Theodora had a very great regard for her brother. She looked across the table at him, and he looked back at her, and under the edge of the cloth, where their mother could not see, his right hand made a small quick shape against his knee: T, for Theodora, and then the sign they had invented when they were children for a thing that was not true but must be borne. It was a thumb pressed hard into a closed fist. It meant, more or less, hold on.
She held on. She finished her toast. And at half past ten, when her mother had gone up to lie down with a vinegar cloth and the expectation of a ducal call, she put on her second-best pelisse and her plainest bonnet, told the maid she was going to the circulating library in Bond Street to change her book, and walked very fast to Piccadilly, where she took a hackney to Fleet Street. It cost a shilling. She entered the shilling in a small green notebook she kept in her reticule, under a column headed School, and underlined it twice, because a shilling was a shilling.
Mrs. Tabitha Bartle's printing shop was at the top of Fetter Lane, two doors down from a chandler and opposite a public house called the Jolly Cooper whose customers were neither. It was a narrow, ink-black, cheerful place that smelled of lamp oil and size and the river, with a press in the front room that had belonged to the late Mr. Bartle and that Mrs. Bartle had worked herself since he died, and two journeymen, and a devil of fourteen with a face like a scraped turnip. In the back room, behind a curtain of green baize, there was a deal table with six slates on it, and a fire, and an old map of the world pasted to the wall with a hole in it where Persia should have been.
On Tuesday and Friday mornings, for nearly two years now, Theodora Ivers had sat at the head of that table and taught deaf children their letters.
There were five of them this Season. There was Joby Bartle, Mrs. Bartle's own son, who was nine and had lost his hearing to the measles at three and who had been the beginning of it all. There was a chandler's daughter named Peg and a waterman's boy named Davit, and the twin girls of a widow who took in washing in Shoe Lane, who had never been taught anything at all until they were seven, and who had arrived, last autumn, so starved of words that they had wept when Theodora first showed them that the shape of a hand could mean a cup. None of them could go to the Asylum on the Kent Road; it had two hundred children on its rolls and more than that waiting, and it took them in by election, by the votes of subscribers, and a