The Lady’s Companion

Chapter Four

The job was Susan’s, but even Lady Bushnell was hard put to explain why. “I have tried many,” she said companionably over tea, and smiled when Joel Steinman nodded in agreement. “You’re forty years her junior, and I can think of little you two might have in common. And yet... oh, well. Only take good care of her.”

“If she will allow me,” Susan interjected.

“Yes, if she will allow you.” Lady Bushnell hesitated then, as though she wondered if what she requested would be agreeable to Susan. “Miss Hampton, I wish to do all I can to give my mother- in-law a free hand, but if she falls ill, or suffers an injury, I expect you to tell me. I will spare no effort to see that she is removed from her remote valley and cared for, no matter what my other responsibilities.”

“I will do as you ask, my lady.”

“I hope you will.”

It was a sobering reflection, Susan decided as they left the mansion in early afternoon. I am setting out for a place I have never been, to do something I have never done before, and among people who probably don’t want me. More than typically silent, she allowed Joel Steinman to walk her home the few blocks from the Bushnell residence.

“I will see that a message to Quilling Manor goes on the mail coach tonight,” he promised. “There’ll be someone waiting for you in Quilling tomorrow night.”

They paused in front of Aunt Louisa’s town house. Steinman stood, hand in pocket, observing the impeccably swept front steps and the door knocker. “You know, if you change your mind about leaving all this, I will certainly understand,” he commented.

She shook her head. “Don’t give me any outs, Mr. Steinman,” she said. “For all that this is an impressive house, it has a way of absorbing one.”

He chuckled. “I am certain your friends will wonder if you have taken total leave of your senses.”

“Do you think I have?” she asked frankly.

He shrugged. “Who of us really knows anything about the lives of others?”

“That’s no answer,” she said, amused.

“It’s a very good answer,” he declared, then winked at her. “Besides all that, Miss Hampton, a good Jew always answers a question with a question. Good day.” He looked up at the house again. “And good luck?”

“Do I need it?” she questioned back, quizzing him with her eyes. He laughed out loud and started back toward the employment agency, head down against the wind that had picked up as the afternoon lengthened.

I will tell them over dinner, Susan decided, so I will only have to tell the news once. She wanted to begin packing, but that would have required her trunk from the attic, and she did not wish to alert the servants to her plans. Instead, she spent the little time until dinner sorting through her clothing, searching for the serviceable, winnowing out the frivolous. There was soon a respectable pile of sober clothing ready to be folded and packed into her trunk. She sighed and put her evening dresses and ball gowns in cloves and a sturdy box. She hesitated over her silk drawers and chemises, then added them to the pile. No sense in abandoning all pleasure for duty. When I am frumpily proper in serge and wool, she decided, I will enjoy my silk all the more. No one will know.

It was a small victory in an afternoon of reflection that was swallowed up totally by the sound of the dinner bell. “I cannot face them,” she said out loud, clutching a shawl of Norwich silk to her like a breastplate of steel. What had seemed so sensible and realistic before the dinner bell now felt foolish and desperate. If I say nothing at dinner, I can send round a note to the Steinmans in the morning, she thought, as she poked at her hair in the mirror and tried to squeeze a little color back into her cheeks. I can stay here and let Aunt Louisa throw me the occasional bone.

She stared at her own anxious face, closing her eyes against her own eyes so wide and frightened in the glass. Everyone knew that Sir Rodney Hampton had never kept a promise in his life; why should his daughter? “But I have promised I would go tomorrow,” she said and opened her eyes cautiously. The fright was still there in her reflection, but something more, too, a curious kind of resolution more felt than visible, but real all the same. “I promised,” she repeated. “I promised.”

Susan saved her news until after the fish course had been removed by the mutton. At least they cannot accuse me of springing horrible news on an empty stomach, she thought, as she speared a slice of mutton with more intensity than usual. And I do not much care for mutton in the first place. She put down her fork.

“I have something to tell you.”

They looked at her, and some instinct told her that even years from now, these would be the faces she remembered—Emily, her air of vague distraction made more pronounced by the burden of being a violet female in a daffodil year; Aunt Louisa, faintly annoyed to be disturbed from her mutton’s path from fork to mouth; and Papa, wary and eager-eyed at the same time, desperate for good news from some source. And what had Susan ever been to him but pleasant company?

“I have accepted a position as companion to an elderly lady living in the Cotswolds. I leave tomorrow morning.”

