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Mr Garth’s eyes returned briefly to Jane before he performed the tiniest of bows while Jane made another curtsey.

She wondered why anyone would be named for an architectural feature. John Balcony Smith, Clive Pilaster Fortescue—it didn’t seem right somehow.

“I do hope you enjoyed your first day in the schoolroom?” declared Mrs Garth in a way that indicated no reply was necessary. She led the way to the table without pausing for an answer.

Dinner seemed interminable. Jane had been a little surprised when a soup bowl placed in front of her had not been accompanied by any other dishes appearing on the table or the sideboards. The soup was tasty but not plentiful, and with no bread to supplement it, Jane felt it had hardly touched her sides on the way down. But when her plate was removed, the dish was soon replaced with another bearing half a partridge and an artfully sliced pear. Several tureens of vegetables and a sauceboat were added to the board.

Mrs Garth kept up an inconsequential monologue of a shopping trip that had occupied her afternoon, which seemed to mainly consist of information exchanged with various ladies she had met. Any purchases made seemed not worth mentioning. Mr Garth occasionally demonstrated he was listening by making inarticulate noises with his mouth full. Cherise, who had been very animated in the schoolroom, seemed strangely subdued in her parents’ presence. Jane did her best to engage in the conversation by adding polite queries in the silences that were necessitated by Mrs Garth’s occasionally having to eat some food.

After the partridge, Jane was dismayed when a mutton pie she could hardly touch followed. Jane finally realised the Garths ate their dinner like a parade. As the long clock struck eight, she wondered when it would all end. A syllabub followed with tea, which Mr Garth did not partake of.

When Mrs Garth finally stood after dessert, Jane was hopeful that she might at last be dismissed, but instead of withdrawing, the lady of the house took herself only as far as the Egyptian Revival settee, from which point she asked her daughter if she had a new piece ready.

After an imploring glance at Jane, Cherise made her way to the pianoforte at the far end of the room.

“What is the matter?” whispered Jane as she followed her.

“Miss Fairfax set me three pieces, but I have only mastered the first,” said Cherise as she searched through some sheet music. “We usually take turns playing.”

This was alarming news to Jane who considered her playing only tolerable.

“You start with that piece,” she whispered back, “and I will turn pages for you.”

As Cherise settled onto the piano stool, Frederick entered with a tray of cheese, which he set down on a side-table before retrieving the port from a cabinet. Mr Garth settled himself into what looked to be the only comfortable chair in the room, heavily gilded, but deeply upholstered.

Once Cherise began playing, it became obvious that Jane’s meagre skills exceeded those of her pupil and she breathed a sigh of relief. Mild applause from her parents greeted the completion of Miss Garth’s performance. When a perusal of the sheet music revealed not a single piece that Jane recognized, she sat down to play one of the tunes she had by heart, a Clementi sonatina.

As she played, she felt the hairs pricking on her neck. She looked up at the end of her piece to see Mr Garth staring at her over the brim of his glass of port. During a brief whispered exchange with Cherise, Jane suggested they play the other two pieces as duets. This happy notion allowed them to give a passable performance for both. When the long clock struck nine at the conclusion of the second piece, Mrs Garth’s soft applause signalled the end of their ordeal. As Jane exited the room, she saw that Mr Garth had fallen asleep with his chin cupped in his hand, leaning on his elbow.

After climbing the stairs, Jane bid Cherise good night at the girl’s bedchamber door before returning sleepily to her room. As her head hit the pillow, she wondered vaguely how she would ever find time to write to Lizzy.

Thus, the week passed. Between teaching in the schoolroom and entertaining the Garths in the evenings, there seemed little time for Jane to even think. Miss Fairfax’s diary proved of immeasurable use for the formal lessons, but Jane had several ideas of her own to break up the day. Early in the week, Jane discovered Cherise had quite a talent for art, drawing interesting caricatures of small animals in pencil. They had the happy notion of setting Amabel to trace these to improve her penmanship. Meanwhile she and Cherise practised their musical pieces upon the pianoforte in the schoolroom. Between the formal group lessons and his rote learning of Latin, Felix amused himself during these musical interludes with his ‘experiments’, which consisted of pulling apart and reassembling an array of mechanical toys he possessed.

Jane began to feel like a bird in a gilded cage. She realised that she had been lucky to find a position in a well-to-do household. The children were nice. Were it not for occasional whispered comments and glances between the two eldest when Miss Fairfax’s name was mentioned, Jane might have felt completely at ease with them. Jane’s impressions of Miss Fairfax, determined largely from her perusal of her diary, were primarily of a meticulous and accomplished lady. The likeness to Lydia formed earlier in the week had been discarded as quite ridiculous. Still, something unspoken lurked there beneath the surface. Jane began to wonder if the children resented their former governess for the high standard of her lessons. Miss Fairfax’s torn and bloodied dress bothered her.

By the end of the week, Jane’s sudden loss of leisure, the unaccustomed demands upon her time and the dull ache of missing her family, especially Lizzy, had cast her down. She had begun to dream about the unknown Miss Fairfax who had taken on the aspect of Charlotte Lucas. On Friday night she woke from a nightmare in which Miss Fairfax had broken her leg when the children had pushed her screaming down the stairs while Nurse looked on.

It was in this context that Jane woke on Saturday night with the alarming feeling she was being watched, to find Felix standing beside her bed holding a candle. Her heart skipped a beat.

“Felix! Whatever are you doing?”

“I’m sorry, Miss Bennet. I had a nightmare. Can I get in?”

“In my bed? No!”

“Nurse lets me get in, but I cannot wake her and she snores besides.”

“You must go back to your own bed, Felix,” said Jane, getting up and pulling a shawl about her.

Having escorted Felix back to his bedchamber, he confessed to Jane that he had been reading a book about vivisectionists. This had prompted a dream in which a creature, half-human and half-monkey, created during his tinkering in the schoolroom, had escaped his experiments and returned to his bedchamber to lurk in the shadows.

After pushing Felix back into bed, Jane explored the corners of the boy’s crowded room with the candle to demonstrate that the creature was not there. But he would not be satisfied, and in the end, she promised to read him a book to send him to sleep. After rejecting Gulliver’s Travels as likely to fuel further dreams of misshapen creatures, Jane decided pirates and cannibals would be safer. She picked up Robinson Crusoe. After sitting beside Felix’s bed for only five minutes, her teeth began to chatter, and she decided there was nothing for it but to crawl under the blankets with him. Her token nod to propriety was to keep the upper sheet between them.

Thankfully the boy fell asleep after only one chapter. After retrieving the candle, Jane returned to her own bed, but repose proved more elusive for herself.

As requested, Meg woke her on Sunday morning when she brought the can of hot water for Jane’s ablutions. Bleary-eyed, Jane dressed quickly for church in the single gown of black crepe she had prepared for her mourning. She pulled on her grey pelisse. After Meg did her hair, Jane donned a poke bonnet she had recently covered with black silk. Her black gloves followed. Meg accompanied her down to the courtyard where the footmen were preparing the Garths’ carriage for their own trip to church. Uncle Gardiner had sent her a note during the week telling her that they would meet at church before returning to Gracechurch Street for lunch, and that he would send a footman to accompany her.

When Mick had not arrived when the church bells started tolling, Jane thought herself likely to miss the beginning of the service and resolved to set off without him. The Garth’s footman, Frederick wasn’t particularly happy about this, but as it was his duty to help the Garth family into their carriage for their own Sunday service, he was unable to accompany her.