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"How did Nash—"

"Justice Nash," he corrected Charlotte.

"—how did Justice Nash vote?" She licked her fingers free of the sausage fat, then drenched the cakes in maple syrup from the jug she had decoratively painted while at Miss Pride's. Those simpler days of music, art, and deportment, her father wistfully recalled: French lessons for Charlotte, German for Henrietta, Latin at home for them both.

"He is as susceptible as anyone to Emma's charms."

"I bet." Charlotte grinned. "Was it another close decision?"

William took a sip of coffee. "The usual minority—although Justice Norton did make some strong points on the Mansfield Judgment."

"Lord Mansfield?" Henrietta asked from the doorway, bowing slightly beneath the head jamb. She was the tall one in the family; it didn't help matters that she wore heeled boots and used the fashion for elaborate hair styling to pile hers high upon her head. This made her taller than most men she met and risked eliminating them as suitors, which worried her father. Could height alone be keeping Henrietta, teetering on the cusp of spinsterhood at age twenty-five, from marrying? Who could tell? Whereas twenty-year-old Charlotte was his wife's daughter, energetic and fearless, Henrietta was his cipher and impossible to read—which was especially odd, since she was most like him.

"Yes, the justice who ushered in abolition for England—long before these United States." William Stevenson put down his weekly copy of The Liberator. "But now the two countries are at one on this issue. Parity among nations and people is a wondrous thing. After all, our ancestors left England due to religious persecution—it is only right we put our own house in order."

Henrietta came over to peck her father on his right cheek ("Right will be for Harry—left for me," Charlie had early on declared) before heading to the sideboard. Returning with a plate of fruit, toast, and jelly, she seated herself to his right and nodded at the newspaper on the table between them. "Garrison says he'll wind down The Liberator to focus on women's rights now that slavery's being abolished."

"The war's not over yet." William Stevenson had noticed this with everyone lately: the eagerness, after four long years, to just get on with things. But the law took time—and justice even more so. As for the vote that his daughters were after, something William did not necessarily begrudge them, he feared suffrage would take far longer than the angry women of New England were willing to accept.

Henrietta and Charlotte each placed a hand over one of his. "Yes, dear Father," Henrietta tenderly began, "but with the fall of Richmond, surely the worst is behind us. They say Lee is to surrender any day."

"On a happier note," said Charlotte as she peeled a hard-boiled egg, "what does the bench read next?"

"Justice  Peabody  was angling to start Moby-Dick given the influence of Carlyle, but the chief justice lobbied for Persuasion and won. In fact, we voted—four to two—to examine all of Austen's works over summer recess."

"Persuasion is her masterpiece," Henrietta firmly declared.

"You say that of each one," William replied with a smile.

The grandfather clock in the hall struck nine and Charlotte jumped up. "We better dash, Harry!" Both girls folded their dining napkins and kissed their father goodbye. They did everything together, a united, petticoated front.

"We'll be missing tea," Henrietta called to him from the doorway. "Garrison has brought the Girl Orator—Anna Dickinson—back to the Music Hall."

"Imagine being our age," Charlotte pined with envy, "traveling all over and lecturing, the first woman ever invited to speak before Congress."

"Imagine," William said as they raced out. But deep in his heart, he did no such thing. He wanted the world for his daughters but a known one, already discovered and mapped out. No unforeseen surprises, no lions or dragons in wait. He was immensely proud of both his girls' intellects but knew for a fact—he saw it in operation every day—that the world was not yet ready for anything more than the mere possession of that.

The Boston Music Hall on Winter Street had been built in 1852 with Harvard money. Along with its massive coffered ceiling and tiered galleries, the venue housed the first and largest pipe organ in the nation. Most famously, abolitionists including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman, and William Lloyd Garrison had assembled here to celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation taking effect as church bells rang in 1863.