It sounded bald, even to her. The silence that followed her quiet pronouncement was the silence of disapproval so profound that there were no words. “I will be paid thirty pounds a year, plus my room and board,” she added, wanting to fill that enormous silence, even if it was only with puny words that sounded like chicken peeps.

Papa spoke first, and this startled her. She glanced at Aunt Louisa, wondering if the news had rendered her speechless, and angry at her father for throwing her off balance.

”I spent more than that on gloves last year,” he said, his tone oddly placating, which only brought her own anger to a high boil.

“I know, Papa!” she said, her voice big in the room. It was almost a relief to talk back to him, to cow him in his chair and watch him shrink before her eyes. “I am tired of your endless, silly promises and your spendthrift ways. They have quite ruined me!”

He winced at her words as though she had lashed him with a whip. “Hamptons don’t behave like this, daughter...” he began, but she would not let him continue.

“I know that,” she raged. “They smile and simper and look big-eyed at the world, and hope for charm to help them over life’s little trials. No, I am not like you,” she finished, each word a slap in his face. “And I thank God for that.”

“That is quite enough, Susan.” Aunt Louisa was on her feet now, the fork with its bit of mutton still in her hand. “You will apologize to your father!”

Susan leaped to her feet and flung down her napkin like a gauntlet. “I will not! You cannot make me!”

Aunt Louisa seemed to tower over her. “You will apologize to your father, and we will forget this conversation ever took place.”

“I will not revoke a word of it,” Susan said, with a calm now to match her aunt’s. “It is enough that I have to earn my bread and spend a lifetime living down my father’s sorry reputation.”

Sir Rodney closed his eyes as if she had slapped him. Susan looked at him, suddenly aghast at herself because she felt nothing – no pity, no sorrow, no remorse. Pathetic man, she thought. Why should a body feel anything for you? She looked up from her contemplation of her father. Aunt Louisa was speaking again.

“You will apologize or you will not return to this house, once having left it.”

“If that is your choice, Aunt,” Susan said, as she started from the dining room.

“No, Susan. It is yours.”

She lay awake long after her trunk was packed, corded, and downstairs waiting for the carter who would take it and her to the Hound and Hare to catch the mail coach. Don’t they understand what they have done to me? she asked herself over and over, until the words lost any sense or meaning. And when she had ground that subject down to hash, she thought about David Wiggins. Unknown man, I hope you are of a mind to be helpful, she thought. I am weary of difficult men.

Before sunrise, she let herself out of a quiet house, permitted the carter to hand her up onto the high seat, and congratulated herself on saving the cost of a hackney. The morning was bitter cold, the air still and heartless. This is a discouraging time of day, she thought. She debated whether to turn around for a last look at the town house, but she did not. If someone is looking out a window, she told herself grimly, they will not have the pleasure of thinking that I cared enough to glance around.

Muffled by snow, the streets were oddly silent. The further they drove toward the city, the more carts she saw, until there was the Hound and Hare, with a queue of passengers already waiting to scramble for the best seats.

To both her relief and her surprise, Joel Steinman stood in the inn door, stamping his feet to keep the cold at bay. He nodded to her and indicated a bench in front of the inn where two mugs of tea waited for them. She took one gratefully, holding the cup to her cheek.

“I won’t have you laboring under the fiction that the Steinman Employment Agency sees off all its clients,” he said as he took her ticket from her and handed it to the coachman. “It’s just that I suspect this is your first ride on the mail coach.”

She nodded. “You know it is. Do you have any good advice?”

“What do you think?” he asked, a smile on his face. “Although I fear you are out of luck for this first stage of the journey, when you get back on after the first rest stop, try to get a seat facing the coachman.”

“That’s it?” she asked after a moment watching the ostler stow her trunk on top and knot it down.

“That’s it. Let’s get you in line, Miss Hampton.”

She set down her tea and took the arm he offered, clutching it rather tighter than she meant to. He looked down at the pressure on his arm.

“Steinman has another service I forgot to mention,” he said as they shuffled closer to the coach. “We let our clients know of other openings more suited to them, if something should come our way. And we also don’t mind getting letters from clients, if they get lonely.”

She didn’t have any more time than to give him a grateful smile, before the coachman helped her inside the conveyance. Steinman leaned in after her. “One thing more: get on David Wiggins’s good side and he will be your ally. He has a most excellent side.”

