“I’ll find a way to make it right, Hannah. I promise you.”

Mrs. Burgh took in a deep breath and considered the ceiling. I had not the heart to tell her that despite her substantial backing, the trip to Portugal, the school’s expenses, including for me and my sisters, had far exceeded what we were taking in. I’d had to borrow money before I left, and now had creditors chasing me.

“I think we have no choice but to close the school,” she said. “As soon as the academic year’s done.”

There was no disagreeing. It was the practical thing to do. For the next three months I watched the students leave one by one, prefaced by last walks and long hugs. Each parting was for me another loss.

“What would Fanny want you to do?” our friend John Hewlett asked me when he dropped in for a friendly visit, and instead found me in despair. Dr. Price had introduced us when we opened our school, as Hewlett had done the same in Shacklewell, in Hackney. Aside from running his school, he was working on a chronology of ancient Greece, translating a book on algebra, and writing his own collection of sermons on various subjects. Fanny and I were fervent in our admiration, and reveled in his company, as he did in ours when we pounced with questions, bandied about ideas, and finished each other’s sentences. But now all I could do was shake my head. I didn’t know almost anything, least of all what Fanny would tell me.

“She would want you to learn from her loss, grow from it, remember the transient nature of human life,” he said. “But also remember your purpose—yours, Mary—here on this plane, before God calls you home.”

“My purpose was Fanny.”

“No, that’s not what I saw. Fanny exemplified your purpose, mirrored your highest ideals.”

“She was my path to virtue. Fanny made me better in every way.”

“But don’t you understand what she saw in you?”

I shook my head.

“I think she saw God in you, the way she did in her plants. Trying to understand their separate parts, admiring the whole.”

“I don’t know about God anymore. Except that he decided to forsake me.”

“You’re thinking about it all wrong. Think of pure intelligence, a perfect brain, but without our human weakness. And you, Mary, you make the purpose of your life the urgent improvement of your own intellect, and the thinking powers of those around you. There’s no higher calling. All we have, each of us, is our own perfectibility. I think that is the gift we return for the one we are given. If we are sparks of His great Creation, then we must make of those sparks a fire, and with that fire light the way, that we might be worthy, and made whole again in His eyes. Make the world whole with us.”