other’s finger. To bestow, Eliza tells herself solemnly, to endow. Along with all their worldly goods, and their hearts, for ever and ever.

“Are we ready?”

She nods. They kneel face-to-face on the worn canvas hassock, their thighs almost touching, their hands clasped the way capsized sailors might cling to a spar. On Lister’s mouth, Eliza smells the preserved apricots they had at lunch, and feels the awful irrevocability of what she’s doing. Signing herself over, trusting Lister with her one life.

“For mutual help and comfort,” Lister intones like a minister, “we two persons present now come to be joined and coupled together. Not unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly, like brute beasts, but in the fear of God.”

The fear of God. Eliza wonders whether they might be struck by lightning for adapting the marriage service to make it fit.

“Eliza Raine, wilt thou have me to be thy wedded husband, to live together, to obey and serve me, love, honour, and keep me, and forsaking all others, keep thee only unto me?”

The words rise in her throat. “I will.” After a moment, she remembers to say: “Anne Lister, wilt thou have me to be thy wedded wife, to live together. . .” She loses the thread.

Lister takes it up fluently. “To love, honour, comfort, and keep in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others, keep only unto thee?” Then answers, in her own voice: “I will.” She holds up the little loop of straw. “For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live.” She slides it onto the ring finger of Eliza’s left hand. The straw catches at the knuckle, then locks into place.

Eliza repeats the line as she sets the diamond on Lister’s finger.

“With this ring I thee wed.”

“With this ring I thee wed.”

“With my body I thee worship.”

“With my body I thee worship.”

Lister drops the formality and whispers in her ear like a kiss. “You’re mine now, Raine.”

“Yours, entirely.”

“We’re sealed.”

“We’re one.”

That night they lie in a sweaty tangle, long after their taper’s fizzled out. “I’m too happy. I may burst,” Eliza whispers. “My pulse is going like a bell.”

Lister puts her ear to Eliza’s bosom, listens and chuckles under her breath. “I’m just as bad. I’ve never known such happiness in my life.”

Now they’re married, they’re starting to build elaborate castles in the air. From this extraordinary present moment, they plot possible futures. “No one will be able to bar our way, once we’re twenty-one,” Lister insists. “The minute we’re of age, we can join forces and sail off to the banks of the Arno.”

Eliza feels like a leaf, sucked up by a breeze and whirling into the unknown. “Remind me, which one is the Arno?”

“In Italy, silly! It runs through Florence.”

“But Boney?”

“Oh, the time we’re speaking of is still more than six years off. The Enemy will be long defeated by then, and all roads will be open.”

Six years: a yawning gulf. One of their Sunday lessons floats up in Eliza’s mind: So Jacob served seven years for Rachel: and they seemed but a few days, because of the greatness of his love. If Eliza gives way to despair at the length of time she’ll have to wait to live with Lister, it means she’s doubting the greatness of their love. So instead, she asks, “What kind of house will we take, in Florence?”

“One with a study and a garden. We’ll keep a horse and a light carriage. Partners for life,” Lister murmurs.

“Beloved companions,” Eliza adds.

“Sharing one pillow.”

“And one purse.” That gratifies Eliza, that her four thousand pounds, shared with her friend and lover and husband, will be the magic wand to work these wonders.

In class, Frances asks, “Monsieur, when the war ends—”

“Isn’t it over yet?” Nan sounds querulous. “We don’t seem to hear much about it.”

“That’s because we’re losing,” Margaret mutters. “Boney’s just seized the throne of Italy.”

Eliza gives Lister a worried glance.

“Only the northern Kingdom,” Lister corrects Margaret, “and our Navy has the upper hand at sea.”

“But when peace does come, sir, will you go home?” Frances asks the master.

His laugh is dry. “Unlikely, mademoiselle. My France. . .elle n’existe plus.”

Eliza’s sorry for the man. Not just exiled from his mother country but alienated; unwilling to go back even if he were allowed, because his France is no more.

Fanny asks, “Oh, but why?”

Monsieur looks out the window at the azure sky over York. “A wise Greek once said, On ne se baigne jamais deux fois dans le même fleuve.”

“One doesn’t bathe twice in the same river?” Nan puzzles over that. “I’m sure I’ve waded into the shallows of the Derwent a dozen times.”

“It’s a figure of speech,” Mercy snaps.

“Every time you get in,” Lister tells Nan, “it’s different drops of water.”

Nan shakes her head. “It’s still the same river, though, just as I remember it. Same place, same cold, same wet, same smell. . .”

“Allons, mesdemoiselles. Back to our lesson.”

One of the Seniors, Miss Simpson, is leaving early to be married, because her mother says a May wedding is much the charmingest. When Miss Hargrave expresses doubt about the wisdom of curtailing a young lady’s education even by a few months, Miss Simpson goes around school sneering at the unmarried teachers as a gaggle of pathetic Misses Teach’em, obliged to support themselves because no man would have them.

Eliza knows what it’s like to be transformed from schoolgirl to wife overnight, the beautiful shock of this metamorphosis. But she struggles to imagine also taking on the public duties of that role and running a household. Would it feel like ageing ten years in a blink?

The eldest Miss Parker, too, won’t be returning after the summer, having turned nineteen. She’s dreading the prospect of being the first of her family to have to leave the Manor.

“My aunt tells me your sister’s not coming back either,” the little Tate girl remarks to Eliza.

Who’s about to contradict it—then has a qualm.

“Is it true?” she asks Jane, catching her in the passage before lunch.

An impatient shrug. “I’m almost seventeen.”

“Not for months yet, you’re not.”

“Well, Duffin’s given permission.”

Given in to Jane’s daily carping and wheedling, that must mean. “Do you really believe your education’s complete?” Eliza doubts Jane’s ability to reckon change from half a crown.

Her sister laughs in her face. “Child—”

Eliza’s standing up for herself in a way that’s new, since the secret wedding: “Don’t call me that.”

“Don’t talk like a naif, then,” Jane tells her. “Duffin had to stash us somewhere, didn’t he? We were hardly sent to the Manor to be educated.”

Eliza falters: “Finished, then.”

Jane shakes her head: “To learn the rules of the game.”

“So. . .do you mean to stay at home now?”

Her sister’s eyebrows tilt. “Micklegate—do you call it that, home?”

Eliza can’t say she does.