“Mr. Steinman, do you know him? Why didn’t you tell me?”

Joel Steinman only grinned and waved his empty coat sleeve at her as the coachman blew his horn to warn bystanders. Susan sat back, her elbows close into her sides, warned from further exhibition by the harumph of the vicar on one side of her, and the warning stare of an over-fleshed woman mashed next to her. They left London as the sky lightened.

Nightfall found Susan only just beyond Oxford, and with a huge headache. I have learned so much today, she thought as she leaned her forehead against the cool glass, smudged from a day of travel through snow three parts mud. I can jostle for a window seat with the best of them, eat standing up, and entertain three-year-olds with the oddest bits of things from my reticule. I have listened to Waterloo stories and Trafalgar stories, and grievances of master and worker, and traded recipes. I know remedies for morning sickness and how to keep fleas off cats. Travel by post chaise was never this enlightening.

She longed for her bed, ached for the comfort of a familiar mattress, and a maid to bring her a tisane. I suppose I will be fetching those tisanes for someone else, she reflected as she rubbed her temple. Oh goodness, I wonder what a lady’s companion does ?

A nursemaid dozed beside her. Her head tipped farther and farther forward, then snapped up when the coach hit icy patches and slid sideways. I could ask her, Susan thought, then reconsidered. She would only wonder what planet I had dropped down from, that I was so ill-equipped.

The headache was a stubborn one and she knew it would not go away without a good night’s sleep and something to eat. Food was out, no matter how many more times the weather forced them to stop tonight. She had spent her last few pennies on tea and a hard roll at the inn before Oxford, and even that was hard to come by, with the crush of travelers. Her stomach growled, and she could only chafe at her own pride that refused to ask a penny beyond coach fare from Lady Bushnell, or a modest loan from Joel Steinman. Her reflection in the coach window hardened. She would starve the length and breadth of England before asking Aunt Louisa or Papa for a groat.

No, what we must do is arrive at Quilling, and I must figure out how to charm David Wiggins. Lady Bushnell had said he was one of her late husband’s regimental sergeants, and before that, her father-in-law’s sergeant, too. Susan tried to picture him in her tired brain, but all she came up with was someone old and forbidding, and used to strict obedience. Perhaps his wife is more easily worked upon, she considered. I can ask her advice on domestic matters, and work my flattery on her husband that way. And if he is convinced of my worth and value, perhaps he will convey it to Lady Bushnell.

About her future employer, she had no clue. “I only know that I simply must succeed,” she said out loud.

“Wot, miss? Begging your pardon.”

Susan glanced at the nursemaid, who was sitting up wide awake now, trying to pull down the bow of her bonnet from under her nose, where it had ridden up and curled like a mustache. Susan hesitated. Aunt Louisa would no more speak to this inferior than pack snuff in her lip. Susan looked at her seatmate—the coach was nearly empty now—and was struck with the fact that talking to her was going to be like taking that first step down to the servants’ entrance.

“I am to be lady’s companion to Lady Bushnell at Quilling Manor,” she confided, her unease overcoming her scruples after all these miles. “I must tell you, it frightens me.”

The nursemaid had wrestled herself out of her bonnet. She turned big eyes on Susan. “Coo, love, it would worrit me some, too. I hear she’s a high stickler.” She leaned closer, her voice low and confidential, even though the sailor sitting across from them snored. “I hear she sleepwalks and prowls about the place at all hours and ends up outside the family mausoleum, joost sittin’ there. Keep your door locked, miss.”

“Oh, I shall!” Susan declared. “This is grim indeed.”

The nursemaid retied the bow under her chin and glanced out the window as the coach began to slow. “’Tis what my uncle heard from the gardener’s cousin, who had it from the laundry maid.”

“Apocryphal, then,” Susan murmured.

“No, miss. The apothecary ain’t had nothing to do with it!”

“My mistake,” Susan replied, careful not to smile. “But tell me something of David Wiggins. Do you know him?”

“Nobody knows him, miss, for all that he’s lived here five years or so. He came back from Waterloo with Lord Bushnell’s body, and he never left. I call that strange.”

“He’s not friendly then?” Susan asked, feeling her hopes dribble away.

“Oo knows? He could be shy or queer as Dick’s hatband.” The nursemaid smiled when the coachman blew his horn. “And here we are, miss, and I don’t mind saying it’s high time!”

