Ballet Shoes

Great-Uncle Matthew is a paleontologist, and over several expeditions he brings home three babies along with the fossils: Pauline out of a shipwreck, Petrova from a young couple who died in Russia, Posy handed to him in a basket with a pair of ballet shoes, her mother a dancer. He leaves all three in a London house with his great-niece Sylvia and her old nurse Nana, and then goes away for years without sending word.

The money runs out, which is the actual engine. Sylvia takes boarders, two retired academics, a man who works with cars, a dancing teacher who gets the girls into the Children's Academy of Dancing and Stage Training, and the children go to work. The law will not let them earn on a stage until they are old enough to be licensed, and then only for limited hours, so a household budget gets met in shifts by three children. They swear a vow, renewed each birthday, to put the name Fossil into the history books: their own name, so that nothing they manage can be credited to a grandfather.

They want different things and the book lets them. Pauline acts, Posy dances under Madame Fidolia, and Petrova wants no part of any of it, only engines and cars and aeroplanes. The reservation is Posy, a talent more than a person, and an ending that scatters them instead of resolving anything: Hollywood, ballet school in Prague, Gum back at last with the means to let Petrova fly. It lands for a reader who likes watching children work at something.