One year turned to two. Hugh Skeys made more vague promises but had not returned to claim Fanny for a bride. I cut short my sojourn in Bath when Mama’s health declined and she demanded that I return home to nurse her, echoed by my helpless sisters. I was not surprised to find them chafing at the cruel smallness of their lives, and their dim prospects for finding husbands, with no dowry of any kind.

Hope stirred when Ned, now apprenticed to a firm in London, reached the age of majority and announced he would marry. Father had long ago squandered his part of grandfather’s estate, but now Ned would have his, a remarkable five thousand pounds. I hated the injustice of the eldest son receiving everything, but it was customary that on marrying, a brother might offer his sisters a dowry to increase their marriage prospects. It would have changed everything for Eliza and Everina, and for me, even a small nest egg would have made my life with Fanny possible. But Ned gave us nothing, not a guinea among us.

Right before Mama slipped into a coma, I sat at her bedside, desperate for some simple gesture of feeling. I had wiped her drool, held her bedpan, brushed her hair, but all she had to say to me was this: “A little patience and all will be over.”

And then it was.

Grief mixed with bitterness is a powder keg. I traveled to London alone to find my brother, and when I appeared on his doorstep to demand he take our sisters in, Ned was so taken aback that he agreed.

“Not forever,” he said. “A few months at most. Then you’re to come back for them.”

I wanted to spit in his face. “I don’t wish upon them a life with a man who’s never cared for anyone but himself. But it’s not them I pity.”

I was relieved when Eliza married soon after, and left for Bermondsey. Meredith Bishop was a suitable match, a respected bachelor, a shipwright—a path to security. Eliza flung herself into his arms, and he caught her, quite willingly. I still believed that marriage was a prison for a woman, and yet I knew it might also be her only means of escape. She’d grown into a vivacious, handsome young woman, who believed in marriage to excess, and begged me not to object. How could I blame her?

Father married the latest housekeeper, and retired to Wales. Some part of me was thankful to be rid of him, though he never missed the chance to ask me for money. Charles, now ten, went to stay with them. Everina was with Ned, still writing me desperate letters begging me to retrieve her. James, not yet fourteen, had gone to sea.