In the Attic

Sara never forgets the first night in the attic. Alone in the darkness — hard bed, no fire, rats behind the baseboards — she holds the single fact she can locate: my papa is dead. She says it aloud in a whisper. She says it again. The physical discomfort is real but secondary to the grief, which is too large for a child to look at directly and too present to avoid.

By morning the new regime is in place. Miss Minchin has decided how things are to go and does not wait. Sara's seat at the head of the junior table is given to Lavinia. Sara is placed with the youngest children to keep them from making noise and wasting food. She is told she will begin taking the French class for the younger girls — she who was, until yesterday, a pupil in it. The school will pay nothing for this. The work is the price of her board.

Burnett spends the rest of the chapter establishing the new economy of Sara's days: the cold attic, the insufficient food, the errands run in bad weather, the knowledge that Becky is next door but equally cold and equally tired. Against this, Sara begins, tentatively, the work the novel will be built around: the discipline of directing her own mind away from the worst of what is happening and toward something that gives her a role inside it she can perform.