But when I stepped into my mistress’s pale blue drawing room and she closed the door behind me, she merely smiled and asked me to sit down next to her at her writing desk. Here, she opened a book and produced a blank sheet of paper, a pen and an inkwell. She pointed at several words in the book and asked me to write them down.

I was not comfortable holding a pen, not at all, but I pulled the page close and steadily copied the words as best I could. Mrs. Amwell watched me closely as I worked, her brow knit together, her chin in her hands. When I finished the first few words, she selected several more, and almost immediately I noticed an improvement in my own pen strokes. My mistress must have noticed it, too, for she nodded approvingly.

Next, she pushed aside the sheet of paper and lifted the book. She asked if I understood any of the words, and I shook my head. She then pointed at several of the shorter words—she, cart, plum—and explained how each letter made its own sound, and how words strung together on paper could convey an idea, a story.

Like magick, I thought. It was everywhere, if only one knew to look.

That afternoon in the drawing room was our first lesson. Our first of countless lessons, sometimes twice a day—for my mistress’s condition, which I’d first noticed at the registry office, had worsened. The tremor in her hand had grown so severe, she could no longer write her own correspondence, and she needed me to do it for her.

In time, I worked in the kitchen less and less, and Mrs. Amwell called me often to her drawing room. This was not well received by the other household staff, Sally most of all. But I didn’t worry myself over it: Mrs. Amwell was my mistress, not Sally, and I couldn’t refuse the ganache balls and ribbons and penmanship lessons by the drawing room hearth, now, could I?

It took me many months to learn to read and write, and even longer to learn how to speak like a child who had not come from the country. But Mrs. Amwell was a wonderful tutor: gentle and soft-spoken, wrapping my hand in hers to form the letters, laughing with me when the pen slipped. Any lingering thoughts of home vanished; it shamed me to admit, but I did not want to see the farm, not ever again. I wanted to remain in London, in the grandeur of my mistress’s drawing room. Those long afternoons at her writing desk, when I was burdened only by the gazes of the jealous servants, were some of my best memories.