“‘Let other lovers testify with presents and tokens, we record and stamp our attachment in this precious creature—the result of our common affection, the shrine in which our sympathies and our life have poured together, never to be separated.’”

“What shall we call her?” Mrs. B heard Mary say in a rusted voice. “Our little bird.”

She crept to the door to see Mary’s eyes wide open and shining, gazing on her husband and child. She turned onto her side and reached to feel the tuft of hair peeking out from the blanket wrapped around the newborn still tight in her father’s arms. She saw Mr. Godwin take her outstretched hand and kiss it.

“We have time and time some more to choose,” he said.

Mrs. B had not the heart to tell them she thought the child might not live.

Mary W

Picture me, little bird, near Whitsuntide. A different springtime, full of hope. At a ball, in gleaming new assembly rooms.

Of course my father hadn’t wished me a happy fifteenth; we’d barely spoken for two years. But when he gathered us around to say we were to leave Walkington for Beverley, my young body buzzed with joy. He’d taken a place in Wednesday Market, where the new terraced houses were “elegant at an easy rent.” I took it that he’d determined being a farmer was beneath him—never mind that the sick sheep and failed crops made it so—and that he’d now be a gentleman, without the farmer part. When he broke out a bottle of gin to toast his new endeavor (speculation of some sort that was sure to make him a fortune), he cursed the uncongenial land, the middlemen, the laborers. Anything but himself. And then celebrated with a shot.

“What about school?” I blurted, my mouth always a furlong ahead of my mind. But I held my breath for the answer.

Mama didn’t look at me. She walked to where Ned was standing and considered a wayward curl on his forehead, gently moving it to one side. “The grammar school for Ned, of course, for ‘gentlemen of the best quality.’”

“But for us girls?” I shifted my stance. My fear was that we’d be consigned to the charity school, whose students wore white straw bonnets, brown wool frocks, and blue cloth cloaks with orange trim. How dreary they looked, like prune-faced old women.

“The local day school will suit you girls fine.”