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My dearest Molly,

It is a great irony that as the curtains close and my life fades to darkness, I begin my story.

There once was a young maiden named Flora Gray, who lived in the lap of luxury. Her house was not a house. It was a glorious, imperial manor with white Roman columns at the entry, a grand oak staircase inside, a ballroom, a library, a conservatory, and so many bedrooms that, try as I might, I can’t remember them all. Gray Manor, the country estate was called—a most appropriate name since it described not only its color but its character.

To say it was stately is an understatement. Molly, it was grander than any museum you’ve ever visited, more austere than a mausoleum, more imposing than a supreme court of law. My father and mother presided not only over the manor house but over the sprawling property as well, which included barns and stables, gardens and glades, a workers’ cottage, ponds, and vast hunting grounds.

You may wonder how it came to be that I lived on such a grand estate and never spoke of it, but the secrets I have kept from you will stay that way no longer. This may come as a surprise, but I did not always live a life of penury. Put plainly, I was not always poor. My father, Reginald Gray, was a man of considerable means, descended from a long line of men of considerable means. Not only was he the revered patriarch of the Gray household but he was also the wealthy magnate and CEO of Gray Investments, a company with inestimable holdings all over the world. A man made of money, Papa had never known poverty or the pangs of cold or hunger, nor had he ever suffered the myriad deprivations of the common man. As a child, I was convinced that in lieu of blood, coins jangled in his veins, and where his heart should have been was a cavernous bank vault housing a ruddy cashier who counted bills in a steady rhythm—a beat that would stop only when there was no more cash to count. Oh, Molly, how I revered my father when I was a child.

“What separates a gentleman from the masses is money. Wealth makes the man,” he used to say.

To me, Papa was half man, half deity—commanding his dominion through some divinely ordained force. Like a Greco-Roman god, he was shifty, his moods a storm of unpredictability. Still, when I was young, he showered me with such warmth and generosity…at times.

I recall him in my mind’s eye before all the troubles began—before the dissolution of assets, the threat of a merger, and the dismissal of servants and staff. I can see him sitting in his office chair—the Capital Throne, my mother called it—handsome and imposing behind his oak desk. A smile breaks out on his face the moment he sees me, his only child, standing in the doorway. I could not have been more than five years old at the time.

He puts down his pen, shoves his adding machine aside, and holds out his strong arms. “My dear girl,” he says. “Come.”

I run to him, my black patent shoes click-clacking on the herringbone floor, the baby-blue skirt Mrs.Mead dressed me in swishing against my legs. When I reach him, he lifts me into his lap, where I curl like a cat, purring with contentment.

“My little Flora,” he says. “An exquisite beauty. The moment I laid eyes on you, I knew you were my precious blossom, and so I named you Flora—a delicate flower, a refined and rarefied bloom bringing color to my days.”

I can still smell the scent of him, his imported French cologne, musky and deep, the prickly fabric of his Savile Row suit scratching my tender cheek. But as quickly as Papa showered me with affection, he was equally quick to take it away. This was the era of rock ’n’ roll and poodle skirts, and yet in honor of Papa’s father and the many hallowed men who’d come before him, my father was running his household like an Edwardian fiefdom, with him as the self-decreed feudal lord. The world around Papa was innovating and modernizing at lightning speed, something he feared and abhorred in equal measure. Papa believed in tradition and continuity, hierarchy and stability. But above all else, he believed in his family’s superiority, untouchably above the common man.

My mother, pitiful creature that she was, worshipped Papa. Never did she let me forget how lucky I was to bear the family name. But she’d confessed to me how she’d used her feminine wiles to win Papa, captivating a man of great wealth and stature and, in doing so, making her family proud.

Audrey Gray—Mama—was an ethereal being with raven-black hair and skin so white it was almost blue. She was a much-coveted beauty—or had been, before my birth robbed her not only of her feminine wiles but, according to her, of “all the joys in life.”

Mama acted as though she was a pedigreed aristocrat when in fact her family’s money was more nouveau than Papa’s. But marriage had changed everything, legitimizing Mama’s family history and changing it forever. This transformation, however, came at a cost. I don’t know what my mother feared more—Papa himself, or losing her claim to the Gray family name.

Over time, I have come to realize my mother was a victim of many things, including circumstance, but it took me decades to see her that way. I will not sugarcoat the truth, Molly, and I hope you will understand when I say that both she and Papa lacked the milk of human kindness. Rarely did Mama have a good word for me, consumed as she was with her vanity and flaunting our family’s good name.

