I was curious enough to go back and look at who the author was, and to my surprise it was a woman named Loretta Copeland. There was no author biography, so I was left wondering if she was a family member or just coincidentally shared their name. What was weirder was that there was no copyright date, but the book was made of blue fabric, threadbare on its edges, and the pages, though not falling out or cracking, were a light brown color that seemed very old.

It was a vanity project, perhaps. Loretta Copeland had been bored enough to write a creepy book telling people how to mold their children.

Gross.

I paused my examination of the book and drank some tea, grateful for the distraction from the drama of the evening. Then I opened the book again and gently thumbed through the pages, reading the chapter headings, which were all like something from a museum: Public Decorum, Standards for Servants, Spiritual Purity, The Dangers of Education, and my personal favorite, The Particular Tendency Toward Wickedness in the Young Female.

I browsed that chapter, hoping for some funny bits about what a disaster it was to teach your daughters to read and write and use their brains, but it ended up being an unfunny mix of dire warnings about the natural desire of young women to pursue sin and entrap men, and harsh instructions on what to do if you suspected your daughter was flirting with the devil, so to speak—or, I don’t know, maybe literally.

One of the recommendations was to isolate her from evil influences. Another was to distract her with domestic labor. If that failed, you could marry her off and just make it somebody else’s problem.

At the end of the chapter, there was a short summary.

I stopped short when I scanned the paragraph:

The moral sense of the world is reflected in the individual soul, and only with the greatest care can we avoid the descent into the darkest and most vile tendencies of human nature.

I knew that sentence. That was the sentence both Agatha and Lily had written over and over.

And the last sentence of the chapter sent a chill through my body:

Be ever mindful that the female of the species was the direct cause of the fall of man from divine grace. Do not allow her to bring similar devastation to your family and its reputation. Undoubtedly she will try.

I shut the book and set it down, feeling weirdly like I’d done something wrong by looking at it. Its tone was so hostile and unkind—especially toward girls—that I wanted to bleach my eyes.

I thought of Laura’s grandmother sobbing at her wedding. And the portrait of the Widow Copeland. And the designer of the garden—how had Laura described her? Preoccupied with the fall of man?