“I mean to try my luck in Pontefract.”

“What’s in Pontefract?”

Jane raises her eyes to heaven for patience. “Lady Crawfurd?”

Eliza’s heard nothing of their cousin recently. “She’s back in Yorkshire? You’re going to pay her a visit?” She remembers the hippopotamus teeth.

A grimace. “Live with her and look about me, till I find something better.”

“Find a husband, you mean.”

It’s a tease, but Jane doesn’t deny it.

This seems a miserable plan to Eliza. “Pontefract—that’s just a small town. It can’t have more to offer than York, surely.”

“But a baronet’s wife will be able to introduce me in circles that a doctor can’t.”

“Even if she lives apart from her husband?”

Jane growls it: “I admit it, I’m scraping the barrel.” Despite the warmth of the May day, she pulls her shawl so tight that her shoulders hunch. “I wouldn’t mind a Company man who’d take me back to India.”

Eliza stares. “Are you so fond of our mother country?”

“Perhaps I’ve just had enough of this bloody one.”

The vulgarity makes Eliza blink. Somehow her stomach is tight at the thought of Jane going so very far away, repeating their endless voyage in reverse, putting oceans between the two of them, leaving her little sister behind (a doll-like figure on a small island, shrinking fast). “We speak of going to Italy someday,” she blurts out. “Miss Lister and I.”

Jane snorts. “That brat’s all talk. Italy, forsooth! It might as well be Xanadu.”

“It’s as real a plan as yours,” Eliza says between her teeth.

“No, it’s not. As long as you’re single you won’t be able to lay hands on a penny of your inheritance for another six years.” Then, with an impatient sort of kindness, “Get yourself a husband, I say. Then life can begin.”

Eliza’s madly tempted to say, I have a husband. My life has begun.

She goes looking for Lister, and finally discovers her in the courtyard under the wisteria, crooning to a pigeon.

O fare thee well, my little turtle dove,

And fare thee well for a while.

Lister’s amused to hear of Jane’s decision. “So your sister means to hand self and fortune on a plate to the first Company man passing through Pontefract?”

“It would seem so,” Eliza says.

“But won’t Dr. Duffin send any such fortune-hunter packing?”

“How can he, if Jane insists on offering herself as prey? She’s never had much of a soul,” Eliza adds, feeling less disloyal than regretful.

“Then she’s no true sister of yours, my love.”

Eliza doesn’t repeat what Jane said about get yourself a husband. “Why couldn’t nature have made you a boy?” She speaks flippantly so as not to hurt Lister’s feelings. “Wouldn’t that have been easier, all round?”

Lister surprises her by saying in a thoughtful tone, “I doubt it.”

“But the freedoms you’d have had, as Sam and John’s elder brother. . .” Shibden Hall, very likely, she thinks.

“I’d have gone to school with them, rather than to the Manor. I’d never have known you.”

Eliza’s mouth is dry at the very idea. “I suppose we might still have met, in society?” Married, even—lawfully, openly?

Lister shakes her head. “Met, perhaps, but only in passing. Men and women live so divided. No, all in all, I’d rather be with you as I am.”

Standing at the mirror the next morning, Eliza’s been trying to fix her curls, but Lister has her from behind and is pulling up her skirts. There’s no time, they’ll be late for breakfast, but it doesn’t matter because pleasure makes its own time, a little bubble that floats in time, above time. Eliza’s hands drop; her head sways and rolls back onto Lister’s shoulder; her back arches.

Lister moves harder.

Eliza’s legs heave and jolt and buckle. Glimpsing herself in the glass doubles the thrill. The peak of bliss comes closer, faster, like a thunderstorm. . .

But Lister stops moving.

Eliza can’t bear delay. She seizes Lister’s wet hand, presses and grinds on.

White, in the glass behind Eliza’s own image, not the white of her frock or cap or Lister’s, but farther back, in the gap of the slightly open door, the briefest flash of another white cap, dress, face—

Eliza freezes. A stone blocks her tongue.

The door shivers on its hinge. Steps hurrying away.

Lister whispers, “Was that—”

“Mercy.” It sounds like a plea. “Mercy saw us.”

Lister pulls away, spins around. Hauls up her hem to wipe her hand on her petticoat. “Are you sure?”

“I saw her face,” Eliza groans.

“Hell! I trusted we were alone up here, with Cook and the servants gone down hours ago. I thought I heard steps, but—”

“I heard nothing,” Eliza admits. “No warning, till I saw her, in the mirror.”

Lister takes a long breath and gathers her forces. (Even through her terror, Eliza loves to watch her beloved’s mind at work: a great complex machine, clicking and whirring.) “Listen, Mercy won’t have the nous to understand what she saw. She may suspect, but—”

“We’re ruined,” Eliza contradicts her flatly.

“Shh,” Lister orders. “Let’s not be seen to miss breakfast.”

In the refectory the two sit several places apart, absurdly, as if they’ve had a tiff. They keep up stilted conversation with their neighbours.

Sitting at the end of the table, Mercy seems to chew her roll with her usual stolidity.

Eliza’s aware of Lister launching into a story from the Herald about a butcher who’s to be hanged for having forged notes from the Swann bank. On Eliza’s other side, Margaret and Frances are discussing the rules of mourning dress. Eliza tells herself to make some show of taking part in the conversation. “Are we talking about a particular deceased?”

“A particular deceased?” Margaret echoes.

Only then does Eliza notice that the atmosphere is peculiar; that the Juniors’ tables are gappy and several girls have their heads down, whimpering. “Do excuse me, I don’t know—”

“Didn’t Mrs. Tate send Mercy around first thing this morning, with the news?” Frances asks.

Mercy the Merciless. Eliza’s heart is banging like a gong. “What news?”

Margaret whispers, “The littlest Percival.”

The cough that wouldn’t mend. “No!”

“It happened in the night.” Frances’s eyes are brimming.

“The poor child.” Eliza tries to remember whether she ever exchanged a word with the youngest Percival. To think of your life ending at school, before you ever emerged into the wider world; snuffed out in the chrysalis.

“She’s to be buried at St. Cuthbert’s, where their father’s the minister.”

The four other Percivals are missing, Eliza can see now, rushed off to be measured for their black crepe. “Will the sisters go to the funeral?”

Frances shakes her head. “Only their menfolk. The delicate sensibilities of girls, and so forth.” She sounds unlike herself, almost sardonic.