She would beckon me into her lap when I was a child, holding me close to her heart, but her words offered little warmth. Whenever a lugubrious mood overcame her, which occurred often—meaning every time a younger, more febrile female specimen caught my father’s wandering eye—my sad mother would repeat the same refrain: “Flora, you were born in a bath of my blood, my first child, destined to be my last. And to my colossal disappointment, you were born a girl.”

Born a girl—a fact I was never allowed to forget. Sometimes, it was meant as a boon, but most often, and more so as I grew up, I learned that my gender was a transgression. I could hardly be blamed for it and yet I was. I’d robbed my mother of beauty and a chance to bear other children while at the same time I’d stolen from my father any possibility of getting what he wanted most—a male heir.

It’s a sad truth of human experience that repetition dulls the impact of just about anything—but this is especially so in the case of suffering. By the time I was seventeen years of age, I was only dimly aware of the increasing volatility of my family circumstances. Little did I know that the comfortable high life at Gray Manor was coming to an end. Cracks were beginning to show in the veneer of our family’s prosperity.

Once upon a time, Gray Manor had teemed with full-time domestics, but the staff had begun to dwindle. I watched, wide-eyed, as one by one my father dismissed loyal, long-suffering servants, making excuses for frog-marching them out the door. “That stupid maid used a monogrammed silver spoon as a shoehorn,” or “I never liked the look of that chap.”

The workers dwindled to a skeleton staff, but my father could not dismiss everyone. The two very best remained. They were closer to me than my own kith and kin, a fact that both galled and mystified my parents. Closest of all was Mrs.Mead, my beloved nursemaid, who’d raised me as her own from the time I was born. Ruddy-faced and portly, she had a special smell, like a warm loaf of bread fresh from the oven, and the kindest eyes you ever saw, one blue and one green. When she looked my way, it was like the sun shone on me and me alone. I loved her with all my might, trusted her with my whole heart. When I scraped my knee or elbow, she’d console me, then dress the wound with a bandage.

“There, there. They stumble who run too fast.”

If a visiting child tried to take a toy from me, Mrs.Mead ensured I got it back. It was at her kitchen table that I did my homework. And when I came down with the curse in my fourteenth year, it wasn’t to my mother I ran but to dear Mrs.Mead. She taught me to stanch the flow, both of the blood blotting my skirts and of my deeper, blooming shame.

“Chin up, Buttercup,” she said, two chapped hands on my cheeks. “You’re a woman now. You should be proud. I sure am.”

At this time of my life, as I reckoned with the dispiriting frigidity of my parents, I discovered how liberating it could be to assign my lived experiences to a fictional protagonist, placing them at a safe remove within the confines of fiction. I became so good at transforming my circumstances into poetics that my teachers lauded my creativity, and in so doing failed to recognize my coded cries for help:

In a bath of bluest blood she was born

A girl, unwanted, from her mother’s loins torn

There you have it, Molly. You’ve been introduced to dear Mrs.Mead and to your great-grandparents—the patriarch and matriarch of our tale. You’ll come to know them all better as I continue my story. I swear to you that no matter what treatment I endured at the hands of my parents, I loved them with every fiber of my being, a blind devotion like no other. I emulated them and believed in their righteous superiority. I wanted nothing but to make them proud, yet in the end, I achieved the opposite of every youthful intention.

But let’s begin at the beginning rather than portend the end. Let us return to a very important day when your gran, seventeen-year-old Flora, was a carefree young student, filled with nervous anticipation as she posed an important question to her parents. You see, the great gift of being an only child with a distracted mother and a father on the cusp of financial ruin was that I was free to do as I pleased. And what I pleased was so different from what other girls my age were interested in. All they dreamed of were dancing and dates, marriage and mates. I, on the other hand, wanted to learn. And learn I did. I was a brilliant student, Molly, with a voracious appetite for history, languages, arts, and my favorite subject of all—literature.

My father had an impressive library at Gray Manor, completely for show, a glorious room with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, filled with leather-bound volumes organized according to subject and sometimes by author name: Antiquities, Art History, Charles Dickens, Economics, Egyptian Civilization, English Literature, Shakespeare. I swore to myself that I would one day read every volume in that room.

I loved learning so much that at the age of eight, I convinced my father to hire a tutor to teach me French, which I could converse in quite fluently after a year or two of lessons. At my private girls’ school, I sat in the front row of class, and not even the girls calling me “teacher’s pet” could dissuade me from giving my full attention to the lecture. The world grew bigger and brighter every day. Suddenly, I had proof there was more to living than the rigid, cloistered ways of Gray Manor, with its affected austerity and flagrant worship of wealth, class, and rank. I longed to suck the marrow of life through education, and I dreamed of higher academic pursuits. Maybe I could be anything—a teacher, a professor, perhaps even a writer?

