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of me, proud of his little girl. He’d carried me up and onto the beach past the demure ladies wading in the shallows. Past a horse-drawn bathing wagon filled with giggling girls in their princess dresses and bloomers being drawn into the waist-deep sea. Mother had been waiting for us in her three-sided tent, scowling at the sight of her wild-haired husband and shoeless daughter, the ragged, weightless hem of my dress. “Oh, the pair of you!” she’d cry. She was always exasperated with us.
    As I’d grown older, I’d insisted on continuing “real swimming,” but she wouldn’t hear of my wearing a form-fitting French maillot—a sleeveless, body-hugging garment that covered only the upper thighs. This was another skirmish in which my father refused to engage.
    “We need to choose our battles with your mother,” he reminded me frequently. He was right, of course. My refusal to “come out” at age sixteen to be presented at court in a fluffy white ball gown—its cost would have paid the wages of six servants for an entire year—had nearly brought the Edlington-Porter house down around our ears. My decision to attend college had sent Mother to bed for two weeks. But in both of those instances, Father, still very much the head of this household—even if not the holder of the family fortune—had prevailed.
    Father’s insistence that I be allowed into his human dissection laboratory had been met with Mother’s unqualified horror. His spirited rebuttals had been at least in part selfishly motivated, as he depended on my help more and more in his home laboratory. None of the assistants he’d hired over the years had exhibited a fraction of my aptitude or enthusiasm. I suspected there was a sense of pride passing on his vast knowledge of morphology, anatomy, and evolutionary science.
    Once fully outfitted in my riding habit, I drew out of a wooden trunk at the foot of my bed a pair of men’s trousers and pulled them on under my skirt. I’d sat up by candlelight for a week wielding a needle and thread—tools with which I was not on the friendliest terms—and hemmed the pant legs so that they wouldn’t show beneath my skirt. Satisfied that I looked sufficiently dignified and ladylike, I left my room, taking the stairs quickly.
    My parents were already at the table, Father at the head, though his eggcup was still covered in its quilted cap, his buttered toast uneaten. He had his head stuck into his New York Times —one of a week’s worth that had arrived that morning, another luxury his wife’s money afforded him. “My guilty pleasure,” he called the weekly delivery of newspapers from America. Father prided himself on keeping up with current events “from the colonies,” as he called them—a playful dig to the Edlingtons, several of whose staunch ancestors had died in America’s revolution against Mad King George III.
    Mother had not touched her kippers and tomatoes, and only a tiny nibble had been taken from her apricot scone, as she was busy jotting down notes for Cook for the evening’s dinner party.
    At the sideboard, I filled my plate with kippers and toast, ignoring the sausage floating in grease, and pondered an egg, which I did take. I sat at Father’s left hand across from my mother. Neither looked up from their occupations, which was just fine with me. I could eat in peace or, rather, quickly so as to get on my horse as soon as humanly possible.
    But it was not to be.
    Mother put down the pen and regarded me with that beady eye of hers. I could see her nostrils fluttering in an attempt to discern any residual odors from the laboratory. She had strangely refrained from any arguments about the dissection class at the dinner table the night before. Now seemingly satisfied on the olfactory front, Mother examined my face with the discernment that Leonardo would his model for the Mona Lisa.
    “Your nose is covered in freckles, my dear. I suggest you wear a broader-brimmed hat when you ride. And