Betsy sprinted ahead of me. She knew the way, the only path to it, the one we’d made ourselves. I tucked the hem of my skirt into its waist to climb the final “stairs”: flat rock, grass, flat rock again, and at its peak, the large, buff limestone where I sat sometimes on its carpet of moss and lichen, master of my own world, that small circumference with a view, I pretended, all the way to Calais. I pulled my knees up, wrapped my arms around them, and laid my cheek there, bone to bone, breathing it all in. Betsy panted in the grass, head resting on her speckled paws, feeling the wind in her fur. No one but Betsy wanted it, or would walk that far, so we kept it our secret. But I would have let Jane Arden come. Because then she would know me, then see me. On my hillock that spoke everything of who I was.

That, little bird, the only true happiness I knew.

The barbed edge of my anger fell away. I knelt to the ground and set the kerchief on the level surface, untied the top, and peeled its corners away until one, two, three, and then thirty spiders at least, with what seemed like a thousand legs, skittered across the rock, under it, away, and into the wild. My realm had been theirs all along.

Could Jane Arden ever understand? She was refinement and elegance, knowledge and hope. How could I explain my letting loose a kerchief full of spiders on a nothing hillock that meant everything to me? How could I make her see that those spiders needed refuge, wanted to live as all beings want to live? Free.

I stood on the threshold of the cottage when Ned confronted me with his empty jar.

“Where are they?”

Eliza and Everina turned to him because Ned’s mood of the moment, whatever it was, preoccupied all the household, except when Father was home. I brushed past him, defiant. I was second-born, a girl, but I never knew which was the greater crime. I paid for it every day, but that day I was tired of paying.

“Take them off,” my mother said, before she even turned to face me. She could point to my stockings with the back of her head, from that spot the size of a pin cushion where her hair was always uncombed and ratted. Though she wore a cap most of the time, there were eyes underneath, I swear it.

“Don’t you want to hear my side?”

“And not a single word.”