The Lady’s Companion

Chapter Eighteen

Lady Bushnell did not seem to mind that Susan missed piano practice entirely that morning when she rushed in, breathless, to apologize, and dashed out again. Likewise, Mrs. Skerlong wisely made no comment at Susan’s tiptoed trips to the Rumford for warm water. She merely looked up from her knitting and managed a long, slow wink that set Susan giggling like a schoolroom miss. On Susan’s last trip to the kitchen before noon, the housekeeper went so far as to suggest to her that tomorrow would be a fine day to wash sheets, if she wished to bring hers down. When Susan blushed and nodded, she offered some whispered advice on how to deal with sheets in future that seemed practical. Susan went back upstairs thoughtfully, serene in the confederacy of women.

With some reluctance, the bailiff left for the sheepfold after luncheon. She decided it would be easier to send him on his way sooner if she could quickly break him of the habit of pulling her up close in such a tight embrace and keeping her there until she started to feel peevish, and put her hands places Professor Fowler would have gasped over. It’s your fault this time, she thought as she contemplated another trip downstairs and resolved to get a larger water can for their room. David surprised her by going for water himself, and coming back, his face red.

“Mrs. Skerlong has a way of looking at me,” he complained. He smiled to himself as he squeezed out the cloth and tossed it to her. “Wash yourself this time. That may be part of my problem.”

And so it was later in the afternoon before she sidled into Lady Bushnell’s room and seated herself to continue her enlargement of the letters. She wrote in silence, deeply aware of Lady Bushnell’s eyes on her as the widow rested in her chair close by. When she finally looked up, their eyes met and they both burst out laughing.

“Mrs. Wiggins, I take it that no one had to remove any hinges this morning?” the widow said as she dabbed at her eyes.

“Not even one, Lady Bushnell,” Susan said. She reached out impulsively and touched the woman’s face. “You were quite right about David.”

“I thought so.” Lady Bushnell returned her gaze to the window, then motioned Susan over. “My far vision is better, Susan, but I wonder, is that your bailiff on the near slope?”

Susan stood behind the widow’s chair. “Yes,” she said. Lady Bushnell, I could spot him two counties over, I know I could, she thought. She felt peevish again, and restless, even though he was some distance away. “Oh, and look, I think he is going to direct the plowing.”

The widow watched, her lips twitching with amusement. “A busy man is our bailiff. He plows all morning and all afternoon!” They laughed together, Susan’s hand on Lady Bushnell’s shoulder.

“I think it is the Waterloo wheat, my lady,” she said, her voice soft. “I think he is going to plant it where you can see it from your window.” I did not think it was possible to love you any more, my dear bailiff, she thought, but I do now. “He’s going to share it with us.”

“He is also going to take us to Belgium this summer,” Lady Bushnell said briskly. “Help me up, Susan.”

She did, knowing she should say something about Lady Bushnell’s dreams, but was unable to comment beyond, “Oh, Lady Bushnell,” which only earned her a sour look.

Lady Bushnell directed her to the bureau, where she leaned against her and rummaged in the top drawer. “Susan, there is another, older packet of letters there. To the left under those handkerchiefs, I think. Ah, yes. Take them out. You can transcribe them later. And beside them, that little box. Help me to bed now.”

Susan did as she was asked, shocked but silent at the pain on Lady Bushnell’s face from so little exertion, and the way her hands trembled as she guided her carefully to the bed. She helped her into bed, cringing almost at the tremendous effort Lady Bushnell made to stop her trembling, and then chagrined at the disgust on the widow’s face at her own weakness. She held up her shaking hands to Susan, staring at them as though they were not her own.

“Susan, I have wrestled with army horses and sawed on more reins than your bailiff ever will, and look how they tremble now! I despise old age.”

She closed her eyes in exhaustion, and Susan hurried back to the bureau for the doctor’s powders. Lady Bushnell offered no objection this time as Susan raised her head so she could drink the potion. She lay silent, visibly gathering her strength about her at Susan knelt by the bed and leaned her cheek on the woman’s hand.

She moved her hand finally, and patted Susan, her touch, in its own way, as gentle as the bailiff’s. “There, pet, did I worry you?”

Susan nodded, deeply moved at the endearment. She put her forehead against the coverlet for a moment, overwhelmed at the love she felt for Lady Bushnell, too. I wonder if it is possible to die from as much love as I have had this day, she thought. I sincerely hope not.

