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head and turned my back to her.
    Her mood changed; I felt her soften. She tugged my braid and said, "They do what they like, I suppose."
    I tried to imagine that—Nathaniel doing what he liked. It shouldn't have been hard. I wasn't caged myself. Lessons, yes, learning to turn out a hem and braise oxtail, indeed, but at Oakhaven I was given to my whims.
    Any book in the library was mine to read. I had a pretty little charcoal set and new paper to draw on. There weren't any diversions to be had back home—no one my age to talk with—but I had no bonds, either. There in Baltimore, it seemed I could go calling, go promenading, even go dancing. Was that not doing entirely what I liked?
    "I can't picture it," I said. I rubbed my throat, as if coaxing words from it. "Can I confide in you?"
    "Of course."
    A painful stitch caught in my heart, and I said, "It's like he formed from the mists on our doorstep and dissipated into them when he left. As if he only existed when he looked at me."
    When Zora didn't answer right away, I worried. What a mad thing to say out loud, about a stranger, at that. But then, with another tug on my braid, Zora said, "You know he's really got no entrance to our circle, don't you?"
    "Yes."
    "But you wish he did, nonetheless."
    Pressing my hands against the absurd ache in my chest, I nodded. "Yes."
    Zora leaned her head on my shoulder, then laughed and bounced back to her side of the bed. The pretty lilac scent of her powder drifted across me as the sheets settled in her wake.
    "Cheer up, then," she said, a smile in her voice. "We'll find a way."

Five
     
    I WAS EMBARRASSED TO FIND myself sitting in the last seat at Swann Day School. From my post, I admired the back of every head in class, including the glossy curls of a little girl who had two front teeth missing—she couldn't have been more than seven.

    "Jumps," Miss Burnside told me as I watched Zora sweep to the front of the class, "may be earned on drills, each Monday morning."
    As it was Thursday, I had no choice but to keep my wool manteau for warmth and haunt my sad desk in the dark. A round little boy recited his Latin—
amo, amas, amat
—elementary conjugations that nonetheless he stuttered when he tried to slip from present tense to past.
    Since I read from Cicero fairly well, I didn't need that lesson. I tried to concentrate on one of the others and nearly dozed. I had little inclination to calculate and no one to write to, so I looked around for entertainment.
    Zora sat in the head seat, working figures on her slate. Though she moved through them ably, I noted that the empty seat beside her drew her attention again and again. Her skin seemed pale against the sapphire collar of her gown, as if she'd bathed in milk and moonlight. Her pallor troubled me somewhat, just because it was so stark.
    Yet, I reminded myself sternly, she was nothing but the picture of health when we were playful or misbehaving. Class work would hardly bring the same roses to our cheeks as a game of forfeits, would it?
    When the door behind me swung open, a brittle wind reminded me that I sat very far from the wood stove, indeed. It would have been rude to twist about in my seat, but I was entitled, I thought, to look up when the intruder passed. Cold came off of Thomas Rea's serge coat; I smelled it on him—a crisp touch of winter.
    He stopped very near me and bowed to Miss Burnside, his hat in hand. "Forgive me, ma'am. Dr. Rea needed me in his surgery."
    What a melody his voice made, throaty like a mourning dove, full of weight and shadows. On hearing him speak, at last I understood why Zora pressed herself against his fences, his name an oath on her lips.
    Touching the reciter's shoulder, Miss Burnside peered at Thomas with the coolest of considerations. "You have come just in time to depart again with your lunch pail."
    "I left it at home," he said. "I'll work through, to account for missed lessons."
    Miss Burnside clasped her hands together. Not alto-gether