Charlotte regarded their innocent faces and held on tighter to Grace.  “It’ll be different now,” she said.  “I promise.”

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In her own wagon, Charlotte dug through the boxes till she found the stack of identical blank journals.  She knew her father had included them with the firm expectation that when she at last produced an heir, she would record every precious and enlightened minute of its day.  Since that wasn’t going to happen, she instead carried the journals back to the room.  Brewster and Ada had already transferred the crates of books and were now attempting to divide them up into piles, although with such a strange mix, the nature of each pile did not immediately become clear.

“Frankenstein,” Ada said.  “What is that?”

“It’s a novel about a scientist who creates a monster.  The important point for now is that it’s fiction, so it goes over there.  And poetry, if you can tell that it is, goes over here.  Geography, this pile, history, that pile.  And start any other piles you think might make sense.”

“Here we are,” Charlotte said.  She bent down, balancing Grace and reached into one of the crates.  “School books!”  She held them up.  “Spelling, arithmetic, grammar, penmanship.  Aren’t they a lucky find?”

The looks she got back didn’t say that anyone agreed they were a lucky find.

“I was joking.  I don’t even know where they came from.  But we will read every day.  I include myself in this.  And we’ll read to Jeremy and Grace.  And we’ll write and write and write.”

Jeremy looked up at the mention of his name.  He’d been sitting at the table mesmerized by The Children’s Book of Quadrupeds.

“What’ll we write?” Brewster asked.

“Lots of things.”  She handed a journal each to Brewster and Ada, set aside one for Jeremy and kept one for herself.  There was even a journal left over for Grace, though Charlotte couldn’t bear to think that far into the future.

“These are for you to keep.  We’ll write in them every day, but no one ever has to know what you wrote, or see it even, if that’s the way you want it to be.  We’ll write stories too, and sketches and letters.”  This was how her father had raised her.  This was how she would raise them.  It was all she knew.

“Who will we write letters to?”

“Anybody you want.  Sometimes you don’t even have to send them, you just write them.  For instance, you could write a letter to Mrs. Bixby.  That would hopefully be one you didn’t actually send.”  Brewster appeared confused but Ada smiled.