She opened her eyes on the velvet box by Lady Bushnell’s hand. Around the clasp, the nap of the green fabric was worn with much opening and closing. She rested her elbows on the bed and picked up the slender box, looking at Lady Bushnell with a question in her eyes.

“Open it, my dear. I think your bailiff has one of these, too.”

Susan did as she was bid, and looked upon a circle of silver elegant in its austerity, with the profile of the Regent. She pushed the token around with her finger, turning it over to see seated Victory, the single word Waterloo, and the date.

“It is a Waterloo medal, Susan, given to all participants, officers and men alike,” said the widow, her eyes still faded from heart pain, but less so than only a moment ago.

“Whose is this?” she asked, fingering the dark red ribbon the color of blood, edged in blue.

“This is Charles’s medal,” she said softly. “His widow was in Ireland, visiting her grandparents’ estate, when it was sent to Bushnell, and then forwarded to me here by mistake. I should have returned it, of course, but I did not.” She took the medal from its case and held it close to her eyes. “I like to look at it, but, Susan, I also wonder if Charles deserves it.”

Susan felt the familiar chill. She rose from her knees and sat beside Lady Bushnell. “Perhaps you could return it now to your daughter-in-law?”

“I could,” she agreed. “Mostly I want to go to Belgium, look the bailiff in the eye, and finally get the truth from him about that day at Waterloo. I do not believe he is telling me everything.”

“I’ve told her all I’m ever going to tell anyone about Charlie and Waterloo,” the bailiff commented that evening as he weighed out the Waterloo wheat in the succession house and she sat at his drafting table, watching him.

“Are you being fair?” she asked, soaking in the beauty of his face. “She is used to honest dealing, and didn’t you promise her you would never lie again?”

He stroked the mother cat who wove herself around him. “I also promised a broken hulk of a man at the bottom of a gorge that I would take care of her, no matter what, my love. I don’t think he meant for me to break her heart again. Now you tell me what to do.”

She was silent, looking down the row of boxes in front of her. The bailiff had uprooted the experimental wheat, and only the bare soil remained, ready to receive the next strain. We tried so hard not to let her daughter-in-law kill her with kindness, but I wonder, are we being any fairer? she asked herself.

The bailiff came to the drafting table, draping his arm over her shoulder. “What? I know you mean to say something. Say it, please.”

She leaned back against him. “Perhaps Lady Bushnell is the best judge of what she should know. He was her son, after all.”

It was his turn for long silence. He kissed her neck finally with a peremptory smack then went back to the wheat in the sack. “We’ll have to differ in our opinion, then, Suzie. I choose not to tell her, and I hope that you will respect my wishes.”

“Certainly I will,” Susan replied, getting off the stool to rescue a kitten determined to explore a grain bucket. She saved the baby teetering on the edge and returned him, squeaking, to his mother. “As a woman, and I hope, a mother someday, I will always want to know the minds and hearts of those I love,” she said, her hand on the bailiff’s head as he knelt by the sack again. “But I respect your wishes in this matter.”

He smiled up at her and poured a careful handful of the experimental grain in the leather sowing sack. When he finished, he sat back on his heels and regarded her with such animation in his eyes that she blushed and looked away, feeling again the tension so little understood yesterday, but a permanent part of her emotions today.

“I sent Tom the cowman to stay with Ben and Owen tonight,” he said as he stood up and hung the sowing sack on a hook out of the reach of any mice. “That means I have to get up early and milk, and begin the sowing.”

“And? And?” she teased.

“And I thought you wouldn’t mind if I sowed a little tonight,” he concluded, taking her by the hand and leading her from the succession house. “Or a lot” He kissed her then, and she wondered if they would even make it as far as the first-floor landing, if they even got as far as the house.

“Mrs. Skerlong told me once that farmers don’t really have time for this sort of thing in spring,” she murmured as he hurried her up the stairs.

He pulled her into their bedroom and started on his buttons. “I’ll have you know that old Lord Bushnell himself once complimented me on my organizational skills. Don’t just stand there laughing at me, Suzie. Take off something!”

