Mama took Ned’s jar from his hand. I was to wash my stockings and stitch each hole, then sit by the hearth for three hours, looking at a spot on the wall and saying not a word, an exquisite torture. Everina was careful not to make eye contact, but Eliza stole glances when she could, and I saw some mixture of awe and pity in her eyes, but wasn’t sure which of us she held in awe, and whom pitied.

When Mama turned to her needlework, I looked out the window that perfectly framed my mighty oak in the near distance, half as big around as I am tall, with an elephant’s foot for a trunk and strong, knurled arms. I took shelter in its leafy world when Ned banished me from playing the boys’ hardy games, and so declared it “my tree,” where I’d go to read, or make my own school. Eliza and Everina, when they weren’t playing with dolls, consented sometimes to being my students, and Henry as a last resort, who let me pretend to teach him things. I wished I were up there, cradled in my favorite bough, as strong as a hammock, reading whatever book I could find, or even my father’s Town and Country, filled with the latest London scandals.

An old housekeeper had taught me to read with the help of some alphabet cards, left over from Ned, no doubt, and her own Bible, tied with a ratty ribbon. I don’t remember the woman’s face so much as her thick, wrinkled finger moving across the page, word by word, as I sounded out each one. I think now that she meant to tame me—I was all scabbed knees and dirty elbows—but it was she who made books my companion, when I could get them, sating a hunger of the mind more compelling than the twitching of my eager legs.