“Don’t be sorry, Mary. He’s just sad. Sad-sad-sad.” He was humming again, even misery a song.

Henry was carted off the next day to the charity school, since neither parent could bear the sight of him. I confess I was relieved. He was out of harm’s way for now; maybe he’d learn something, maybe thrive, fly away. The whole household felt the respite from Father’s ire. Even Mama turned back toward planning for the ball: what Ned would wear, which sort of carriage would be called to take us, what time, fashionably, to arrive. It seemed a promising moment to share some intimacy to unite us. I found her on her favorite settee, gazing dreamily out the window.

“Would you teach me to dance, Mama?” I saw she gripped a letter in her hand. “Then I could teach Eliza too.”

“I am hardly the one to teach you girls to dance.”

“But I saw you, with Ned. Showing him. You knew just what to do.”

“You spied on us?”

“No! Not spying,” I said. “Admiring. How gracefully you moved.”

“Darling Ned,” she sighed. “How I miss him.”

“Yet here am I, Mama,” I said. “Asking you to dance.”

She spun around. Her eyes, I now saw, were red ringed.

“Your brother’s not coming for Whitsuntide.” She tugged on a loose thread where the piping was pulling away from the settee’s edge. “So there will be no ball for the Wollstonecraft women.” She looked right at me. “Not for me, not for you.”

I sat beside her, gingerly taking her hand. “I’m sorry for you, Mama, about Ned. But we can still make our own joy from it.”

I felt her hand go limp.

“If only I could learn to step and twirl half as well as you,” I said. “All the girls at school know how—”

“Then let them teach you.” She shook my hand away from hers, as if my touch were a sullying thing. “Or maybe your friend Jane.”

The way she said it, Jane’s name dripping off her tongue in disgust, made my chest cave. She put her fist under her chin and looked outside again.

“Do you know that I met your father at a ball?”

I shook my head and looked into my lap.

“He cut a fine figure once, trim, robust … could dance like any fine young gentleman, at least I thought he was. Not what he is now. A drunk and a failure.”

“What about his … speculations?”

She let loose an exasperated huff. “Gambling by another name, is what it is. Wealth without work, that’s what your father believes in. And like all his other schemes, doomed from the start.” She looked at me with a flat stare. “We are always clinging to the edge of ruin, Mary. Surely you feel it.”

I shrugged my shoulders. I’d only wanted to dance with her, just that.