I was the only girl in my school with marks high enough to pursue arts and literature rather than home economics and coiffure. Two roads diverged, and I longed to take the one less traveled. But doing so meant leaving the girls’ school and sitting crucial exams that would, if I passed, allow me to apply to university. My dreams rested not just on the results of those exams but on whether I’d be allowed to take them at all.

At my behest, the headmaster of my school arranged a meeting with my mother and father, and on a cold, rainy Monday, he ventured to Gray Manor to petition my parents on my behalf.

Never before had I seen the headmaster look so meek as he did on that rainy morning in the grand foyer of my father’s mansion, wet from head to toe, slack-jawed as he took in the majesty of his surroundings. Uncle Willy, my father’s butler, escorted him through the corridors and up the grand staircase to Papa’s well-appointed office, where the poor man’s knees were shaking as he knocked with a clammy hand on Papa’s mahogany door.

“What do you want?” my father growled when the headmaster entered. “I don’t have much time.” Papa said all of this without so much as glancing up from his papers.

My mother was standing behind him, wearing a navy silk blouse and fashionable beige culottes she’d bought in Paris a few months before.

“Sir, madam,” said the headmaster. “Your daughter asked me to come. You’re very lucky. Rarely have I had a student as gifted as Flora—if ever.”

My father drew a deep breath and stood from his chair. It was a tactic of his, to stand and assume his full, imposing height, towering over everyone. His mouth shaped itself into a mirthless grin, a smile in name but not in spirit.

“Bit of a waste, no?” Papa said. “To have a daughter with brains.”

“I…I don’t see it that way, sir,” the headmaster countered. “Do you, madam?” The headmaster turned to my mother, expecting agreement.

“What I would say,” drawled Mama, “is that with a girl, it’s best to invest in her looks if you’re seeking long-term gains.”

“Beauty above brains,” my father quipped as he offered a hand to my mother, inviting her to stand by his side.

“I’m not here to dispute Flora’s beauty,” said the headmaster. “And she comports herself with grace at school. But you see, Flora has a chance to enter courses that will allow her to sit entrance exams for university. She has the aptitude for it, and the will, too. It would be a shame for someone so clever to eschew academics. It’s a gateway to any profession of her choice.”

“A gateway,” my father repeated. He slow-marched to where I silently stood in the threshold of his office. He appraised me with his hawkish eyes, then came to a halt in front of me.

“Headmaster, look at her. Take her in,” he said, putting a finger to my chin, pushing my bowed head up so my embarrassed eyes met those of my equally embarrassed headmaster.

“Is she not a fine specimen?” my father asked. “If Flora were a horse, she’d be a thoroughbred, don’t you think? Who am I to withhold such a gift from mankind?”

I know these words will sound harsh to your ears, Molly, but these were different times, and believe it or not, it wasn’t unusual for women to have their physical attributes assessed as if they were prizewinning livestock at a county fair. At the time, I found such appraisals either laughably silly or worse, complimentary, for I was too young to fear idolatry.

“What my husband is trying to say,” my mother offered, “is that our daughter should attend a finishing school for girls, where she will be trained in home economics and other womanly arts and where she will learn, if we’re lucky, to find herself a husband appropriate to her station.”

My father smiled at his wife, a real smile this time, with all his warmth shining upon her.

Despite my fears, I found the strength to speak up. “Papa, Mama,” I said. “Please excuse me for speaking out of turn, but I wish to take the prep course and the exams. I’d like the opportunity to prove myself.”

“To prove yourself,” my father echoed.

“To whom?” my mother asked.

“To myself, I suppose,” I said. “I want to know if I have what it takes to succeed.”

“What it takes, Flora,” said my father as he hiked up his trousers, “is something you weren’t born with. I’m a businessman descended from a long line of businessmen. I know how the world works. A woman with a sharp mind is like a fish on a bicycle.”

My mother brought a mannered hand to her mouth to conceal her tittering laughter.

“Still,” said my father, “if you’re set on writing your silly exams, be my guest. Just don’t get too far ahead of yourself. As your father, it’s my job to decide your future. And there are better pursuits for a girl than university.”

“Thank you, Papa!” I said, hearing only approval and ignoring the cautions that came with it.

That was all I wanted—a chance. It was a step that would move me closer to my goal. Surely, if I passed my exams with flying colors, I’d be allowed to stream toward higher education rather than finishing school? Surely, if I was granted admission to a good university, my parents would support me? And surely, if one day I made something of myself as a professional, Mama and Papa would be proud of me for bringing glory to our family name? Surely, anything was possible, even for a girl?

I met the eyes of my headmaster, expecting to see excitement writ there. But all I saw was the grim line of his upturned mouth—another smile that wasn’t quite a smile. And again, I chose to ignore it.