It was high time, and then some, Susan agreed as she left the mail coach, stiff in all her joints and with a head so huge she felt like turning sideways to get out of the door. The coachman unstrapped her trunk and dropped it into the snow. Shaking her head at the ostler, who would only expect coins she did not have, Susan tugged the trunk close to the inn door. She glanced briefly at her reflection in the window, thankful to discover her bonnet straight and her hair still smoothed in place. Aunt Louisa always did say I had a knack for that, she thought. At least I will not frighten the shy, retiring, and elusive David Wiggins, be he ever so queer.

He was also the nonexistent David Wiggins. When Susan worked up her courage to enter the taproom and inquire of the innkeep, he only shook his head. “Haven’t seen him today, miss. Not at all.” The innkeep sighed and stacked away the last of the glasses. “Of course, it’s been a rum day for the hostelry business. I misdoubt he can get off the place, what with all this snow. Can I speak you a room, miss?”

She shook her head. “Thank you, no. I am to be Lady Bushnell’s companion, and a letter was sent for someone to meet me. I can wait for conveyance.”

“That’d be David Wiggins, then. Some tea, miss?”

She shook her head again. “I would like a glass of water, if you please.”

The innkeep eyed her more closely. You are wondering why I am dressed so well, and such a nipfarthing, she thought, her humiliation complete. Her eyes were beginning to fill up and she wanted to look away, but she raised her chin higher instead. After another moment’s appraisal, the innkeep turned away, then came back with tea.

“I can’t,” she protested.

“Take it, miss,” he said, his voice kind. “We all end up at low tide sometimes.” As she sniffed back her tears, he looked under the counter. “And Lord bless us, here’s a pasty left from supper. Let me stick it on the hob a moment, and you’ll never know it wasn’t fresh.”

“I mustn’t,” she began.

“You must and will, or I’ll get ugly,” he said, his tone firm. Something tells me you have daughters, Susan thought as she sipped the welcome tea and then followed him a moment later to a table as he brought the meat pie. “And look at this, I even found a bit of soup all sad and lonely,” he said, setting it down with a flourish beside the pasty.

She couldn’t speak, but he didn’t seem to expect her to. He gazed around the room while she blew her nose hard, and then he began to stack chairs on tables. “It’s not a big village, miss, is Quilling, but we’re good enough for most,” he said at last.

Her headache was gone by the time she finished eating. The innkeep had busied himself in a back room somewhere, and she had the taproom to herself. She ached for sleep, but there wasn’t anything she could do but sit there, back straight, like a lady, and wait for David Wiggins to show up.

As anxious as she was to meet him and take his measure, Susan felt no qualms about his nonappearance. She was used to dealing with men who did not keep promises or deliver what was promised. A woman unfamiliar with Sir Rodney’s frippery ways would probably have worn the floorboards through to the ground, pacing back and forth. If one has no expectations, one is seldom disappointed, she told herself as her eyes grew blurry and midnight turned into one o’clock. The innkeep had given up trying to give her a room upstairs, and said good night an hour before.

It was nearly two o’clock when she realized with a prickle down her back that someone was standing in the taproom doorway, looking at her. She hadn’t heard anyone come in, but there was a subtle difference in the air of the room, as if it had rearranged itself to accommodate another body. Intruding on stale tobacco was the fragrance of hay, remembered just vaguely from the years before Papa sold the estate.

I should be jumping out of my skin, she thought as she breathed the tiny odor and felt the intensity of someone’s eyes on her. I wonder if the landlord has any ax murderers in Quilling, or Caribbean conjurers left over from market circuses. She smiled to herself. I think it must be David Wiggins.

Just as she turned around, the man in the doorway gave an enormous yawn, the epitome of all yawns. “Sorry,” he said when he could speak. “It’s been a day, Miss Hampton.” He straightened up from the doorframe, where he had been leaning. “I’m David Wiggins and I’ve come to fetch you.”

His voice had the lilt of the Welsh in it, and he had the look of dark folk beyond the Dee, Wye, and Severn rivers. If he was a little taller than some, and blockier of build, she considered, that would account for the Wiggins side, which might be English. His dark hair and eyes and a certain intensity of observation about him told the Welsh side. And his lovely speech. But he was much too young to fit her fiction of a retired sergeant from the Regulars. Oh, dear me, she thought. I shall have to change my strategies.