“Did Mercy not go up to your garret, then?” Head tilted to one side, Margaret seems to be considering Eliza with more than her usual sharpness.

Mercy, sitting there a few feet away, would be the type to loudly insist on having done her duty and gone to every bedroom in the Manor. Maybe now is when she’ll denounce the lovers, this very moment.

All Eliza can muster is a stagey yawn. “I did hear someone gabble something at the door, but I was half-asleep.” She keeps her eyes away from Mercy and prays the girl will let this pass.

Mrs. Tate orders the rows of pupils to be quiet, and the Head stands and begins to preach in a low, shaking voice: “From the vicissitudes of the world, my children, we learn the uncertainty of life and the certainty of death.”

All morning Eliza finds herself avoiding Lister’s gaze, and Mercy’s too. Which is absurd, because if Lister’s right and their classmate’s not sure what she glimpsed, having no way of fitting it into her strictly ordered mind, then their best hope for carrying it off is to behave quite as usual.

At lunch, the lovers meet under the alders. “Perhaps Mercy ran straight back to Mrs. Tate this morning. Or Miss Hargrave.” Eliza writhes at the thought.

“But we haven’t been summoned to the parlour,” Lister argues.

“They might be considering what to do.” It’s no ordinary offence. “Or the Head could be writing to your parents right now, and the Duffins.”

“To the devil with them all.”

“Lister!”

“If we’re to be accused, we should at least have the chance to defend ourselves.” She speaks as if they’re innocent.

“Defend ourselves how?”

Lister flails, which is a rare sight. “There’s no proof.”

“But Mercy saw—”

Lister attempts a haughty speech: “Miss Smith may imagine she glimpsed something in a mirror, which only testifies to her own impurity of mind. A girl of such low origins, growing up in the foulest alleys—no doubt she’s seen filthy things.”

This takes Eliza’s breath away. A new side of Lister: the hunter, the warrior, no holds barred. “That won’t work. The Smiths are known to be the most upright—”

Lister cuts in: “Religious zealots. Delusional, fancying exotic vice where none exists.”

Unable to speak, Eliza shakes her head.

In Lister’s own honest voice again: “I love you, Raine. I will not be the means of your destruction.”

“You’re prepared to look the Head in the eye and lie?”

“Gladly.”

“Then I’ll do the same.” Though Eliza doubts her own powers of deception.

All week, the two of them don’t touch. By day, dread binds their arms to their sides, in case they’re seen, heard, suspected. Even at night, they lie as still as marble Crusaders in their separate narrow cots, in case one of these mornings they have to stand in Miss Hargrave’s parlour and say, No, never, how could, I don’t, what could you possibly mean?

The sun pries their eyes open before four. They lie listening to each other’s ragged breath. Lister whispers, “Are you ashamed?”

Eliza, too shrill: “What?”

“Be frank with me. Is yours a coward love?”

“How dare you?” Eliza says, instead of yes or no.

“Come here, then.”

Eliza does, of course she does, hurries to Lister’s bed. Two steps, and the border’s crossed.

Their touching’s not the same now. How could it be? So fraught with a deep-down shuddering at the thought of being exposed, misunderstood, laid bare. From now on, will the two of them always be looking over their shoulders, listening out for footsteps?

When they go to Italy together, Eliza decides, they will have a room that locks from the inside.

It’s not the same, no; she finds it’s sharper than ever, fiercer, more precious. Eliza knows what they’re risking and why they’re risking it. How far they’d go to keep this. They touch each other as if they have no skin.

“It’s been a whole week,” Lister murmurs into Eliza’s neck, after. “I don’t believe Mercy’s told. We’d have heard something. Has she spoken to you? Any hinting looks?”

“No.”

“Nor to me. Perhaps she’s not sure of what she saw.”

Eliza doesn’t believe that. She remembers all too well how her own body was lashing about in the mirror, signs surely unmistakeable even to a strictly raised girl who’s never seen or read or heard about such things. “She must have decided to hold her tongue.”

“But why? To keep such a secret—to forgo the chance to inform the proprietors—”

Eliza shakes her head. “Nobody rewards a messenger who brings such news.” She sees now that the sisters would be appalled if such a story landed at their feet, like a sack of stinking innards from the Shambles. The shame of having to acknowledge what they’d have to call vice in their school, like mould in a basket of shining fruit. The awful necessity of expelling two girls at thirty guineas a year plus extras each, and on such grounds.

“Mercy the Merciful,” Lister breathes, like a prayer.

They’ll never be able to ask their classmate her reasons, Eliza realises. All they can do is accept the unexpected grace of Mercy’s silence.

On Saturday, the whole school crowds into the refectory for Judgement and Consequences. Who’ll be barred out this time, debelted, or disgraced? The pupils’ current besetting faults, as observed by Miss Hargrave and her sister, are tale-bearing, lassitude, and wool-gathering. The Vanity Mask, Fool’s Hat, Liar’s Tongue, Ass’s Ears, and Quarreller’s Sash lie on the mistresses’ table in case they’ll be needed. The line forms: Seniors, Middles, then Juniors.

But Jane and Hetty are lingering at the back of the refectory, Eliza notices. Surely they can’t be refusing to queue up?

“Any marks?” Mrs. Tate asks the eldest Miss Parker, the one who’s drifting around the Manor in a haze of valedictory fondness.

“No, madam.”

“Any merits?”

“One, for courtesy.”

Eliza throws another glance over her shoulder. Hetty’s bent over, clutching her back as if she’s been kicked by a horse. Jane’s tugging her pal’s elbow, trying to pull her towards the door.

“The treat this week will be gravy,” Mrs. Tate announces.

A terrible, guttural groan escapes from Hetty. She’s quite doubled over now. Jane has her under the arms, to keep her from collapsing.

“Miss Marr! Are you not well?”

As Hetty straightens up and arches with a roar of pain, the bulge of her belly stands out against the thin white cloth.

Eliza blinks, unable to make sense of it.

Miss Hargrave’s saintly expression turns aghast. Whispers are filling the refectory; gasps, even titters.

It’s Jane’s face that breaks the news about what’s happening to Hetty: Jane’s appalled but unsurprised face.

After Hetty’s been taken away—moaning and thrashing in some kind of invalid chair on wheels—the school can talk of nothing else.

