Ambrose hammered four nails in the wrong place while talking giddily about their hopes for several sons. Surreptitiously Henrietta inspected her sister’s waist—but Hester had always been nicely plump, with rounded forearms and calves and a smooth, short neck, and she looked no different. The changes came after she lost that baby and then, several years later, another. (Exactly what Henrietta had dreaded; their own mother had lost several between herself and Hester.) Her hair thinned and her feet swelled, but the doctor couldn’t figure out what was wrong and Henrietta feared she might be developing heart problems like those that now confined their mother to the house.

Perhaps, Henrietta suggested, Hester should avoid having children? But Hester said Henrietta understood nothing. Not about marriage, not about motherhood. “You’re thirty-six,” Hester pointed out then. “Without even a prospect.”

And what was Henrietta supposed to say to that? Although she’d never told Hester about the painter Sebby Quint, her only regret about giving up Mason was the wreck of their long friendship and the gossip that had caused. Hester should have understood how limited her choices had otherwise been: only men crippled in one way or another, like Izzy Deverell, had returned from the war, and if Daphne had continued all this time with only the occasional gentleman friend, never settling into marriage, why shouldn’t she? These days, when acquaintances nudged her toward plausible mates, she talked about her work and, if they pressed further, pointed out her obligations to her students and her family. Not just all her mother needed, but her deep involvement in her sister’s life.

Which she could not, of course, say to her sister. Instead, as a way of counteracting Hester’s growing despair and aimlessness, Henrietta begged for her help in the caterpillar room.

“I need another pair of hands,” she said truthfully. “You’d be doing me a favor.”

To her delight, Hester, who hadn’t been interested in the caterpillars when she was a girl (she liked to sew, she liked to cook; she was a wizard gardener), agreed. Ambrose, who since Hester’s second miscarriage had been devoting his spare time to raising and rebuilding a steamship sunk at the village dock, encouraged her in this.

“You’re always finding caterpillars outside,” he said. “Even when no one else notices them.” Mostly he seemed relieved she might have something to do that didn’t involve him.