“I don’t know what I’ll do here without you, Mary. You are the weft and warp of my life.”

“And you mine,” I said, brushing a stray lock from her face. “You’ll join us when you feel stronger, promise me you will.” I pressed my forehead to hers.

“I promise. When I’m stronger.”

When we sisters arrived at Newington Green, we found a second paradise, after Beverley. It had the feel of a rural hamlet, but with handsome Georgian houses lining the old Roman road, circling a shady green with steepled churches and pretty gardens. Our house was cavernous, without a stick of furniture. That first day we skittered up and down the stairs, let our laughter bounce against the walls. Fanny had taught us her favorite Scotch song, “There’s Nae Luck about the House,” and we sang it, full lungs, at least four times, like an incantation to bring her there. I had enough money from Mrs. Burgh to buy furniture, desks, books, hire a cook and two maids, and begin to prepare for our first girls (and even a couple of boys). I was twenty-five years old, living, for the first time, a life of my own choosing, my own direction, my dreams.

By the end of summer Fanny felt some surge of strength and joined us. She would help teach where she could, especially botany and drawing. Mrs. Burgh approved of her almost to senselessness. They talked like young girls; Fanny was disarming in that way. She could make an old widowed woman, almost without realizing, confess that hers had been an affectionless marriage, her husband believing that “supporting the species” was the sole aim of marital relations, which should be curtailed otherwise. She told Fanny that she’d been beautiful once, many men had thought so—her dance card was the first to fill—but that Reverend Burgh thought beauty “a mass of flesh, blood, humors, and filth covered over with skin.”

“How awful,” Fanny said. “For you.”

We were walking on the Green, but they thought I was farther behind them and couldn’t hear.

“Yes, well, I suppose I hoped his passion would overcome his prejudice. But he believed that to admire me was to deny that possibility. He called his thoughts ‘filthy,’ and believed it his prime duty to eradicate them. And so eradicate them he did.”

“Without supporting the species?”

“I’m afraid, yes,” she said, making clear that it was a sadness to her. “And so I must do so much more to advance the cause now.”

“Well, you’ve picked a good one to advance it. Mary does whatever she sets her mind to.”

Mrs. Burgh took her arm. “I think of her, more than anyone, as a kind of daughter.”

“What kind?” Fanny asked.

“The very best,” said the widow, patting her arm. “Like me. But without the giving in.”