The African woman said, “My mistress say, this is where Master Nicholas must be, in school. I leave him with you now. He will make his own way back come dinnertime.”

Before Martha could think to ask her name, the woman was gone. The boy was looking at her with a guileless and open expression, perfectly calm and even eager to please, as if he had never known anything but kindness and could not perceive of any other treatment. Behind her Martha felt the children stirring, uneasy with her silence and with the boy.

He said, “That was Elfie. Elfie didn’t want to bring me. Lorena wanted to bring me but Ma said Lorena coddles me and she’d let me run off and play, but I don’t mind coming to school. I wouldn’t have run off.”

Martha said, “Nicholas, we are glad you’ve come to join us. There are a number of empty desks. Please pick one and sit down.”

Younger children, her new mother-in-law had told her, needed movement and distraction and if she could provide those, she would have more success turning their minds to arithmetic and reading and geography. Elizabeth had only given this advice when Martha took her aside to ask her about the best way to approach the class she was supposed to take on the very next morning.

It was the little people revolving around Martha like a carousel during the wedding supper that reminded her what was ahead, and how unprepared she was to walk into a classroom.

Elizabeth’s advice made sense to Martha and no doubt it would have been the key to success, but for the unanticipated distraction of a new student who had come to the village and brought so much excitement with him. If Martha’s attention was drawn to the boy again and again, despite her earnest intention to treat him just as she did the others, then who could expect any more of the children?

The son of a farmer or a cobbler would have been a matter of great interest—any new child in the village was a momentous event for these children—and still they would have waited until recess to satisfy their curiosity. But Nicholas Wilde was Jemima’s son, and even the littlest of Paradise’s young had heard stories of Jemima. Sooner or later Nicholas would find himself at the center of a crowd of children bent on interrogation. He would be overwhelmed by questions he had no way to answer, and rumors that would make no sense to him.

Some children stood up to such treatment and maintained their dignity by stalwart silence; a few tried to fight their way to the respect of their classmates. In any case, Martha could not raise the subject without intensifying the effect. She would keep an eye on him during recess, but children could be both sly and cruel, and it would be impossible to defend him against all comers. Martha had grown up in Paradise as Jemima’s daughter, and those memories were very close to the surface as she went about her business. While she bent over water-buckled primers, passed out slates and chalk, she watched Nicholas from the corner of her eye and wondered how he would cope. Each time this thought crossed her mind, she reminded herself that because some of her own classmates had been cruel and mean-spirited, that didn’t mean that Nicholas would necessarily receive the same treatment.

When she had set all the other schoolchildren work and it could no longer be avoided, Martha called Nicholas to her desk.

He stood before her, a likely young boy with a head of wavy brown hair and mild eyes the color of caramel. His smile was shy and trusting both.

She said, “Nicholas, how far along are you in your primer?”

He seemed confused by the question, and so she tried again. “Did you learn from a primer like this one with your last teacher?”

“Oh,” he said. “No, ma’am.”

“You may call me Miss Martha. Then what books did you learn from?”

He seemed pleased to have an answer to this question at least. “The newspaper.”

“You learned your letters from the newspaper?”

“Yes, ma’am. Every morning Mr. Focht reads the newspaper and then he passes it along to me.”

“And who taught you to read?”

A set of lines appeared on his brow, as though she had spoken to him in Japanese. “Nobody,” he said finally. “Ma showed me but mostly I learned on my own.”

With a dread sense, Martha thumbed through the primer until she found a list of vocabulary words.

absent   abhor   apron   author 
Babel   became   beguile   boldly 
capon   cellar   constant   cupboard 
daily   depend   divers   duty 
“Do you recognize any of these?”

His gaze ran dutifully across each line, and then he shook his head. “Guess I haven’t got to those ones yet.”

She tried again. “And these?”

Age
Beef
Cake
Dead
Eat
Neat
Gate

Again the solemn consideration, and then a bright smile. He pointed.

“There,” he said. “My name starts with N, and there it is, N.”

“And so it is,” Martha said. “Can you read the word that starts with N?”

“Well, I don’t know,” he said, his brow furled. “I’m not sure I can.”

Over the course of the next few minutes Martha discovered that young Nicholas Wilde was a biddable, pleasant child, apparently devoid of all artifice. She learned too that he had only the most rudimentary arithmetic skills, and that he could, when coaxed very patiently, recite the alphabet up to and including the letter K.