“She just wants to be inside, with us.” But Henry had already let her in. Mama narrowed her eyes, resenting even that small defeat. But she preferred to admonish me and ignore Henry. Sometimes she seemed bothered by the presence of so many daughters, when she’d only wanted sons. Henry she didn’t count, but doted on Ned as if he were her husband, a husband she might like to have, or wished hers was. I saw her once giving him dancing lessons in the drawing room. Ned was clumsy and four-footed, but she didn’t care. The way she looked at him, her face shining like a smitten young girl—maybe one she once was—who knew how to hold herself, and where a young man’s hand might rest on the small of her back.

Reliving this now, little bird, I feel some splinter of sympathy for my brother. I’m sure I saw him blush, not at the thought of touching his mother, but touching any girl at all. I see that despite his bravura, he didn’t know anything, and that my mother, who loved him best, was trying to prepare him for the world she thought he deserved, which was one she’d never had. Sometimes I’d pretend she loved me like that too. Pretend she did not send me to a wet nurse for the first two years of my life (unlike Ned, whom she let suckle at her breast)—that she delighted in my first smile, first word, first step, first anything. Even then, I visited five-month-old baby Charles in secret. His wet nurse, in the poorest part of town, had lost her one child, an infant, and had only my youngest brother’s care to shape her days. She was glassy eyed, and said nothing to him as he sucked, just stared at the wall. But she didn’t mind when I sat beside her and said nonsense words to him, wiggled his tiny feet, watched him laugh. I wondered if my wet nurse did the same for me, whether I took her as my mother, and then, when I was taken from her, the only home I’d known, found my own mother a stranger, as she found me.

If only Mama had looked at me that way, once, the way she looked at Ned. The way I’m looking at you now, little bird. I would’ve retreated to my hillock and been happy for all my days.