Mary only very occasionally remembers that two years have passed since Mr. Tam offered her the opportunity to study medicine on a world that would not concern itself with her gender.

She's simply been far too busy to remember the passage of time -- as apprentice-assistant to the only fully-trained doctor on the small Rim planet of Aberdeen, her ( Read more... )

Round One

"I assume," Mary says, in her most scathing tone, "that there is a good explanation for this." But she's known, from the minute she hears the lock click in the door, that a good explanation is unlikely. Not impossible, though; luring her into a room with no patient in it might, after all, be a silly prank. Jans has not proved himself ( Read more... )

In the end, it's not anything she reads in a book or in the newspaper - or even anything her tutor tells her - that causes the thing that's been nagging at the back of Mary's mind for the past few months to finally come into focus ( Read more... )

[PLACEHOLDER: SO STUFF HAS BEEN HAPPENING ON PYLEA OKAY???? HERE IS WHERE IT CAN GO!]

Tomorrow Mary turns thirteen.

The cook is going to make a cake and she is to be let off lessons. Other than that she's not really sure what to make of this; despite the cold weather, she's sitting outside by her tree (now bare) in her garden, trying to decide.

Mary Lennox should really learn to keep her voice down, thinks Susan Merriweather, as she wends her way to the office of the headmistress ( Read more... )

Professor Wolfe has kindly offered to tutor Mary Lennox in mathematics. And they do, in fact, spend most of the time allotted to the tutoring sessions talking about math. It is a subject in which Mary earnestly wishes to excel, and her scores have improved tremendously.

Just not quite all of the time.

"There is something queer about the dog," ( Read more... )

Somewhere in the woods of Yorkshire, there is an abandoned suitcase, dropped there when by a small girl upon her discovery that she’d been given the wrong luggageThe suitcase is, by this point, sodden and dripping and gives the general impression of having something squashed and disgusting inside ( Read more... )

Mary has been packed off to school, and she is not pleased. Friday and Saturday, the first two days there, she spent in a sulk; now it is Sunday, and - well, to be honest, she's still sulking ( Read more... )

Mary is in on her knees in the greenhouse, carefully transplanting a few English daisies from out of the middle of the patch to the outskirts, making sure they all have room to breathe.

There's dirt on her face and hands, and she looks happy, as she usually does in a garden (and rarely outside of one.)