Over the next few days, information (or, put another way, speculation) trickles in: it’s said that the infant has been born alive, perhaps very scrawny, perhaps of a wonderful size; that the Marrs are keeping their fallen daughter shut up, on bread and water; that, on the contrary, they’ve barred the door to Hetty and she’s had to beg for refuge at the County Hospital on Monkgate; that she’s named her debaucher as an army officer, an eminent merchant, a tailor, a carpenter’s apprentice, or has refused to name any father at all.

The first day Eliza catches sight of Jane, crossing the courtyard, she hurries up to her and begins a question with “Your friend. . .”

Jane turns on her. “I knew nothing.”

Eliza supposes Jane has been interrogated over and over by Miss Hargrave and Mrs. Tate. Isn’t it the very definition of friendship, to keep such a secret?

Her sister steps closer and says, iron-cold, “It’s none of my affair.”

Left alone in the courtyard, Eliza finds herself thinking again that school is not a rehearsal for life’s play. Not for Hetty, nor for Eliza and Lister, nor any of them. It’s the first act of the piece, performed once only. It comes to Eliza that she’ll be reliving these brief days for the rest of her life.

The following week, posters are nailed up all over town for the Race Ball, which is to be—doubling the glamour—a masquerade.

“I’ve been racking my brains to come up with a scheme,” Lister tells Eliza one night in the dark.

“What sort of scheme?”

“You shall go to the ball, Cinderella.”

“Don’t talk nonsense.”

Having so narrowly escaped disaster, these days since Mercy glimpsed them, Lister is more hectic and daring than ever. “I mean that you and I will watch it through a window.”

“What window?” Eliza wants to know. “Even from the Manor’s east range, we’d barely be able to glimpse the carriages drawing up.”

“No, I mean a window of the Assembly Rooms,” Lister says. “You and I will be in the lane, peeping in, seeing everything.”

“How on earth—”

“Trust me, Raine.”

What other choice has Eliza? At this late stage, the only answer is yes.

So on the Saturday evening, the two of them ready themselves for bed as usual, as far as appearances go. “Audentis fortuna iuvat,” Lister teaches Eliza out of her Virgil. “Fortune favours the audacious.”

“Say it again?”

“Audentis fortuna iuvat.”

The third time, Eliza pronounces it with her, correctly enough.

But after Mrs. Tate takes their lantern at nine on the dot, Lister brings out their hidden taper and they strip off their night shifts. Underneath they have on their Sunday best. Eliza’s insisted on lending Lister one of her snow-white muslin frocks, and an unstained pair of sharp-pointed, stencilled silk pumps, only slightly too big for her.

“Follow me,” Lister breathes in the passage. “If we happen on a maid or a teacher, freeze. Should anyone call out. . .well, we’ll flee back up here, I suppose, and throw ourselves under the covers.”

Eliza trembles at the thought. She picks her way after Lister through the maze of the Manor.

The door into the courtyard is locked, so Lister turns aside and leads her through two of the tenants’ deserted workshops, testing every window on the outside of the building. After a couple of rooms in a semi-derelict condition—what little furniture’s left is draped in dust sheets—she finds one window a little ajar and whispers, “Victory!”

Eliza clambers through after her. Down onto the rough grass.

It’s so lovely out there in the dark that Eliza’s dread lifts. They canter across the turf, careful to avoid any cowpats that catch the starlight. Lister loses one of her loose shoes and has to hop back for it. Never mind the Race Ball; Eliza would be happy to stay out here, playing Hide and Go Seek among the mossy ruins. “The front gate’s sure to be bolted,” she hisses.

“But they never bother locking the back one, even at night.” Lister leads her the other way, towards the river, where the door in the wall does in fact swing open, letting them through to the Manor Shore.

From there it’s an easy run around the massive bulwark of Lendal Tower and St. Maurice’s Church, then a quick right on Blake Street. The Assembly Rooms hum with noise, and are lit up so blazingly, the alley beside seems plunged in blackness. Lister dips into it, and Eliza rushes after.

Lister’s up on her toes with her chin on a sill, trying to see into the ball. She moves down to the next.

Eliza objects, “Won’t the dancing be at the front?”

At a third window, Lister says, “Aha—the room where they leave their coats and cloaks.”

Eliza jumps as a door scrapes open and a pair explode out—a liveried youth and a red-faced parlourmaid. She pulls back, but the couple don’t look the girls’ way; already kissing, they break off to scuttle farther down the alley, away from the street and the light. They’ve left the door hanging ajar. Staring after them, it comes to Eliza that the footman and the maid are going to do—it, something like what she and Lister have invented in the privacy of their attic. The couple are following an urge equally desperate, so urgent that they’ll make do with a noisome wall in an alley.

But now Lister has Eliza by the hand and is tugging her towards the open door.

“What are you—”

Lister whoops it: “Audentis fortuna iuvat!”

“Are you mad?”

“My darling girl, the worst they can do is throw us out.”

Eliza goes hot in the face. To be ejected as mannerless schoolchildren from the Assembly Rooms—

But Lister’s hand is hard, relentless, tugging her through the door, into a narrow passage. Lister turns sharply left and they’re in an empty room hung with outer garments on pegs, scarves and shawls draped everywhere. Pieces of costumery too, cumbersome headdresses and feathered masks that their overheated owners must have already shed. Paper labels hang from some items, but there are also quaking piles on two tables, several stylish silk top hats and flattened bicornes with cockades spilling onto the floor, as well as canes, a few swords on belts, even. . .How do any guests find their own things again?

Lister’s snatching up an armful of crumpled cloth that proves to be two black cloaks with white domino masks sewn in. She throws one over Eliza before Eliza can say a word. Blindness, then light, askew; Eliza straightens the cloth and blinks out the little holes. Is that herself she’s glimpsing in a mirror? No, Lister, unrecognizably identical now, Eliza’s wicked twin. The two of them cackle and hoot.

A footman marches in, laden with cloaks, and recoils—

The girls stand like statues.

“Beg your pardon, madam—misses—”

Somehow the trick’s worked.

Lister sweeps past the footman without a word, her masked face tilted away. Eliza hurries after and nearly trips over the hem of her frock.

Down the passage, which is hazed with smoke from men’s pipes. Eliza’s turning her head, trying to take it all in. A Harlequin, several dairymaids, sailors, some kind of witch or hag, a great muscled nun with a beard, a woman in baggy trousers under a glittering smock. An extraordinary mask turns out to be half Belle, half Beast.

