Mathinna gazed up at the hanging herbs. “How do you know how to do that?”

“My mother taught me. A long time ago.”

“Is she still alive?”

Hazel’s face clouded. She turned back to the linens. “I wouldn’t know.”

To celebrate the advent of spring, it was decided that the Franklins would host a dinner dance in the garden. In a short visit to the schoolroom, Lady Franklin announced that Mathinna’s studies would be suspended while Eleanor taught her to dance. “If she is to attend, she must learn to waltz, and do the Scotch reel, and the cotillion, and the quadrille,” she told Eleanor.

“But we’re memorizing times tables,” Eleanor said. “She’s right in the middle of them.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake. Learning to dance will matter more to her social prospects than times tables, I assure you.”

“You mean your social prospects,” Eleanor said under her breath.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing. What do you think, Mathinna? Would you like to learn to dance?”

“I know how to dance,” Mathinna said.

Eleanor and Lady Franklin looked at each other.

“This is different,” Eleanor said.

For the first few days, Eleanor sat with Mathinna at the table in the schoolroom, mapping steps on a chalkboard, with Xs for each participant and arrows designating where they should go. Then the two of them began practicing together in the yard behind the henhouse. Eleanor was too self-absorbed, not to mention intellectually incurious, to be a particularly inspiring schoolteacher. She plodded from subject to subject as if checking items off a list. But these same traits, as it turned out, made her an excellent dance instructor. Color rose to her cheeks and her eyes sparkled as her every step was admired and emulated. She looked so pretty as she turned! And as soon as she tired of one dance, she could move to another. She was playful and persistent, happy to spend hours demonstrating the moves.

Out in the courtyard one sunny afternoon, Eleanor conscripted a stable boy, two convict maids, two idling buggy drivers, and the butcher to practice with them. Upon learning that the head butler, Mr. Grimm, had taken up the fiddle, she persuaded him to saw a jaunty tune. The air was mild and the atmosphere convivial, and it was thrilling to touch another person’s hand in public without fear of rebuke.

To Mathinna, the dances, with their choreographed footwork, were as logical as mathematics: the careful fitting together of a sequence; a series of movements that, done in the correct order, produced the intended result. Once she mastered them, it was as if her body moved on its own. Soon enough she was helping Eleanor corral the other dancers into their proper places. She loved the pace of the songs that drove them forward: one–two–three–four, one–two–three . . . step-step-step-step, stepstepstep . . .

“She will be ready in time, won’t she?” Lady Franklin asked Eleanor a week before the party.

“She will. She’s learning.”

“Her dancing must be a triumph, Eleanor. Otherwise, what’s the point of including her?”