She decided in May that Mrs. Skerlong, estimable woman in so many ways, was certainly wrong about farmers and wives in spring. She also discovered that the odor of lanolin had the curious effect of making her look about for the bailiff, or start counting the hours until they could decently excuse themselves for bed. It was knowledge she chose not to pass on to the bailiff. He already has enough power over me, she told herself as she rested on him after one particularly passionate interlude. I would have to be stupid to tell a sheep grower that lanolin makes me randy.

She discovered that other things did, too, even some of the letters she was copying over now for Lady Bushnell, the little packet she had hidden away in the bureau with Charles’ Waterloo medal. They were love letters the old colonel had sent to Calcutta from Lucknow, when he was engaged in the field and she was awaiting the birth of their son from the safety of the city. While Lady Bushnell dozed in her bed—as she did more and more now— Susan sat at the desk by the open window, fanned herself, and told herself she was ridiculous to squirm over the colonel’s frank expressions of longings for his wife. Just copy it, Susan, she told herself.

She finished two letters in her large, careful printing, made sure Lady Bushnell was soundly asleep, and went in search of the bailiff. He was never hard to find, and never too difficult to distract, either. Other than a simple admonition to lock the door of the succession house, and then the calm observation, twenty minutes later, that they must have scared the kittens into hiding, he was eager to let her have her way.

“Just as long as you leave me to worry over the major decisions, Suzie, I am ever so obliging,” he told her as he helped her back into her dress and did up the buttons.

“And what constitutes a major decision?” she asked, contented enough now to return to the copying of letters.

“Oh, whether we go to war with the United States over tariffs, or, let me think, whether I’ll make a profit on this year’s wool clip. I leave the rest to you.”

He didn’t, of course. There were times when he came in search of her, giving Lady Bushnell such flimsy excuses that Susan could only roll her eyes and look everywhere but at her employer. Lady Bushnell’s earlier comments to the contrary, he was never gentle with her then. She couldn’t have cared less. Her own fervor amazed her, and she had to agree with the bailiff when he had said after their first night together that all they needed was practice, and lots of it.

She discovered that she also treasured those times when they just strolled the hillside in the evening to stand among the Waterloo wheat. Being with the bailiff, in bed or out of it, was its own reward. If she could have taken out her heart and handed it to him, she would have.

“‘Why did you plant the wheat on a slope?” she asked one evening before the sun went down as they stood in their usual spot on the hillside.

“It’s how I remember it, Suzie, sloping like that to Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte,” he said, squatting in the field to run a practiced hand over the grain, measuring its height “Only after that first night when we dug in, and it rained so hard the field was a trampled mess.” He shook his head as though trying to clear his brain of the memory. “Then at the end of that endless day, it didn’t look like a field at all, but a cemetery where the ground had been turned over and all the corpses flung out on top.”

He smiled up at her, something of embarrassment in his expression. “I guess I want to see it this way, and not muddy and bloody.” He shrugged and looked over the field toward the manor house. “I think every soldier has his way of dealing with battle; this is mine.”

Tears came to her eyes, and she sniffed them back.

“Don’t cry, Suzie. If it’ll make you feel better, I also look at this field and think how lucky I am to be a steward over my Waterloo wheat. It’s good grain, and it will make us a seed farm, someday,” he said as he tugged her down to sit beside him. She leaned against his shoulder, secure in the knowledge that she was the most fortunate woman in the British Isles.

It was easy then to tell him of her increasing fears for Lady Bushnell. She had never been around someone dying before, but she knew in her heart that Lady Bushnell was facing death, and soon. Dr. Pym never told her. He came three times a week, full of town gossip and good cheer, and more potions that Lady Bushnell only shook her head over. “My lady, we’ll see you well and hearty before harvest,” he said, concluding his most recent visit.

When he closed the door behind him, all bay rum and bluff humor, Lady Bushnell only looked at Susan, and they both knew.

“Promise me you will never lie to me, Susan,” was all she said. “Let me know straight up what is going on.”

“I cannot fool her,” she told the bailiff on the hillside as May slipped into June.

He massaged her knee thoughtfully. “Has she asked you about Charlie?”

“No, thank God. I pray she will not.” She took his hand and pressed it to her cheek. “But she does ask me all the time now when we are going to Belgium. She talks of Brussels, and Mont St Jean, and stopping at the chateau at Hougoumont. David, is there any way we could take her there?”