Lister pulls up, and Eliza bumps into her sharp shoulder blades. “Thirsty?”

Eliza’s afraid they’ll be found out as interlopers if anyone looks at them up close, but she is dry-mouthed, from the running and the fear and excitement. And if they’re risking so much for this adventure, she supposes they should enjoy it. “Vastly.”

So Lister plunges into the Refreshments Room, her narrow frame ducking between the real guests. Eliza hovers in the passage, then decides it only draws more attention to her, so she forces herself into the room, which is round, with curved niches and a bulging frieze, a dome rising to an octagonal lantern. She tries to move, if not with Lister’s confidence then at least with the air of possessing a ticket and having every right to be here. A boar’s head in brawn, grimacing. A swan swimming on jelly, already half-eaten, its alarming ribs laid bare. As Eliza approaches the laden tables, a domino costume to her left holds out a cup with no saucer, making her jerk.

“It’s me!” the domino says in Lister’s deep voice.

Eliza accepts the drink and puts it to the slit in her mask. It dribbles and burns sweetly and lemonly as it goes down. “Punch?” she gasps.

“I’m on my second.”

Dutch courage: her whole insides feel the glow.

“Can I help you to a biscuit?” Lister asks genteelly, striking a pose. “An ice? Syllabub, soup?”

Eliza laughs and shakes her head at the thought of trying to drink soup through her mask.

“Then come on.”

“Where?”

“It’s time to dance.”

“Lister, no!”

“We’ve come this far. . .”

Eliza stumbles after. They only have to follow the music through an assembly room where people sit playing cards, then a narrow vestibule, and finally the Great Hall.

It’s long and massive, with dozens of marble columns in Egyptian style that go up so high, Eliza can barely make out the ceiling’s elaborate cornices. Dark staining in one corner, from a fire. She looks up at the dazzling candelabra and remembers the figure of two hundred and thirty-four wax candles. What if one fell into somebody’s hat—would it start a conflagration? Such a crowd! Hundreds of masked revellers. A false beard that looks as if it’s made of a cat. A tartaned Highlander, a robed Mandarin, a chimney sweep. Turbans, gold veils; one woman’s embroidered gauzes, sashes, and bangles remind Eliza of her mother.

At the far end, musicians are tucked behind potted shrubs: Eliza recognises a pianoforte, a cornet, a harp, and a violin, or is it a cello? The fellow at the end is playing a whistle with one hand and slapping a little dangling drum with the other. Flags decorate the walls: England, Scotland, Ireland, and other possessions of the King’s. The Great Hall smells honeyed, like a hive; wax from the floor, probably polished that morning, and now warmed by all the soles and heels rubbing and spinning.

The minuet ends and a more raucous country-dance begins. Lister pulls her into the set. Eliza’s already sweating behind her mask. Men promenade with partners on their arms, some barely masked, little bejewelled half-masks held up on long sticks. Breathless, hot, she wants to rip off this domino and yet she never wants to take it off because the musicians are playing a reel now, wild and raucous. Snapped fingers, the odd yowl. Hop, jump, skip, clap. A tall, spurred boot catches on a gauzy drape and rips it. A woman crashes into Eliza and her bracelet scratches Eliza’s arm. There’s molten wax spattered on Lister’s black-clothed head—from the crystal candelabra overhead, Eliza realises.

A bare face, in Eliza’s. A footman, who rattles off, “The Master of Ceremonies’ compliments, and might he have the honour of making your acquaintance, ladies.”

Eliza’s speechless. She and Lister have been smoked out.

“At your earliest convenience.”

“We’re just leaving,” Lister tells him winningly.

The footman frowns. “If you’d like to come this way, the Master—”

Instead Lister grabs Eliza’s arm and dives through the dancing couples, and Eliza lets herself be pulled along as if she’s floating downriver, through the rapids. At the mouth of the passage she glances over her shoulder and sees the dancers have closed up after them like the waters.

At the door into the alley, the two of them throw down their dominos and run.

Out on Blake Street, bare to the cooling night air, Lister nearly crashes into a watchman with his staff and lantern; only the clatter of his rattle alerts her in time to swerve. They nip into Lop Lane and come out at the precinct of the glorious Minster. Left is Bootham Bar, and once past that they can see the ancient chimneys of King’s Manor emblazoned by the light of the risen moon.

“It seems absurd to go all the way down to the Shore in the dark,” Lister says, panting. “Don’t you think we might manage the front wall?”

Eliza would much rather not. But why should she be the pricker of bubbles? “I’ll go first, if you’ll give me a hand up.”

Lister drops to one knee by the wall to make a step.

Eliza does her best to wipe her silk shoes on the grass before she climbs onto Lister’s thigh. She fits her other foot into a hole between the stones and pushes up on them. She’s not willing to fail in front of her fearless beloved. She reaches for the rounded top of the wall and grasps it. “Push?”

Lister’s hands under her, shoving so hard Eliza manages to throw one leg over the top of the wall.

“All right?”

She’s scraped her thigh a little, but she’s straddling the wall now. “All right.”

“Can you see a soft spot to land?”

“First let’s get you up.”

Lister waves away her offered hand. “Drop down. I’ll be right behind you.”

“Just let me pull you up before I—”

“No, then we might both topple.”

Deep voices going by; a top hat and a bicorne. Horrified at the prospect of being seen, Eliza swings her legs to the Manor side and peers down into the soft darkness. It looks like grass, at least. She takes a breath and launches herself.

She’s crashed into a bush, a little prickly, but she’s all right. She brushes leaves off her skirts and peers up.

Lister’s head pops up over the edge. Teeth catching the moonlight. “Ahoy!”

Eliza waves back.

Lister pushes herself up on her hands and gets her feet under her.

“Come down.”

But she crouches on the rounded stonework like a merry frog or a gargoyle. “I’ve never seen the Manor from such a vantage point.” She twists to look over her shoulder. “Nor the city.”

“Come.”

“Oh, my lovely Raine, what a night.”

“Hurry!”

“Look at me. I’m the Emperor of Eboracum, Chieftain of Eoforwic, Commander of Jorvik, Lord Mayor of York!”