“You’re David Wiggins?” she said, wondering instantly at her stupid question.

“Said I was,” he commented. “And you’re our latest lady’s companion, pain in the side, burr in the balbriggans?”

Double dear me, she thought. “I’m Susan Hampton,” she said, sidestepping the question. “And I don’t know what balbriggans are, sir.”

He didn’t reply right away, but he turned his head a little away from her and smiled into the dark, as though someone else were there. “I’ll tell it this way,” he began in his musical voice. “I hope you’re wearing woolen balbriggans under all those skirts, because we have to walk partway.”

He looked at her again and raised one eyebrow. You’re hoping I back out, she thought, returning his gaze, even though her cheeks flamed. Her anger blew in and out like a spring wind through an open door. She shrugged into her coat again, and pulled on her gloves, determined not to falter.

“I’ll manage,” she said. “And you can mind your manners.”

Again he turned his head away for that surreptitious grin, and he chose not to rise to the bait. “Come along then. I’ll send someone to fetch your trunk in the morning.”

She followed him into the inn yard, understanding why she had not heard him approach, with the snow muffling all sounds. The deep winter silence made her want to speak in whispers, had she possessed any desire to address David Wiggins, which she did not. Still, he had come a long way through the snow. She could at least follow with good enough grace and not let him know her legs were already cold.

The snow was deep. He set a brisk pace and she floundered behind him, her lips set tight against any word of complaint. She focused her attention on his perfectly disreputable hat, a wide-brimmed, squashed-in felt monstrosity. He wouldn’t dare ever set that thing on the floor, she thought. A dog would commit misdemeanors on it. She chuckled in spite of herself. He looked over his shoulder, one eyebrow raised.

“You’re a rare one, Miss Hampton,” was all he said. “Too bad you will not last.”

He talks as though he has murdered and buried a row of lady’s companions in the shrubbery somewhere, Susan thought as she labored on. Probably killed by his devastating wit. She suppressed most of her laughter, but still he looked back, and this time took her arm, tucking it close to his side.

“Big drifts,” was all he said as he tugged her along.

She opened her mouth to protest his ill usage, then closed it again. He didn’t seem so much impatient with her, as he was eager to get somewhere. How can I protest, she thought, when you look so tired?

“You know, you didn’t really have to get me tonight,” she said, out of breath from hurrying.

“This morning,” he corrected. “I told Lady Bushnell I would.”

And that was that apparently. He had nothing else to say and it was pointless to waste her breath. This is a man stingy with words, she realized, as she grimly hung on to his arm and let him help her over the deepest drifts.

After another silent stretch, in which they seemed to be steadily climbing, they broke through the last of the deep snow. David Wiggins let go of her arm, but she did not follow him toward the gig and blanketed horse tethered to a tree. Instead, she clasped her hands and looked around, enchanted by what lay before her.

They stood at the head of a valley all tucked in tidy and protected from the deepest snows behind them. The moon was up now, casting a brittle light on the snow that illuminated the valley as though it were day. She could clearly make out the dark coil of a river and a fringe of woods offering some shelter to fields asleep now, but outlined by fence and furrow only partly snow-covered. She could not see Quilling Manor itself; it must be beyond the trees.

Lovely, she thought, stamping her feet. She cast a guilty glance for delaying Wiggins, who tossed the blanket in the back of the gig and climbed onto the seat. She started toward him then, waiting for him scold her to hurry up. He surprised her. Reins slack in his hands, he nodded. “It’s beyond beautiful in the summer,” he said, his voice warm.

Like all his few words, these were quietly spoken. She hurried to the gig now, buoyed up by his obvious affection for the view. Someone who has a fellow feeling for his land can’t be all prickles and rabbit pebbles, she decided as he tucked a lap robe around her and spoke to the horse in a language she did not know.

“Welsh pony. He understands me,” he allowed, and that was all the conversation between them as they crossed the sheltered valley.

Lord, I am weary, she thought as she sat so firmly upright or the seat beside the bailiff. She tried hard not to touch him, but it was a narrow seat, and he was the kind of man who overlapped. He sat easy, his eyes on the road in front of him, almost as though she were not there. He seemed relaxed, except that he kept tapping his feet, as though he could speed the passage. I suppose there is a sleepy wife somewhere and a warm bed, she considered.

“I don’t think the world would end if you leaned back and rested yourself.”

