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With a delighted squeal the little girl danced backward, then swung her stick through the air, well short of Will. “Show me that!”
“No more trying to put holes in me while I’m talking to my wife, then,” he returned, grinning as he made a show of sheathing his pretend weapon against his hip.
“I agree. But you have to show me how to thwack people on the feet.”
From the window, Emmie watched. Not the giggling five-year-old, adorable as she was, but her grinning, out-of-breath husband. She knew he could fence but hadn’t seen him do so in years. The way he moved, all grace and skill, that had been part of his world, where he went to clubs and boxing and fencing matches with friends, and she shopped or visited or embroidered with hers.
He wasn’t that gawky, gangly boy with whom she’d chased frogs, nor was he the awkward, earnest one who used to propose to her every Season, or even the one whose… fumbling on their wedding night had made her wonder if he hadn’t also been a virgin. He wasn’t eight or twelve or even twenty, any longer. He was eight-and-twenty, and every inch a fit, brilliant, attractive man.
“I did all the letters,” George said from the table behind her. “Why are there two different shapes for each stupid one?”
Taking a breath, Emmie returned to her seat. “There are uppercase letters, the big ones, which are for the beginnings of sentences, names, and titles. Then there are the lowercase letters, which are for everything else.”
“But why?”
Why, indeed? “It makes understanding what you’re reading easier. You know when you’re reading a name, or a place, just by which type of letter is used.”
“Seems like shi—a waste of time to me,” the boy stated, frowning.
“If you mean to learn to read and write properly, it isn’t a waste of time,” she countered.
“I’ll learn it, but it still don’t make sense.”
She regarded him for a moment. Then she wrote out a short sentence. “Let me demonstrate,” she said. “This says, ‘A rose wilted in the garden.’ This”—and she wrote out another sentence—“says, ‘A Rose wilted in the garden.’ Do you see the difference? One means a plant needs water, and the other means your sister fainted.”
Rose ran by the open window, Will on her heels. “Varlet!” she yelled, laughing so hard she nearly choked.
George looked up. “I don’t think she’s learning fencing,” he observed, and went back to studying the sentences. “That’s Rose’s name. Do mine.”
He wanted to see his own name in writing. Emmie leaned in and, in her neatest printing, wrote “George Fletcher.” “This is ‘George,’” she said, underlining the word, “and this is ‘Fletcher.’”
“With uppercase letters at the beginning of each word,” he muttered, carefully copying what she’d written.
“Yes. Because they are names.”
As he finished the two words, he put a clenched fist over his head. His joy at being able to write his own name felt contagious; eventually he would realize it meant he could put his name to contracts rather than signing an X as he’d done earlier, that his name on paper had weight and legal standing.
For Emmie it meant that if the children at her grandfather’s party decided to make the duke birthday cards, well, he would be able to sign the wrong name. Yes, she should have been teaching him to write “Malcolm Pershing,” but for heaven’s sake that could wait a few days. This moment was important for him.
“You’re doing very well,” she said, smiling as she wrote out a few simple words with which he would be familiar. “Do you wish to take a few moments and go see how Rose is progressing?”
“I can hear her,” he said. “Do you think if I can write, that one day Rosie and me might be able to open a shop, and folk will come in and buy things and give us money?”
He’d omitted several steps there, but she nodded anyway. “Of course. Though you may find yourselves with parents who own a farm, or a mill, and wish to follow in their footsteps.”
George shook his head. “Rosie can’t be a potato picker. Or a washerwoman like Mama. Seven different families tried to get her from the orphanage, but I told the Mother Superior that if anybody tried to separate us, I would tell everyone how the nuns lock us in cabinets and sell off our belongings to buy cigars for themselves.”
“What?”
He went back to tracing. “Oh, they don’t do any of that, except sometimes some of our things go missing, but I had to make sure that if Rosie and me go anywhere, we go together. No one else will look after her like I do. And I know we’re nearly out of time. Another year or so and I’ll be a long-haul boy. The nuns will give up on me ever leaving, and they’ll start bartering me out to bricklayers and canal diggers in exchange for repairs to the stone jug.”
Goodness gracious. Even without his letters, even being only eight years old, George Fletcher had managed to stand up against nuns and God knew who else to keep his sister with him. And he was very aware that his own adoptability faded as he grew older. When she’d been eight years old, she’d spent half a year nagging her parents for a new doll that she’d seen in a shop window—and that had been the most important thing in the world to her.
“If any nun looks like she smokes a cigar, it’s Sister Mary Stephen,” she said aloud.
He snorted. “She reminds me of those stone gargoyles they put on churches.”
The resemblance was striking, when she considered it. “I’m glad you’re not going back there. We will find you a good family, George. For the two of you.”