I refused dinner and retreated to my room where, by tears and candlelight, I wrote a thousand letters to Jane, raging against my fate, my brother, my father, the tyranny of men. I wanted to ruin him, tell all his secrets, say that my father was everything hers was not: a failure, a gambler, a drunkard. He beats his children, I wanted to say, even if sometimes he wrestles them onto his lap and kisses their heads, he withdraws his affection as easily, a double cruelty. Ned is the only one he won’t touch, protected as he is by my mother’s skirts. Henry, who is his shame, he boxes about the ears until my sapling brother cowers in the corner. We girls he always hits with a wide-open hand, careful to leave no lasting marks that might be seen by curious townsfolk. I wanted to tell her that he stopped hitting me a year ago when Betsy bit the arm he raised to strike me, piercing cloth and skin. I had never seen him afraid before, and now I see it in everything, even his refusal to let me go to Beverley. Polite society would find him out to be the pretender he is.

I knew I wouldn’t send any of it. Because they were my secrets too. I was railing against the night, but it only agitated poor Betsy, who laid her head in my lap, then on my feet, circled around her own tail, and finally settled in a sighing heap. When my hand hurt from writing, I paced the room, telling myself what I ought to have said to him: Look at you. You’re less than nothing. That’s why you hurt everyone else. Because it’s the only thing you can do. The only thing you’re good at. I looked out the window and saw my tree, its quaking leaves dipped in moonlight. I sat on the floor with Betsy and laid my head on hers, to feel her velvet warmth against my skin.

But I knew I was waiting for him. I was done ignoring my mother’s bruises, done covering my ears trying to drown out his nightly pawing, her refusals and pleading, then surrender, followed by grunts and moans, and a bedstead that banged like a hammer against the wall. Even worse, his drunken snoring while Mama whimpered until she finally slept. I didn’t know what I would do, but I could stand it no more.

Betsy heard him first. I followed her to the top of the short flight of steps, and waited under the low ceiling, alert to the sound of his shoulder pushing open the front door, the creak of it closing, heavy footfalls. He stumbled, then cursed the furniture. There was something like a song on his breath, but he didn’t know the words. I watched his dark figure careen into the wall at the bottom of the stairs.