Her lisp was extreme, her voice grating and high. She giggled when she told me she found me “quaint” in my simple dress, my hair gently swept back, no makeup, no embellishments at all, which seemed to please as much as amuse her. I soon came to understand that the governess before me had been seduced by Lord Kingsborough, and unceremoniously dismissed. She took me, apparently, as no threat whatsoever.

The older sons were away at Eton; the three daughters were to be mine alone. She called them in and introduced them with no motherly pride, but more curiosity as to how these girls could have issued from so fine a womb as hers. There was Margaret, fourteen, tall, and built squarely. She had a pointy nose and brown hair that fanned around her face in fashionable disarray, which didn’t suit her at all. With arms crossed firmly across her flat chest, and a militant frown, she looked both miserable and fierce.

“Just look away from her spots if they bother you,” said Lady K, moving on to Caroline, twelve, and Mary, seven, with big blue eyes and abundant brown curls. Though stuffed into French dresses à la mode, they struck me like the wild yews outside, unhappy in the same way. Their manners were rough, nothing polite about them, and they seemed almost bored to meet me.

“You’ll be gone before Christmas, trust me,” Margaret whispered in my ear when she gave me her hand and curtsied, her gaze fearless.

“No need to curtsy for me, Miss Margaret,” I said. “I am not your master.”

“Yes, you are! And they must curtsy,” said Lady K. “I’m trying to teach them manners. And so must you. Anyway, make something of them, won’t you, Wollstonecraft? Not too much. Just enough.”

“She means, to get a husband,” said Margaret, rolling her eyes.

“As soon as possible, yes! I know it won’t be an easy task. But do your best. We’re counting on you.”

The girls, united in their cause, plotted and played tricks on me, presenting me one day with a bouquet of dead flowers, the next putting a live beetle in a hollowed-out apple, and the coup de grâce: a dead worm in my tea. When I seemed unimpressed, and told them about the Beverley girls and their tricks, I had their attention, at least for a moment. On our first day of lessons in a bleak, airless “schoolroom”—though I’d prepared over the summer, improving my French, music, and art—my own restlessness equaled theirs. They fidgeted. I shifted in my chair. We couldn’t find a rhythm.

“Put on your coats,” I said. “We’re going for a walk.”

“A walk?” Margaret groaned. “Outside?”

“For walking, I prefer outside to in,” I said.

“But we might catch cold,” said Caroline, “and then mother will scold us!”