Eliza’s still laughing when Lister rears up cock-a-hoop to her full height, striking a heroic pose, but the flounce of Lister’s frock is caught under her borrowed shoe and skews her sideways so she falls, flailing through the air. She hits the grass with a sickening crunch.

Eliza tries to get her up at once, but finds Lister can’t put any weight on her leg. Lister crumples, she yelps, making sounds Eliza’s never heard from her. “Leave me. Find that window at the back where we got out,” she orders in gasps. “Run upstairs and get into bed. In the morning—”

“I’m not leaving you here all night!”

Lister subsides. “Well, once you’re in nightclothes, then go and rouse Mrs. Tate. Say you woke and I was missing—you looked out a window and glimpsed me down on the lawn.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Which window in our north wing could I possibly have seen—”

“Say you ran around the school looking out all the windows.”

“That sounds quite mad.”

“Do it! Now!”

Almost afraid of Lister, Eliza backs away. She tiptoes around the irregular perimeter of the Manor, half sobbing with frustration. She finds the open window and gets in somehow.

Upstairs. In the Slope, she strips off and throws on a night shift. Pulls on a nightcap and shoves her front curls into it. She dashes past the box room to the door behind which the four maids sleep, and hammers on the door to wake them.

A night of chaos and recriminations. Lister’s carried upstairs, face crinkled with pain, spouting her absurd tale about sleepwalking and tripping over a rock. She’s dosed with laudanum. Eliza lies on her own bed, insomniac, listening out for Lister’s ragged breaths.

When Dr. Mather comes into the Slope, before dawn, Eliza begs to stay while he examines Lister’s awful calf, purple and swollen like a giant plum. As he presses and probes, Lister grips Eliza’s hand very hard. The drug’s made her pupils tiny.

“A very nasty break indeed, though none of the bone pieces has pierced the skin, thank heaven.” The doctor unrolls a sticky bandage from a jar and wraps the shin tightly.

Lister hisses with pain. She speaks in the detached tone of an interested observer. “What’s that stuff in the jar?”

“White of egg, vinegar, and wheat flour,” Dr. Mather says as he daubs it on with his fingers, thickly covering the whole bandaged area. “It stiffens as it dries, and keeps the limb in good posture, without the dangers of tight binding.”

She winks at Eliza grotesquely: “The heat of my leg should bake it into a Shrewsbury cake.”

Eliza can’t smile.

On top, Dr. Mather adds a curious device, a cylindrical cage of wood and leather that he adjusts and straps just below the knee and above the ankle. “You’ll need to stay off this leg for three months, Miss Lister, and rest as much as possible.”

Outraged: “Three months?”

“And rest as much as possible, to improve your chances of healing fully.”

Her chances—so it’s not a sure thing, Eliza deduces. And in the meantime, how on earth will Lister be able to get up and down all these stairs to lessons?

Whispers of girls in the passage outside; giggles, even.

“You’re a popular young person,” Dr. Mather murmurs as he packs up his bag.

Lister manages a grin.

“Your mishap seems to have put your schoolmates in a tizzy.”

Does it count as a mishap, then, Eliza asks herself—pure bad luck? She and Lister are the only ones who know it was the kind of not-quite-accident that happens to a daredevil cavorting about on top of a wall. Then again, it could be argued that being born a daredevil was the first mishap in Lister’s life.

“This is a very small world,” Lister tells Dr. Mather. “Even the slightest stir makes a storm in a teacup.”

When the doctor’s out in the passage talking to Mrs. Tate, Eliza hovers by the door to eavesdrop.

“If there are any fragments floating about in there,” he’s saying, “there’s a risk of a putrid infection, gangrene, amputation, or worse.”

It only strikes Eliza now that a person could die of a broken leg.

Mrs. Tate’s whispery voice is harder to make out. After a few minutes, she comes in, funereal, and addresses Lister: “My sister’s writing to your parents.”

“Don’t send me away.” Not a plea but a refusal.

“Our maids are too few, and have far too much to do already.”

“I’ll look after her,” Eliza wails.

“Calm yourself, Miss Raine. Your education would not be well served by playing nurse to—”

“I don’t care about my education.”

A cold look from Mrs. Tate. “We each have duties proper to our station. Running up and down stairs with trays is not yours.”

“Put me in that little storeroom by the kitchen,” Lister proposes.

“Oh, you cause enough disruption already, Miss Lister. Besides, your people will want you home.”

“I assure you, they won’t,” she growls. “Let me stay.”

“I wouldn’t have it on my conscience,” Mrs. Tate says. “I’ve already hired a hack to take you all the way to Market Weighton, with your leg up on cushions to lessen the jolting.”

Eliza feels her ribs cave in. Her sobs mount.

Mrs. Tate sighs. “Really, Miss Raine, considering you were fast asleep and suffered no injury—”

“It’s the shock,” Lister says.

Eliza weeps on.

Once the two of them are alone, and she’s dried her face, she tries to pack Lister’s trunk, following instructions. She breaks off so they can hold hands, palms sweaty with dread.

“So the die is cast, my darling wife,” Lister says. “Dame Destiny means to part us a while, for her obscure amusement.”

“Don’t be witty,” Eliza snaps, “not now.”

“I’m sorry. But we must bend to the dictates of fate.”

“You told me we make our own.”

Lister’s face twists. “Up to a point.”

“But you said—”

“It was a figure of speech, Raine. We must be practical now. Bide our time, and plot our reunion. Non si male nunc et olim sic erit.”

Eliza doesn’t ask.

“That’s Horace,” Lister says. “Things may be bad but they will get better.”

So often in her fourteen years Eliza’s been told to reconcile herself to partings, as if life is one long schooling in separation. “Do you promise to write?”

“Every day. Remember it’s not even twenty miles, and I’m sure to be back after the holidays. By the end of July, for the start of term, if I mend as fast as I’m expecting, or August at the very latest.”

But Eliza can’t believe the Listers will send their prodigal back.

“I’ll get better in leaps and bounds,” Lister insists. “I’ll be doing handstands by September.”

Oh, Eliza doesn’t doubt her beloved’s firm intentions, or her tough and skilful bones. But Fanny was so young when she fell on the cliff, and her arm never really mended. And there’s another problem. “How will your parents think it worth the expense?”

“Merely because I got into a scrape here? I’ve been getting into scrapes since I was born,” Lister reminds her with a laugh.

