Mary smoothed the tussock of their little girl’s hair with her fingertips, pressing the feel of her into memory. “When I’m well,” she said.

“Of course! It’s only temporary,” said Fordyce, offering the only comfort he could. Mrs. B sensed the lie in his voice, but hope was the only medicine there was.

“I do wish our girl had a name,” said Godwin, looking into his wife’s eyes. “Before we … send her away—”

“A name,” she said. “Yes.”

Godwin held the child’s cheek to his own, and pressed his eyes shut for a long moment. His tears were ripe as raindrops. “I want to call her Mary,” he said. “After you.”

“Mary?”

“What else could she possibly be?”

“A thousand things,” said Mary, beginning to fade, whether into fire or ice, no one knew.

“Then let her be a thousand things,” said Godwin, “but Mary first of all.”

Mary W

Gray is the color of grief. Not black, not white, not color at all, but bland nothingness. Days that are dark all the time. Water, frozen in the washbasins of our school, the furniture pulled up, all of us hovering around our one meager fire in the large drawing room, the one we could afford. I’d been gone only two months, but our world had changed in my absence, and I didn’t have the will to correct its course. Eliza and Everina showed me little empathy, instead blaming me for having gone to Fanny, my leaving having prompted several parents to pull their children, others now planning to leave. How could I argue otherwise? Without Fanny, I didn’t care.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Burgh. I know I’ve let you down,” I said, when she called me back to her parlor upon my return, greeting me with a warm embrace. She sat close beside me on the settee and asked after Fanny without reserve, her final moments, my state of mind. I didn’t tell her about my recurring dream, Fanny calling me to join her, and how sad I was when I awoke to still be alive. “I can scarcely find a name for the apathy that’s seized me,” I said instead. “I am sick of everything under the sun.”

“With time, it will change. Everything does.”

I thought of John Arden, when he’d looked upon his wife’s portrait and said the same thing to me. But the now pressed on my heart.

“I blame myself, even still. It was I who persuaded her to marry Hugh, go to Portugal. She might still be with us if I hadn’t. The school would be thriving, our girls—our grand project, yours and mine.”

She patted my knee in the most motherly way, something my own mother had never done, not once. “There, there,” she said. “There’s nothing in it to blame yourself. We must look forward, not back.”