ELEANOR WAS PIECING TOGETHER THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY delights around Arabella. It was one thing to see it laid out across the tabletop, another thing entirely to join skirt to bodice and see the shimmering shape of it. The fruits and flowers blossomed around the curves of the mannequin. They were speckled with silver. It was as if everything that ever was beautiful in nature had been woven together and set upon the silk. It was her masterpiece, and no mistake. If there ever was a dress that could change a family’s fortune, then it was this one.

There was a bang at the door, and a cold gust of wind blew through the house. She leapt from her chair, unlocked the door, and there, standing before the fire, was William. It was William and yet not William. He was staring into the room before him, like a man stranded in a foreign land. How old he looked, how utterly bent in upon himself. Behind him, the front door lolled open on its hinges, framing a world of darkness beyond. “Edgar …” he said. His voice sounded heavy and strange, as if he was speaking in his sleep.

Eleanor shivered. Something terrible had blown into the heart of their home, she was sure of it. She slammed the door closed, and guided William to his seat by the fire.

“What of Edgar, my love?”

“Edgar is lost to us, Eleanor.”

She looked at the clock. Its hands marked out eight o’clock. Caught up in her work, she had not noticed the chiming of the hours. The supper table stood unset.

“Lost?”

Eleanor listened in silence to William’s story of bones and clockwork and burning rafters. It sounded to her like a tall tale from the tavern, a fable found at the bottom of a beer glass rather than anything that could have happened to her family. When William came to the end of it, with Edgar dragged off by the wardens, and he unable to follow, Eleanor stood up sharply and began to pace back and forth across the parlor.

“This is a mistake, Will, surely,” she said. “A great injustice.”

And not just to Edgar, but to them all. To William, who had given the best part of his life and his hours to the University. To she herself, who had turned her back on the tavern, who had carried Edgar in her belly, dressed him for all his apprenticeships, and done her very best to steer their family on toward a better life.

“Edgar is in the hands of the University. There is nothing that can be done.”

“But from what you say, it was an accident. If there is anyone to blame in all of this, then it must be Mr. Stephens! We signed Edgar away into his care.”

William frowned. He was back on Broad Street, watching Stephens staring up at the burning ruins of his workshop.

“I rather think that Edgar created the whole spectacle without his master’s knowledge.”

“You talk as if you think him guilty.”

“I do not know what I think,” replied William in a whisper. “All I know for certain is that I do not know my son.”

William turned his face to the fire. And there, in the tumble of the logs and the spitting of the embers was Edgar’s crime, played out in miniature on the other side of the grate.

EDGAR SAT BEFORE a constable.

“This is a serious matter, boy, serious indeed,” he said.

Edgar stared back, silent. It seemed that anything he said or did was turned against him. He would not speak another word.

ELEANOR SAT AT her workshop table and penned out letters of appeal to the Professor of anatomy and to the dean of William’s college.

In the room above, William buried his face in the wall of pillows.