“What if they decide that fifteen is old enough to leave school?” Still not exactly polished. The Manor tried to mould Lister, and the Manor failed. “They must have guessed that you can teach yourself more out of books than you’ll ever learn here.” The weight on Eliza’s chest won’t shift; she gulps for air.

“But you know how persuasive I can be. And once I’m up and about again, my energies will wear them out.”

“Face it, Lister, they can’t afford the fees as it is.” Money, filthy money. Eliza wishes she could break open her account at the bank and shower her beloved in gold.

Lister sounds oddly calm; maybe it’s the laudanum. “You seem to view our happiness through a concave mirror. What exactly do you fear?”

“Losing you!”

“Impossible. We’re not two people anymore,” she tells Eliza. “I’d know your thoughts, even a thousand miles away. How can we be separated when our two souls are one?”

But that’s just a story, one of Lister’s thrilling stories. Eliza’s tears start falling again and she can’t catch them.

The Head’s parlour. Eliza stands alone, eyes on the Turkish carpet.

“Miss Lister seems too sturdy for, ah, somnambulism.” Miss Hargrave’s dry lips have a chewed look about them.

Eliza shrugs as if she’s equally bewildered by the incident.

In a whisper: “It seems far more likely to my sister and me that your roommate climbed out a ground-floor window on purpose to cavort in the grounds.”

Eliza tries to make her eyes flare in shock. No mention of the ball—ah, so the Head, despite her agitated state, has no notion of the full extent of their crime.

A strained sigh. “While eccentric, Miss Lister does come from one of our oldest county lines, and will always be respected. Yours, Miss Raine, is a peculiar position.”

Eliza’s lids squeeze shut. She knows; since she first came to this country, has she spent a day free of the burden of this knowledge?

“Your birth from an irregular union is no fault of your own, my dear,” Miss Hargrave assures her, “but a stain it remains.”

You’re a bastard, Eliza translates. It’s almost a relief to have it stated baldly at last.

“Your complexion, too, should be no bar but may, alas, prove one.”

A brown bastard.

Eliza’s voice comes out hoarse. “Will you be asking Dr. Duffin to withdraw me?”

The Head throws up her bony hands like a fan. “Not at all. I pledge my protection as long as you deserve it. I’m merely emphasising how important it is for you to linger in the safe harbour of the Manor School for as long as possible.”

This woman means to be kind, Eliza tells herself.

Miss Hargrave shakes her head as if it’s all too much to bear. “The sad fact is, you’ve been raised to marry into a certain class. . .of which many members will judge you ineligible.”

Eliza swallows hard. She’s been studying the wrong book all along, memorising passages that won’t be on the test.

“However,” brightening, “the more exemplary your character and accomplishments, the heavier they should weigh in the scales, surely. The more likely that a gentleman of good family will consider you worth the risk.”

The risk of sneering looks and comments about his bride? Or the more substantial risk of bringing little dusky children into the world, under a cold Northern sky? How many generations until they’d be washed white enough?

Eliza wrestles with herself; she won’t cry.

The Head’s mouth droops. “Though I do wonder if in the end you might not be better off returning to your native land, where your face and funds would surely attract an officer of some sort.”

Rage, surging. These people taught Eliza to be English, scolded any trace of India out of her, and now they tell her to go back to where she came from?

The lovers’ last half-hour in the Slope, where Eliza realises—totting up the dates—they’ve been cocooned for nine months. Dreaming away their time, never anticipating this rough birth.

Lister’s cot is stripped now, as blank as an envelope. She’s quoting Virgil again: “Durate, et vosmet rebus servate secundis. Which means, Endure, and keep yourselves for better days.”

Eliza asks mutinously: “When should I expect them, the better days?”

“Our confidence in our mutual attachment will shorten the time.”

“Our marriage.”

“Indeed. We must be philosophers for a while.”

There’s no more wishful thinking about getting Lister’s parents to send her back to school, Eliza notices. “How can you be so damnably stoical?”

“With considerable difficulty. Come, let’s plan. You’ll visit me for the holidays, as soon as the Manor breaks up at the end of June—and for every holiday after that. Think what those longed-for nights will be.”

Eliza makes herself nod.

“Our letters will bring such relief,” Lister promises. “We’ll use a secret code so nobody else can read a word of them.”

“What secret code?”

“We’ll make one up! Numbers, mathematical symbols, bits of Latin. . .It’ll be child’s play.” Lister goes on: “We’ll learn the same songs and sing them at the same time. You’ll conjure me up in dreams so vivid that it’ll be as if I’m waiting in your sheets every night.”

A tear shoots down Eliza’s cheek.

Her lover leans in and catches it with her lips, then licks them. “What is it? Do you doubt me?”

It would seem a betrayal to say so.

“As soon as Dr. Duffin lets you leave school, we’ll be free to be together.”

“Be together, where?”

“I’ll make it my mission to charm him into inviting me to Micklegate, or Nun Monkton. Or we might stay with my family—my parents hope to move into Halifax one of these days, which would be a step up from the farm.”

None of this sounds real to Eliza.

“And once we’re twenty-one,” Lister says, “and you come into your funds—”

“Yes!” But Eliza shrinks at the thought of those unbridgeable six years.

“Time speeds up after childhood—everyone says so. It’ll fly by. What’s a few years to a lifetime, my love?” Lister pleads. “Once we’re of age and the war’s over, how can they stop us from going off to the banks of the Arno?”

There’s no time to quarrel and reconcile, barely enough time to say goodbye. Instead of answering, Eliza looks around for a present. She empties her writing things out of her father’s red donkey-skin case, and hands it over. “Think of me when you use this.”

“Oh! I will.”

“And you have my eye, in the locket?”

Lister pulls it out of the neck of her frock on its little chain. “A lock of your hair too?”

Eliza grabs her nail scissors. She chooses a piece at the nape of her neck. And then changes her mind, and lifts her hem, embarrassed but resolute.

Lister’s eyes are wide.

Eliza hands her the scissors. Lister cuts a tiny curl, and puts it to her lips, inhales its fragrance. Eliza shakes down her skirts, straightens them.

Lister pries the eye drawing out of the locket and tucks the hair in behind it so no one else will ever know it’s there.

But they’ve missed their chance for a last kiss because, with no warning, here come the housemaids for the trunk and bag. Two unfamiliar men wheel in an invalid chair, and the maids help Lister into it.