“It would mean our jobs and no character references, Suzie, if the Marches found out,” he said. “No. The answer’s no. It’s what I tell her when she asks me.”

“But she keeps asking!”

“And we keep telling her no, Susan. It just can’t be.”

It was easy enough to agree with him, sitting there in the wheat, his hand on her leg, but harder all the time as she finished copying the letters, then began to write Lady Bushnell’s army experiences in the Peninsula, as the widow dictated them. After wrangling half a day over the title, they decided they would call it “A Lady’s Reminiscence in the Army of Wellington.”

“I like that,” the bailiff said one night when they were lying in bed, pleasantly pleased with each other. He kissed her hand and draped it over his chest. “Where do you start?”

“Well, you usually don’t object if I touch you here and here,” she mentioned, moving her hand and putting her leg across his.

“Silly! You know what I mean. Does she begin at Vimeiro?”

“Yes. And we’ve already covered that part where she rescued that wretched Welshman from three hundred lashes. Let’s discuss this later, David.”

“He was a wretch,” the bailiff murmured, rolling over and giving her his undivided attention.

Later, when he slept, his arms protective around her, she lay awake, thinking of Lady Bushnell. Every day now, you ask me about Waterloo, and I feel your urgency, and all I can do is shake my head and tell you no, she thought. You tell me of Bussaco, and Ciudad Rodrigo, and horrible Badajoz, and I write it all down, but behind it all, like a blaze behind a tire screen, is Waterloo and Charles. She sighed and burrowed closer into the bailiff’s warmth. Your mother’s heart has to know.

She knew better than to pester the bailiff anymore about it. “Susan, that’s enough,” he had said firmly one night on the hill. The wheat was almost up to her waist now, and she ran her hands across it as he did, enjoying the prickle of the forming kernel in the hull against her palms.

She stopped, embarrassed. “I know you have other things on your mind,” she apologized. Only last week the bailiff and his crofters had washed the sheep in the dip beside the shearing floor. He had come home so tired from picking up sheep and tossing them into the narrow trough of water that she had to sit on his back and rub his arms and shoulders so he could sleep. The shearing would begin tomorrow.

“I shouldn’t pester you,” she said as she looked at the manor beyond the wheat. “It’s just that she wants it so badly and...”

“Sometimes we don’t get what we want,” he interrupted, his voice short.

She looked at him then, really looked at him, admiring the fine-boned elegance of his face. “You did,” she said softly. “So did I.”

“Susan!” he protested. He took her hands in his, turned up the palms, and kissed them. “Susan.” He smiled at her, his irritation gone already. “I suppose we will have the most stubborn children.”

“Of course,” she agreed as she watched the storm leave his face as quickly as it had come. “There’s nothing weak about this Hampton.”

Later, much later, when she had time to contemplate the many-stranded weaving that is fate, she asked herself if saying Hampton brought on what followed. It didn’t seem likely, and she was not superstitious, but there was something in the saying. She knew it.

The shearing went without a hitch, all noise, and heat, and smell and excitement, and crofters’ children running about beside the shearing floor where the itinerant shearers did their rapid trade. The bailiff even tried one sheep, grinning at her as he wrestled the sheep between his legs and clipped away, stripping it naked. The odor of lanolin rose and filled the stone hall, and she had to turn away, smiling to herself and thinking naughty thoughts for the bailiff to satisfy later.

Lady Bushnell had insisted on coming along for the shearing. “I am always at the shearing, Susan, so save your breath to cool your porridge,” the woman insisted. She sat ramrod straight like royalty, taking in the business of the day, accepting a glass of ale from an awed Owen Thrice.

“Is she a queen?” he whispered to Susan.

“I think so,” Susan whispered back. Most of all you are a colonel’s wife, she thought, her arms around Owen’s shoulders, a follower of the drum who did not flinch from guns, or hunger, or siege, or betrayal, or the fickleness of fortune, that tawdry slut. Dear lady, I wonder what you would do if I told you I loved you.

She had no answer, so she kissed the top of Owen’s head instead, sending him into the worst paroxysm of mingled pleasure and embarrassment. He released himself from the burden of affection by teasing a crofter’s child and making her cry.

It was a long day, and she was glad, for Lady Bushnell’s sake, to see the end of it The widow was much too tired to read any of her army letters, or eat anything beyond a few bites of gruel, which came with Mrs. Skerlong’s loving admonitions about overdoing it, and “forgetting that we’re not as young as we think we are, Lady B.”

