“I can’t help it,” I said. “I’m tied to my fellow creatures by our shared weaknesses. Do you know that once I walked into her steward’s closet, and felt something like envy, touching her silks, taffetas, and crêpes, the ribbons and feathers, spangles and pearls, let them glide through my fingers, and burst my eyes with their bouquets of color. It was a feast of sensation, and I felt the cost of my chosen plainness.”

“’Tis these whims that render you interesting, Miss Wollstonecraft,” George Ogle said. “These ups that tumble into downs, and the downs that rise to ups.”

“And still I own that I dislike her.”

“As we all do,” said Mrs. Ogle, with a supportive pat on the knee.

Then one day I found Lady K in a taffeta puddle on the drawing room floor, tears like rivulets through her powder and rouge, her hair half falling down from its tower.

“What is it?” I asked, helping her to her feet. “What’s happened?”

She pulled a paper from the bust of her dress. “This!” she said, poking the air with it. “I intercepted it from our former governess. The one before you. A letter to my own husband, after I banished her from our house!”

She handed it to me. I scanned it quickly. “An annuity of fifty pounds? But that’s more than I will make—”

“And for doing nothing at all!”

Lady K plucked the letter from my hand and melted into a chair, trying to breathe. I had never seen her so distraught.

“How could he do this to me?”

“Has she had some injury to her reputation that makes it impossible for her to … find another position?”

“Injury to her reputation? What about my reputation? What about his betrayal of me?” She splayed her knees, all decorum disappeared, put her head in her hands, and wept, real tears.

I knelt in front of her, feeling her pain genuinely. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It was insensitive of me. But you must know I am ever aware of the plight of a woman who has nothing, no options, no choices. And you, Lady K, you have everything.”

She looked at me, defeated. “Yes,” she said, “I have everything you do not. And nothing that you do.”

As the makeup washed away, I could see her more clearly, her pretty oval face, large, slanted eyes, creamy lids.