school. The first of its kind, for the
training of intellects and souls, hearts
and minds. A school, here, for girls.”
“What girls?” Caroline said. David
laughed.
“Any of them! All of them,” Samuel
said. “Any who want what they
couldn’t find in any other girls’ school.
A true, transforming education, dear-
est. Like the one you’ve had.” His fin-
gertips grazed her arm.
The education that had grown a
wilderness in her head, too large to fit
into any available space she’d yet
found, so that she’d always wondered
what her father had planned for her
exactly—if he’d planned anything, if he
hadn’t just taught her all of it because
she was there and because he could.
“We’ll be filling a hole in the edu-
cational landscape,” Samuel was say-
ing. “No one, no one, has done this
before. Formed girls into women who
can become their own best selves,
who can be true partners to their hus-
bands and true mothers to their chil-
dren. Our school will be a pursuit of
the divine in the human. We’ll teach
thinking, not sewing or physical
graces, not shallow parlor-trick erudi-
tion. We’ll teach them to read the text
of the natural world.”
Samuel Hood, essayist.
“It’s unprecedented,” he said.
But Caroline thought all this would
have sounded familiar to the Birch
Hill men; only the direction of its
application had shifted.
“Of course there’s the matter of
what they’re to do with all that after,”
she said. She did not look at David.
Then her father surprised her. He
stepped forward and caught her hand.
“I know,” he said softly. “My dear, I do
know. That’s why this school is so
important, as a first step. There’s noth-
ing to do with it? We’ll make some-
thing to do, while we’re making the
doers.”
Another small beginning, meant
like Birch Hill to ripple. Shouldn’t her
father understand that the ripples did
not always follow? Birch Hill hadn’t
lasted two years. And yet. A bird
adjusted its wings, and Caroline
thought she almost heard the slight
friction of feather against feather. One
impossible thing might follow
another. Her father did mean what he
was saying, she knew—he always
did—and about girls, who else said
and meant such things?
She hadn’t realized her father
understood what it felt like to her.
Samuel gripped her shoulder.
“You’ll teach with us, Caroline. You’ll
help us shape what we’re doing.”
Caroline had briefly tried being a
teacher. She hadn’t been sure what else
to try, equipped with the educationhe’d given her, tied to this place, so
three years earlier she’d gone to work at
the Ashwell grammar school. A few of
the children she’d adored, but when she
raised her hand one afternoon to strike
a boy who’d thrown gravel in another
boy’s face, she only just remembered to
open her fist. She’d returned to Birch
Hill and told her father that the world
wasn’t served by the troughs and peaks
that teaching seemed to bring her to.
“Teaching didn’t suit me, remem-
ber?” she said.
David answered. “No one has
taught the way we’ll teach here.” Flut-
tering on its branch, one of the birds
gave its call. A single rapidly repeating
note, almost mechanical in tone but
lighter, higher: the sound of a quick
tongue ticking on teeth.
“Sir, for the name?” David said. He
bounced on his feet as if testing the
ground. “The School of the Trilling
Heart. What do you think? In honor
of the circumstances.”
Joy suffused Samuel’s face.
There were words that might have
plucked him down to earth again, but
Caroline couldn’t bear, in that
moment, to say them.
From The Illness Lesson.
Copyright © 2020 by Clare Beams.
Published by arrangement with Doubleday, an imprint of
the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Pen-
guin Random House LLC.EXCERPT CONT. The Illness Lesson