“I give you an inch and you suddenly presume to judge my housekeeping! “Did he not attend to your education?”
“I went to a blue coat school for two years,” she said, “But then father fell on hard times so I was sent to a dame school instead. Be careful what you do with the quill once it has ink in it. She spoke of the sudden sense that she had become surplus to the requirements of her family, a nuisance to be tolerated rather than child to be loved. I have a filing system I can explain to you some time. “To be honest with you, the fact of the matter is, well, to put it plainly…” she trailed off and then swallowed. Under the musty bedsheets, her dreams were once again of the black dog, but now it was running beside her, a companion rather than her hunter. Of how life and love gradually returned to the house, but by then she had already learned to make herself small, and unnoticed, and useful.
