‘By this time next year I will be a famous authoress,’ announced Miss Diana Martin as she lay in the grass with her two best friends and stared up at the clouds sliding across the pale blue April sky. They were only a few days from leaving their schooling for ever, presumably as polished young ladies of eighteen, ready to grace society, and had thus been allowed a rare afternoon picnic unchaperoned in the school’s lush park.

‘How can you do that, Di?’ murmured Lady Alexandra, a duke’s daughter, the sweetest, shyest and most beautiful girl in all of Miss Grantley’s. ‘There are no great lady authors. It must be so hard. Everyone knowing who you are, staring at you wherever you go. If anyone would buy the book at all. I would be so terrified.’

‘Oh, Alex,’ laughed Emily Fortescue, the most sensible of the trio that everyone in the dormitory corridors like to call The Three Musketeers. ‘You would be terrified if a mouse even looked at you, though you must get used to it. You are a duke’s daughter and you look like an angel. Everyone will stare at you when you make your debut.’

Alexandra’s face, which was indeed heart-shaped, all ivory and roses crowned by spun silver-gold hair, blushed bright red. ‘Please, Em, don’t remind me. I wish we could stay here for ever, just as we are. Right at this moment.’

Diana could definitely see what Alexandra meant. It was a perfect day, the sun soft and warm, the grass like a velvet blanket beneath them, the smell of honeysuckle on the breeze. The solid, Georgian red brick of Miss Grantley’s main building was in the distance, watching over them, keeping them safe as it had done for the last few years of their education.

She had loved it here. The teachers had taught them so many things—geography, mathematics, philosophy, as well as the more usual French, watercolours, music, and how to curtsy to the Queen. They had one of the finest libraries in the county thanks to their founder, the daughter of a famous rare book collector. At Miss Grantley’s, Diana had found the stories that took her out of herself, the poetry and novels and plays. She knew she wasn’t pretty—she was too thin, too gangly, her hair too red—but here she had found a place for herself. Here she could start to see herself, unlike at her parents’ house where she always felt so awkward, out of place, and—wrong. Miss Grantley’s had changed all that, at least for a while.

Best of all, she had found Emily and Alexandra. From the very first day, when they sat next to each other for the school’s formal dinner in its vast, intimidating great hall, they had been bonded fast in friendship. None of them had their own sisters, so they became sisters of the heart. They studied together in the library, whispered in the night as they shared chocolates, wandered the gardens, shared hopes and dreams and stories.

And now it was all coming to an end, rushing towards them faster than a railway train, sweeping them into the unknown future. It was frightening—but also very exciting.

Alexandra would surely marry. She was a great beauty and, as a duke’s daughter, could probably find a prince—if she could bring herself to speak to him. She was so very shy, which was why her ducal parents had sent her to school, hoping she would come out of her shell, make new friends.

Emily, the daughter of a prosperous merchant in Brighton, could marry a wealthy factory owner her father knew, or she could run her very own business empire. She was clever enough, strong enough, brave enough, to do anything.

But Diana—she had no idea what she could do. Her father was a respected diplomat, well-to-do but not hugely wealthy, long retired from a military career that had once taken him to India and South Africa. She knew her parents expected her to find a country gentleman to settle into a fine home with, or maybe a vicar, if he was from a good family, or even an army officer, as her father had once been.

Yet marriage, despite all the wonderfully romantic French novels all the girls at Miss Grantley’s passed around and devoured along with their chocolates, seemed quite terrifying. Once a lady was married, her own ideas seemed finished.

She knew she wasn’t shrewd enough to run a business, as Emily could do. The one thing Diana really loved, the one thing that could take her out of herself and into other, stranger, beautiful worlds, was writing stories.

Miss Merrill, their literature teacher, told her she had a rare gift for creating vivid atmosphere with her words. She couldn’t play the harp very well, could barely add sums above three digits, hopelessly mixed up the borders on globes and who should sit beside who at dinner parties. But she could write well enough.

Couldn’t she?

She propped herself up on her elbow and studied her friends. Their hats were all off, their faces turned to the sun, their shoes discarded, Emily’s chestnut hair spread on the grass beneath her. Miss Merrill would lecture them if she could see! Diana tucked a loose strand of her red-gold hair back into her unruly plait.

‘There are great women writers,’ she said. ‘Jane Austen. Mrs Gaskell.’

‘Charlotte Brontë,’ said Emily. ‘Plus all those anonymous books by A Lady, the ones Ann Parkinson is always bringing back from Paris. Plenty of lady writers, though few are as good as you, Di.’

Diana felt her cheeks turn warm, maybe from the sun, maybe from the compliment. She had always longed for praise, but when it came she didn’t quite know what to do with it. She laid back down in her spot on the grass.

‘Do you want to write one of those French books, Di?’ Alexandra asked.

‘I don’t know.’ Diana thought of what they found in those smuggled books: wonderfully vivid descriptions of gowns and balls, kisses, elopements, scandal. They were fun. But she also loved the more realistic worlds found in George Eliot and Thackeray, so full of deep truths. ‘Maybe I’d like to do something like Mr Dickens. Something to make a bit of difference in the world. Or at least distract people from their troubles for a moment, as Miss Austen does, and give a bit of joy.’

‘You do that just by being—well, you,’ Alexandra said. ‘I’ve never known anyone to make me laugh as you do.’

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