The bailiff dragged himself in later, reeking of wool, exhausted beyond food and single-minded only about his bed. He offered no objections when Susan helped him from his clothes, and was asleep before she extinguished the lamp. If he even moved all night, she was unaware of it.

In wordless conspiracy, Susan and Mrs. Skerlong let them sleep the next morning. They ate porridge and milk in the kitchen, listening to the thunder rumble and then fade. “I wish it would rain,” Mrs. Skerlong said as she took the dishes to the sink. “Have you seen such weather?”

She had not. The sky was gray-green and seemed to loom over the earth like a blanket, casting an eerie shadow on the Waterloo wheat. She sniffed the air, shading her eyes with her hand to watch the thundercloud rise up and up like a genie out of a lamp. It was quiet, too, with no barnyard fowl complaining; even the birds were silent.

How good that I am not given to megrims over the weather, she thought, even as she frowned at the sky and wandered from room to room, dissatisfied without being able to explain why. She looked in on the bailiff, who slept bare on top of the sheets now, sweating from the strange, wet heat. Lady Bushnell stayed decorously under the covers in her room, but she seemed troubled by dreams.

When Susan came downstairs, she noticed the letters on the small table by the entrance. They must have come yesterday while we were at the shearing, she thought, picking them up to read the directions, then dropping them with a gasp, as though they burned.

It was her father’s handwriting and the letters were addressed to Lady Bushnell and David Wiggins. Her first thought was to fling them into the fireplace, but there was no fire in the hearth. She was still sitting on the staircase steps when the bailiff came downstairs. He sat beside her obligingly, questioning her with his eyes.

“Love, if the weather saps your energy, go back to bed,” he told her. “I doubt that anything won’t keep until later in the day, except the harpsichord.” He smiled at her. It was already an old joke in their young marriage. Nothing deterred Lady Bushnell from Susan’s daily piano practice, not female complaints, or outside duties, or even the bailiff’s needs, after that first week of fervid marriage.

She nodded in the direction of the table. “Letters.”

A puzzled look on his face, he picked them up from the silver basket and sat beside her again. “One to me,” he said. “Well, don’t be so blue about it, Suzie. I don’t have a secret wife, and I’m not owing taxes.”

“It’s my father’s handwriting,” she said, her words clipped and shorter than she meant them to be.

“Don’t bite me now,” he said mildly.

Mrs. Skerlong came into the hall with Lady Bushnell’s breakfast tray. “She’s pulling her bell, Susan,” the housekeeper said as she edged up the stairs between them. The bailiff handed her the other letter. “Thank you, David.”

He borrowed one of her hairpins, slit the letter open, then replaced the pin. She felt him stiffen beside her as he read the letter, and read it again. “By damn,” he said finally when he finished the second reading. “By damn.” He looked at her, and it seemed to her, nerves on edge, that he shifted slightly away from her. “What a parent you have, Suzie. Thank God I’m a bastard.”

Her fingers almost numb, she snatched the letter from his outstretched hand. Her eyes filled with tears almost before she began, so on the first reading she saw only snatches of “Newgate,” and “debts,” and “no help from any source,” and “I’m relying on you.” Shocked down to her toenails, she swiped at her eyes with the hem of her dress before she turned the page over.

“You’ll like the back page even more,” her husband said. “Don’t miss a word of it.”

She glared at him, angry at his unexpected sarcasm, but she calmed herself enough to read every word. She read it again, even as her husband had done, nausea rising in her throat. “No,” she whispered. “How can he think...”

The bailiff took it from her and opened his mouth to speak, but stopped at the sound of Lady Bushnell’s cane beating on the floor. They looked at each other, and Susan saw her own reflection in the depths of his eyes. It did not please her, any more than the frown on his face. He stood up and helped her to her feet, then hurried ahead of her up the stairs.

“Susan, your father is a monster,” met her at the door like a lead wall. Lady Bushnell glared at her and thrust the letter at the bailiff, who read it, then stared at her, too. She leaned against the wall, afraid to come any further into the room.

