Several children turned around in hopeful, blinking gazes to look at the new grown-up who had arrived, opposite the sixteen-year-old terror visage of Miss Dinah, who had likely already told them several unforgettable things about the trials of poor Hansel and Gretel.
“Which part?” one asked. “Which part was wrong?”
“Oh, dumpling,” Dinah said with a frown. “Don’t listen to her.”
Vix shook her head. “It’s only,” she said sadly, “that her fingers were missing too.”
And then she shut the door behind her and let Dinah deal with the eruption of gasps and questions that followed.
Rosalind was trying not to look amused and failing. “Vix, that was not very responsible of you,” she said, shaking her sandy curls.
“No, but it was very amusing,” she answered, turning the other girl around by the shoulders and pushing her back toward the classroom. “Show me what you needed help with.”
“Oh, it was the tally rhyme,” she said, immediately distracted and bouncing off toward her beloved chalkboard. “I am teaching them to count by fives and I realized that we learned it by rote, you see? Five, ten, fifteen, twenty. It doesn’t rhyme, but it feels like it does, because we said it so many times as children.”
“And these people didn’t,” Vix guessed, looking around the classroom.
Rosalind had taken up the duty of training the recovered who could no longer perform their former vocations after the tenement that used to stand where the clinic now was had collapsed and gravely injured several working poor.
The key skill she was teaching, for now, was tally work, and almost every surface in this room was covered with ticks and swishes, some with numbers and sums beneath them.
It looked like some twice-cursed cell in the Tower of bloody London in here, where prisoners had spent years scratching away the days in trembling, chalky lines.
“So how did you teach it?” Rosalind asked, licking her thumb and adjusting the straightness of one of the endless tallies on the chalkboard. “When you were a governess? Did you just use rote?”
Vix stared at her until she stood back up, bouncing in her flouncy peach dress and turning back around.
“You know,” she said, a little dazed by the impact of her realization, “I was feeling utterly disgusted by a woman who still wore ruffles last night, but somehow you make it completely charming. How do you do that, Rosalind?”
“What?” she said, her lips pursing together. “Are you teasing me?”
Vix shook her head, taking a step forward. “God, no! No, I’m really not!”
Rosalind frowned, pushing her hands down the lines of her dress. “I am trying,” she said. “I know I am terribly provincial. I’ve only been in London for a few months. Your dresses are so very elegant.”
“You don’t need to change a thing,” Vix insisted. “I really was being sincere. I … drat, I am sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. You look nice in the morning light, is all. Rosalind, you know I struggle with … with softness.”
Rosalind blinked again, her big green eyes damn near wobbling in their sockets.
Vix groaned. “I didn’t use rote,” she said briskly, turning and marching toward the chalkboard and taking up a piece of yellow chalk.
“Oh,” said Rosalind softly.
“There was a girl a few years behind me at school who had a problem with writing. She would see things backward, so we used tallies to do mathematics,” Vix said, carving out a small square in the bottom corner of the board and kneeling. “We started with our hands. So when you do four ticks and the one across for five, it matches a hand.”
“Five fingers,” Rosalind said, kneeling down next to her and nodding.
Vix nodded. “So a fist on one hand for zeros and a flat hand on the other for fives. And each pair goes up one number on the left,you see? It is easier than starting with five. Instead start with zero. Zero and five. Ten and fifteen. Twenty and twenty-five. They will remember the image of their hands next to the groups of ticks and slashes.”
“Oh! Oh, yes, I see!” Rosalind said, making a fist and a flat hand herself as Vix wrote the examples under the grouped marks in her corner of yellow chalk. “That is brilliant!”
Vix sat back on her heels, giving half a smile to the other girl. “You could go try it with the pox children first if you want to test it out. Some of them are old enough.”
Rosalind was muttering numbers under her breath, bouncing her fist and her flat hand on her knees rather than listening, and nodded absently at Vix’s suggestion.
She watched her for a moment, guilt still gnawing at her for the misunderstanding a moment ago, for making this sweet creature feel mocked.
“Ambrose kissed me,” she said, so suddenly that she startled even herself. “Last night.”
