The Girls at the Kingfisher Club Read Online Free Page B

and stoic Rebecca. Araminta and Doris fell to Lou; Araminta took it badly, mostly because it came from Lou, and Jo wished later that she’d known enough to give her to Ella instead.
    Ella went into the nursery and gathered Sophie into her lap, and dried her tears with a threadbare cuff. Only after Sophie was sleeping did she do the same for the little twins, Rose and Lily, who had started asking when their mother would visit.
    (Violet was too young to understand; she’d never ask, assuming her mother must have been Ella. Rebecca would eventually set her straight, but so late an intercession of the facts had no effect on what Violet really thought.)
    When the cook delivered dinner, she mentioned their father had asked what all the noise was about.
    â€œWe can’t go out any more,” Jo told Lou when the lights were out. “If he catches us now, there’ll be no mercy. We’re to stay inside, with the others.”
    That was when Lou cried.
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    That Christmas, as a reward for good behavior, their father had parcels delivered.
    It was a generous year, from their father: sewing kits and books, dolls and music boxes.
    The dolls were discarded. Araminta picked up the sewing kit. Jo picked up the books.
    Each room (they occupied six) received a music box; the melody was the same, not even right for dancing.
    The party dresses (cruel, Jo thought) were the wrong sizes for anyone but Rebecca and Ella, and too long, but they looked almost like they should, and everyone declared it a good Christmas.
    With her savings, planning for disaster that might never come, Jo ordered a handful of flimsy coats.
    (Ella had chipped in enough to buy hair ribbons; the ribbons went over better.)
    She handed them to six girls, one for each room. No one said they were cheap or ugly, though they were; anything that had to do with outside carried power. They cast glances out the window.
    â€œNever wear them unless you have to,” Jo said, and they all nodded without asking why.
    By then, their father was a myth; Jo was the one you worried about.
    Ella was the first to ask Araminta if she could do something with the length; soon Ella’s coat had a mostly even ruffle at the collar, made from leftover hem.
    The others lined up, and Araminta—barely old enough to thread a needle by herself—did what she could.
    In their rooms they’d slip them on, grinning as if at the beginning of a great adventure, as if when Jo rapped on the floor to summon them for geography or history or dancing (dancing, dancing), what she really meant was that they were going somewhere, anywhere, at last.
    For years they lived that way, doves in cages, peering out and shaking the feathers of their wings; with every practice they were dancing along their perches, just waiting for a door to open.
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    One night, when Jo was nineteen, the house next door had a party.
    They were frozen by the music. They had no gramophone (they’d never been good enough to earn that at Christmas), and humming and music boxes hardly counted.
    To have music so close was overwhelming, and above the songs rang the laughter and voices and the scrape of three dozen pairs of shoes echoing off the walls, through the stairwells, right through to their rooms like a telegram.
    When Lou realized, she laughed too sharply.
    â€œSounds like they can’t even dance, the clodhoppers,” she said, and then burst into angry tears.
    Jo was startled into silence.
    She didn’t comfort Lou—there was no comfort—but when Ella and Doris came in, Jo motioned them aside.
    Doris whispered, “But what if Father hears?”
    â€œLet her cry,” Jo said.
    They sat on Jo’s bed, watching Lou grind her fists into her brows, waiting for the storm to subside.
    As soon as Lou had recovered air to speak, she said, “I’ve had it. I don’t care what happens to me. I’m getting out. I’m running