“Oh, this is good, Lady B,” the bailiff said. He looked at her then. “Suzie, he asks... no, no, he demands that your employer pay him enough money to keep his sorry hide out of Newgate.” He looked down at the letter. “’Knowing how you feel about my daughter, I am sure you would not wish to see her suffer with the knowledge of my incarceration. Yours, sincerely, etc. etc.’”

“Someone should have shot him in a duel years ago,” Lady Bushnell said.

“Wait until you hear mine. Me, the lucky husband,” he said. Susan flinched at his angry words, swallowing her nausea with the greatest difficulty.

“Please don’t use that tone,” she pleaded.

“Maybe you can suggest a better one, after you hear this?” he snapped back. “Lady Bushnell, he asks me to doctor the estate books and send him two hundred pounds!”

“God!” Susan gasped. She sank to the floor, but no one noticed.

“Hear this, Lady B. ‘My own steward cheated me regularly, I am sure, so I know it can be done, depend upon it,’” he read, each word more clipped than the one before. With an oath that made her ears hum, he balled both letters, strode to the window, and threw them as far as he could. When he turned around, staring at her, his face was as hard as stone.

She could not meet his eyes, even as a voice inside her pleading “It’s not me,” tried to scratch its way out of her throat. To her ineffable relief, his expression changed. In another moment, he gave her a hand up from the floor and helped her to sit on Lady Bushnell’s bed. “I’m sorry, Suzie.”

For me, or for you, she wanted to whisper. His hand was heavy on her shoulder, and she felt weighed down, instead of buoyed up, as usual, by his touch. She couldn’t see his face, but she could see Lady Bushnell’s, and her pain reached full circle.

The widow lay back against her propped-up pillows, looking every minute of her years. She groped for Susan’s hand. “Dismiss it, Susan. He’s not worthy of a tenth part of you.” Her eyes seemed to fade and dim as she looked at the bailiff then, and Susan understood the source of her agony, even before she spoke of it. Oh don’t speak it, dear lady, she wanted to say.

“Sergeant Wiggins, do you understand what damage parents can do to children?” She made a fierce gesture with her hands that had nothing to do with old age about it. “We’ve just flayed Susan with our anger, and it’s not her fault.”

“I don’t mind,” she managed to whisper. “You didn’t mean it.”

Her hand tightened around Susan’s. “My dear, I am trying to point out to your lug-brained husband that parents can do some terrible things. I wonder if I am any better, but you will not tell me. Should I have forced Charles to take command of the regiment? Did I send a coward son to a living hell? Am I no better than Sir Rodney Hampton?”

Her voice was as loud as the bailiff’s had been a moment ago. Susan covered her ears with her hands. I cannot bear it if you lie or tell the truth, husband, she thought.

“He was no coward,” the bailiff lied.

“I don’t believe you,” the widow said.

“Then ask Susan and take her word over mine.” His angers bit into her shoulder like an auger.

“He was no coward,” she lied. “David told me everything.”

She knew if Lady Bushnell was to believe her, she had to look her in the eyes, so she did, raising her own ravaged face to the widow’s. Her gaze was steady, dishonest as the day was long, and entirely fitting for a Hampton. She knew from the bottom of her heart that Lady Bushnell believed her, and the knowledge was bitter beyond belief.

Lady Bushnell relaxed against the pillows with a great sigh. She squeezed Susan’s hand, then released it “Very well, Susan,” she murmured, closing her eyes.

I must get out of here, Susan thought, wondering if there were enough hours left in the day to get her to that door that seemed miles away. “Excuse me, please,” she said, and hurried from the room.

Her husband followed her. She looked back at him, but did not stop as she moved toward the stairs. She paused halfway down, and looked up at him. “David, you can still tell her the truth.”

“I don’t have to now, Susan, and you know I can lie with the best of them.”

She didn’t know why she said what she did then, even before the words were entirely out of her mouth. It was illogical, and nonsensical, and totally without merit, and meaningless. It was the kind of thing that she would never sling at him, even on her worst day, because she knew, as only his wife could, how false an accusation it was.

“Did you lie about loving me, just to keep her cocooned here from the truth?”

She knew, if she lived to be older than everyone in England, Scotland, and Wales combined, she would never forget the shock on his face. He reeled back as though she had slapped him, then retaliated without a thought, even as she had.

“I consider that remark worthy of a... Hampton,” he snapped, the word coming out like every dirty thing imaginable.

With a sob she turned and fled down the stairs and out the door.