The rest of my world was a cruel desert, my room a prison, the loneliness crushing. In the first month I refused dinner every evening to rush to my room and cry in torrents. I thought it was Fanny I was lamenting, but it was also my grief for the fact of her fading, becoming less vivid, less near. I could no longer call up her voice, her laughter, no longer close my eyes and feel her finger trailing the length of my arm. And I was so far from everyone who loved her as I did. I wrote the Bloods, sent them money, but it wasn’t the same as having them near, to remember Fanny together.

I reviewed my whole life and found, apart from a few smatterings of joy, a catalog of calamities, disjointed as a dream and impossible to decipher. Despite being treated by everyone in the house as a gentlewoman, I had fallen so far, lost the only independence I’d ever known. I was an exile in a new land, trapped in a strange netherworld that held nothing for me. All the comforts of life weighed nothing against the liberty I longed for.

“Why are you sad today, Mary?” Margaret asked me one day when we were walking.

“Do I seem sad?” I didn’t want her to worry.

“I can see it in your eyes, the way you see it in mine sometimes. It’s a faraway look, but I don’t know where you are.”

She waited for my answer. I thought I ought to protect her from the darkness I felt, but if I urged them to speak from the heart, mustn’t I do the same for them? I took her hand tightly in mine. “Sometimes I am nowhere at all, sweet Margaret, but I feel frightened and alone.”

“Don’t be frightened, Mary. You have me. You have us.”

“And I count myself fortunate for that. But this is your place in the world, not mine.”

She thought for a moment and squeezed my hand back, her shoulder leaning into mine. “Sometimes I don’t know if it’s my place either.”