“Does your dear Jane Arden know how wretched and low we truly are?”

I shook my head.

“That you lie across my threshold at night?”

Now I was swallowing tears.

“And when all of Beverley discovers who your family is, do you think you’ll be welcome at the assembly-room balls?”

I stood, towering over her, not because I’d grown, but because she had diminished. I wiped my nose with the back of my hand.

“Don’t you want me to be better than we are?” I asked. “To try? For all of us.”

She looked up at me. “Your father’s right about you, Mary. You think you’re better than your own family. That you deserve better than what I’ve had.”

“I see your unhappiness! Why should I want that?”

The cords in her neck tightened.

“You think you can hide the truth of us, our failures, of you? Hide behind fancy John Arden and his cloying daughter?”

“You don’t know her!”

“No, Mary. She doesn’t know you. But she will, soon enough. Everyone finds us out in the end.”

She stood and swept past me out of the room.

I hadn’t the heart to tell Eliza the ball was in jeopardy. I was sure I’d think of something to salvage it, to keep up appearances, and secure for us a place our past couldn’t touch. But I lay awake every night with a roiling pit in my stomach, the fear of Father being found out, and the rest of us dragged down with him. I felt a rising panic to belong. The person who could save me was Jane. But the less I felt worthy of her, the more demanding I became.

Like a horse sensing its rider’s fear, her friends resolved to form a close knot around her and keep me away. They were cruel to me and my sisters. The one with the sweet upturned nose tied a kite to Eliza’s hair, another sent Everina to fetch striped paint and pigeon’s milk from a store, where the clerk laughed in her face. Jane asked me to the theater, but the girl with the penny-colored hair told me the play would be above my understanding, and I shouldn’t bother. Jane didn’t seem to be part of it, but she didn’t step in to defend me.

“I am singular in my thoughts of love and friendship,” I told her on our last walk together on the Common. “I must have the first place with you or none.”

“Silly you,” she said, threading her arm through mine. “You’ll meet a man at the Norwood ball, an East Riding man, and then the world will change its colors, and you’ll change yours.”

“I don’t want to meet a man.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said.

“But why don’t you trust my colors now? These that I am, without a man?”