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expect I would hate it at first,” she says quietly.
    Fred’s face falls.
    “But I could get used to it, I believe. We all could, especially Pet.” Her throat locks on the syllable. To really live. Not walled up.
    “Oh, sis. Afresh start!”
    “People do it every day,” she says, a little giddy. Is she deluding herself that she could be anything but what she is? When you change countries, perhaps your old self stays fixed to your back, like a turtle’s shell.
    Fred is standing by the little writing desk. He lets out his breath in a half whistle and sits down on the beveled edge.
    You’ll break it, she wants to say, but she stops herself. Instead she says what just a moment ago she wasn’t going to. “But it can’t be done, Fred, not really.”
    His jaw juts, exactly like his niece’s. “Why can’t it?”
    “Come, now. However would we raise the cost of our passage?”
    “Ah, I have one or two ideas about that,” he announces.
    Caroline’s eyes narrow. “Nothing reckless, Fred?”
    “No, no. There’s someone to whom I mean to write, to ask—”
    “For charity?” she interrupts shrilly.
    Her brother’s fiddling with the pen she uses to keep the household books, rubbing dried ink off the nib. “This person’s a very distinguished gentleman—I won’t name him, in case nothing comes of it, but I know he takes an interest in such cases.”
    Such cases. That means her. A long pause, and Caroline considers the curiously lingering nature of pride. “You wouldn’t tell this person? Tell him my story?” she forces herself to add.
    “Ours. Our story. I would be obliged to tell it,” he says, almost stern, coming over to the sofa and letting himself down beside her.
    She squeezes her eyes shut.
    “You have nothing to be ashamed of,” Fred says.
    Hot water spills down her face. What does he know?
    “I’d put it all down on paper just once. To be done with it. Say I may?”
    Sell her story, instead of her body? “No.” Caroline’s pulse is in her ears, as fast as the wheels of a train, as loud as a ship’s engine. Not on and on, but out and away. To let out the truth, and then sink it under the waves. What will she tell Pet, years later? Nothing, nothing at all. Or a beautiful lie: We lost your papa back in England. “No,” she says, “I’ll do it,” opening her eyes blindly and taking the pen from his hand.
     
     
     
     

Onward
    Caroline Thompson’s existence is recorded only in the letters of Charles Dickens. The young draftsman Frederick Maynard first wrote to the novelist about his older sister on October 10, 1854, and Dickens got to know both siblings before persuading his fellow philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts to set Caroline up with a lodging house. When that failed to make Caroline a living, he and Burdett-Coutts let her sell the furniture (for something more than a hundred pounds) to pay her and her child’s way to Canada. Since on May 14, 1856, Dickens referred to “an endeavor I am making to do something to help a sister and brother to go out to Canada with some sort of light upon their way,” it looks as if Fred went with his sister and niece. On September 26, 1857, Dickens recorded, “I saw Mrs. Thompson before she went, and told her that I trusted her with great confidence.”
    Fred’s song is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Village Blacksmith” (1842).

NEW YORK CITY
    1735
     
     
     
     

THE WIDOW’S CRUSE
    I t was peculiarly warm for an April morning. Huddlestone left his apartment and crossed Dock Street to the best coffeehouse in town. The young attorney nodded to a couple of wholesalers, but he took his coffee alone by the window, with the New York Weekly Journal.
    There was a paragraph about some females down in Chester County who’d formed a sort of secret court to arraign a man who’d battered his wife over some trifle. They’d sentenced the fellow to be ducked three times in a pond, and shaved off half his hair and half his beard to make a