She shook her head, surprised that he had noticed. He shrugged and turned his full attention to the road again. Or he seemed to, at any rate; she couldn’t tell.

Susan closed her eyes once or twice as they moved slowly across the valley, opening them before she felt herself leaning toward the bailiff. She must have had them closed longer than usual, because the next time she opened them they were stopped in a barnyard.

How did that get here? she thought stupidly, staring wide-eyed at the stone bam that looked as though it had been there since the Romans. Her mind sluggish and starved for sleep, she waited for the bailiff to help her down. To her dismay, he knotted the reins, climbed from the gig and hurried on a half run into the barn without a look over his shoulder at her. “Worse-than-useless man,” Susan muttered out loud as she helped herself from the gig.

She wouldn’t have followed him into the barn, except that the wind was teasing her ankles and lifting her skirts. She followed him inside, careful to watch where she walked. She sniffed the air and looked around her. They were in a cattle byre, pungent of cow and timothy grass. So this is where you were before you came for me, Susan reflected as she moved quietly down the stalls toward a lamp hanging on a far wall.

David Wiggins sat cross-legged on the hay-covered floor, a calf of ravishing beauty across his legs. He rubbed her down with a piece of sacking, speaking low in Welsh. He looked up at Susan and motioned her to join him. He nodded toward the fawnlike creature before him.

“This is why I was late, discounting the snow, Miss Hampton,” he explained. “I had to blow into her mouth to get her going, so I figured you could wait.”

Susan came inside the loose box and sat on an overturned bucket, her eyes on the cow, a Jersey who gazed back mildly without missing any rhythm as she chewed her cud. Susan looked at the slimy rope on the hay beside the cow. “You had a hard tug of it,” she commented, leaning forward and resting her chin on her hands.

“I did,” he agreed. He lifted the little thing off his lap, smiling as it raised up on back legs and pitched nose first into the hay. “You come to a hard, cold world, lass,” he said, his voice soft. He leaned back against the partition, content to watch the animal struggle, fall, struggle, and rise, wobbly but on all fours.

David got up, too, wincing as though he ached everywhere, and prodded the cow to her feet. “Cush, lass, cush,” he crooned, “there’s work afoot.”

The calf knew what to do. In another moment, she had found her way to the udder, nudged it and settled to business. David sighed and rubbed his back.

“Now to you, miss,” he said, turning to Susan.

“I’m tired, not hungry,” she said. It was only a very little joke, but he smiled and held out his hand. She allowed him to haul her to her feet. Her eyelids felt weighted down with lead shot and grainy in the bargain.

‘There’s a place in the house for you,” he said, pulling her along the passageway. He chuckled. “I misdoubt it’s still warm from the last lady’s companion!”

She looked at him, her eyes narrowed, but his face was bland and smooth again and his dark eyes completely unreadable.

The wind braced her and woke her up again as they crossed the barnyard and came to the back entrance of the manor, solid stone and hunkered down to outlast any kind of winter thrown at it. I can admire it in the morning, she told herself, as her mind turned to porridge.

David Wiggins took off his boots inside the back door, put his finger to his lips. “It’s dark. Give me your hand,” he said. He led her up the stairs and paused outside a door. “I’ll have your trunk here by noon,” he whispered as he opened the door, “provided you’re of a mind to stay.”

She stood up straighter and glanced over his shoulder at the welcome bed beyond. “I have to stay, Mr. Wiggins,” she said, not bothering to pull hairs with this man. “I don’t have a penny to return to London on.”

“So we’re stuck with you?” he asked, and it didn’t sound unkind. But how was she to know, with her mind already telling her how good the pillow was going to feel, if only she could get to it?

“I think so, Mr. Wiggins. Do forgive me for being rag-mannered, but you stand between me and that bed right now, and I wish you would move.”

He gave another of his oblique smiles, stepped out of her way, and closed the door after him. She didn’t hear him on the stairs, but as she sat in the window seat to remove her boots, she watched him head across the barnyard again. She could see a modest two-story house beyond the barn, but he made for a long building that looked like a succession house. She watched closely; in another moment, a lamp began to glow.

Don’t you sleep? she thought as she let her dress fall to the floor, and crawled between the comforting weight of heavy blankets. The only reflections of any coherence that crossed her tired brain before sleep took over was the odd notion that David Wiggins had been her last thought the night before, too, as he was now.