About this story
Left alone while your mother visits an aunt, you drape yourself in the good skirt against every rule Constance recites, and catch Mr Povey, who manages the shop, wincing over a tooth he was meant to have pulled in Hillport hours ago. What follows is laudanum, a stolen pair of pliers, and a tooth you pull yourself — not the one that was actually hurting him.
How it opens
Thursday afternoon closed nearly every shop in Bursley beneath calm spring light.
Baines's needed no signboard; respectability itself directed customers to its windows.
She has no gloves, and she is walking straight toward those men.
Choose
Maggie is allowed a suitor if she keeps him out of the kitchen.
Her twelfth engagement deserves more confidence than the first eleven.