I confess I even wished her father were my father, for I couldn’t separate Jane from John Arden, with their noble noses and keen gray eyes. For weeks I’d secreted myself in the back row at his scientific lectures, pretending to be a Beverley girl. He spoke of things beyond all my knowing, of electricity and gravity, of “animalcules,” invisible to the eye, that are borne by the air and reach all the way inside of us. I could see she was his daughter by the way she looked at him with pride from the front row, only occasionally staring out the window, when I could see her long neck and regal profile. Finally, with jangling nerves, I introduced myself to her, Jane of the fine manners. Wanting to impress, I pretended to know things I’d only just learned. But she smiled as she took my cold hand in her gloved one. Here was a buzzing electrical current; here, gravitational pull. This, then, was the science of my heart. I had a sudden determination to overcome any obstacle to possess her friendship. I wrote her my first letter that night, and one every day after, with a third as many replies from her, polite enough. She didn’t know that it burned like a bonfire—a bone fire—inside me, the desperate wishing for her life to be mine, or for some sign of returned and equal affection, some inkling that she found me worthwhile.

When she asked me to sit beside her at a demonstration of her father’s portable scientific instruments, I couldn’t contain my joy. I thought Mama only assented because she, too, longed for us to be part of the Beverley crowd somehow. Jane sat in her chair, her hands folded as neat as a napkin in her lap. I tried to do the same, but kept inching toward the edge of my seat as John Arden revealed one instrument after another: an equinoctial sundial in a fish-skin case, a folding botanical microscope you could slip into your pocket, a compass with a steel needle “blued” at North.