“Mothers do not scold over niggling colds. And it is a lie that the outside will make you sick. It is the outside that keeps us well,” I said, trying to raise a window that was stuck.

“Mother makes them paint them shut,” said Margaret.

“Well, it’s this stuffy air that makes one ill. So, coats please.”

And so we started each of our long days together with a walk, no matter the weather. They resisted at first, walked single file behind me, griping at the ground, answering my questions with grunts. I’d stop to pick up stones, moss, fallen bark, and leaves, make them close their eyes and describe what I put in their hands. On one unseasonably warm day I made them take off their shoes and socks, to feel the grass between their toes. On another we walked all the way to where the tenant farmers lived. They didn’t seem to know who “those strange people” were, or how they were connected to their own estate, or how kept down by it. They only knew them as “stinking Irish,” and didn’t seem to care.

That I did care, and wanted them to, was the only evidence I had that there was a world outside this pretend one. And that I was still of it.

By mid-October they were climbing the yews, begging to go outside, asking questions one on top of another: Why are some stars brighter than others? Why do things die? Why do the French hate their king? In the handsome, well-endowed library that no one seemed to use, I cracked the spines of books and found all the knowledge I needed, each lesson designed around a question the girls asked. They were astonished that I detested needlework and eschewed French pleasantries, all of which, I told them, amounted to a heap of rubbish. If they wanted to learn French, it must be to speak of ideas. They soon began, as I did, to refuse eating sugar, which was linked to the slave trade, and to forgo the eating of meat whenever possible. They were surprised I coddled them when they were sad, and that I wanted to know why. Slowly they began to tell me, and I formed a picture of a house where love was banished.

When they fell sick six weeks after I arrived, one after the other, they were baffled that I tended to them closely, instead of quarantine, on which their mother insisted. I felt genuinely sorry for the girls, put warm rags on their chests, made them hot drinks of elderberry juice and gin, and told them stories, until at last they were better, and told stories to me.