The lovers stare at each other, horrified. Is there no more time at all? Neither of them speaks a word of goodbye.

Then Lister’s pushed off down the passage. Gone.

It comes to Eliza that she’d rather die than resume her old life without Lister, the bareness and hollowness of it.

Her bed is still strewn with pens, papers, banknotes. Seized by an impulse she hardly understands, she opens the slit to the right of her waist and shoves the whole mass of money down into her pocket. Wrenching open her drawer, she pulls the fat jewel-roll out of the bottom of the birdcage and stuffs it into the other pocket. Her dress is distorted now; she grabs her summer cape to wrap around herself. She catches herself in the looking glass: her swollen eyes and wild expression.

Eliza thunders along the passage. Halfway down the second staircase she catches up with the men, who’re sweating under the weight of the invalid chair. Lister’s clutching the arms, but she rides with a swaying dignity, as if on the back of an elephant. Something so princely about this nobody from the Wolds. Eliza’s about to call to them to wait. But there’s no sign of the maids, and she seizes her chance to give this impression that she is in charge. She orders hoarsely, “Let me go in front.”

The men wait for her to squeeze by.

“Dearest—” Lister’s eyes are startled, shiny, almost as if she’s about to weep, though Eliza’s never seen her weep.

Eliza says nothing, only holds doors open for the men as they push Lister along the corridor. She’s preparing her argument for when she’s stopped: Miss Lister’s in pain and needs a companion on the journey. If Eliza’s firm enough, there’s a chance she’ll prevail.

But the school is quiet—all the pupils are in class, and it seems no one is coming to see Lister off, no mistress, neither of the proprietors. So no one challenges Eliza at all. The men tote the invalid chair out the door, over the gravel of the driveway, to the waiting hack with its step folded down.

Lister says, “I can manage—”

But the burlier one scoops her up without a word and deposits her inside the carriage, with her plaster-cast leg propped up on the seat opposite. Lister bites down on a groan. Eliza hurries up the two steps and lands on the seat beside the foot in its lone, half-off sock.

Lister stares.

Eliza puts a finger to her lips.

The other man folds up the step and shuts the door while the first drags the empty chair away. Eliza doesn’t trust her voice to thank them, so she makes do with a civil nod out the window.

The crack of the whip, and the horses move off. Eliza doesn’t give the Manor so much as a parting glance.

“My darling, you’ll be put in disgrace for a month for this!”

So Lister doesn’t understand; she still believes this is a schoolgirl escapade. They’re in under the shadow of Bootham Bar now, pushing into the heart of the town.

Eliza leans over and puts her hand on Lister’s other knee. “Husband.”

Lister’s eyes light up at the word.

“Let’s go now.”

“Go where?”

“Go off, run off, together,” Eliza says, “as we’ve planned.”

Lister frowns.

She rushes on: “Not to Italy, of course, not yet. But somewhere.” She hears her vague, childish tone. More firmly: “There must be so many places in Britain we could hide.” Not hide—that sounds furtive. “Where we could be alone, I mean. Together. Like those Welsh cousins.”

“Irish,” Lister corrects her.

“We’ll take lodgings in some city—” Trying not to think of the practical difficulties of nursing Lister; three months of bedrest; the risks of infection.

“Unaccompanied females of fifteen—fourteen, in your case? We’d never be allowed, Raine.”

Why must Lister be at her most practical right now? Where’s the harum-scarum madcap from the night of the ball? (Last night. Was that really only last night?)

Eliza recognises the ancient timbered frame of the Merchant Adventurers’ Hall. That means they’re on Fossgate, about to rattle over the narrow wooden bridge with the fish stalls. “We’d—we’ll pass ourselves off as older,” she argues, fumbling back into the future tense. “Seventeen, eighteen? In London, say, where there are a million people. . .”

“And how on earth would we manage for money?”

“I have some.” Patting her distorted skirt. “And my jewels.”

“Oh, my generous love! If we tried to pay for lodgings in pearls, I expect we’d be had up for robbery.”

Eliza bites the inside of her cheek, hot-faced.

“I cherish you for this gallant offer,” Lister assures her. “It’s like something out of a romance.”

“No, it’s not.”

“But even if we could pull off this marvellous trick, what would we do when your cash ran out? Who can live on love alone?”

Eliza wants to say, I’d live with you in a coal cellar, and she also wants to smack Lister’s head against the side of the carriage.

Walmgate Bar rears up ahead, with its twin-towered, crenellated barbican, the city walls’ last and strongest defence. They must have come a mile in less than five minutes. How fast everything can change; how easily a life can be discarded.

Lister grips Eliza’s hand hard. “For two young ladies to elope from school—you must see it would mean ruin.”

All Eliza can do is keep shaking her head.

“We’d be throwing away our reputations, dragging our names into the mud. Ingratitude, rebellion, rash folly, fraud, impurity, madness, even—the things that would be said of us! There’d be no coming back from this, Raine.”

“I wouldn’t want to come back!”

Just one more minute and the hack will be plunged into darkness, through the iron-studded oak doors and under the rusty portcullis, then out the far side, beyond the thick and ancient walls of York, into the light. Into a wide-open country.

But all at once Eliza feels her confidence draining away, like blood leaking from a secret wound. Lister’s right, no doubt; isn’t she always right? Cleverer than Eliza, more knowledgeable about the world, more sure of herself, more sure of everything.

Eliza believes she could still win this fight; Lister loves her too much to refuse her, or to force her out of this carriage. But she finds she loves Lister too much to carry on, to drag her away into a future that seems all at once obscured by fog. (Ignominy, shame, filth, hunger, worse?) I will not be the means of your destruction.

“Stop,” she says. Too low for the driver to hear. “Stop!” She reaches up, half standing, and thumps the roof.

She feels the horses reined in, the wheels slow. She leans across and kisses Lister once, their mouths bumping hard enough to bruise as the hack comes to a halt. Eliza staggers, almost falls. Then she pushes the door open and jumps down before the driver can come around.

She slams the door shut and walks away before she can lose her nerve, or did she lose her nerve already and is that why she’s walking away? Her skirts are thick with paper, heavy with jewels, silver and gold. She spins around and throws one hand up, whether to signal goodbye or wait she hardly knows, as the horses move on and the wheels turn and the carriage bears her beloved away.