emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters, all the same. They love being dominated. I am sure you were splendid. I have never seen you angry, but I can fancy how delightful you looked. And, after all, you said something to me the day before yesterday that seemed to me at the time to be merely fanciful, but that I see now was absolutely true, and it explains everything." [50] "What was that, Harry?" "You said to me that Sibyl Vane represented to you all the heroines of romance--that she was Desdemona one night, and Ophelia the other; that if she died as Juliet, she came to life as Imogen." "She will never come to life again now," murmured the lad, burying his face in his hands. "No, she will never come to life. She has played her last part. But you must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room simply as a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy, as a wonderful scene from Webster, or Ford, or Cyril Tourneur. The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died. To you at least she was always a dream, a phantom that flitted through Shakespeare's plays and left them lovelier for its presence, a reed through which Shakespeare's music sounded richer and more full of joy. The moment she touched actual life, she marred it, and it marred her, and so she passed away. Mourn for Ophelia, if you like. Put ashes on your head because Cordelia was strangled. Cry out against Heaven because the daughter of Brabantio died. But don't waste your tears over Sibyl Vane. She was less real than they are." There was a silence. The evening darkened in the room. Noiselessly, and with silver feet, the shadows crept in from the garden. The colors faded wearily out of things. After some time Dorian Gray looked up. "You have explained me to myself, Harry," he murmured, with something of a sigh of relief. "I felt all that you have said, but somehow I was afraid of it, and I could not express it to myself. How well you know me! But we will not talk again of what has happened. It has been a marvellous experience. That is all. I wonder if life has still in store for me anything as marvellous." "Life has everything in store for you, Dorian. There is nothing that you, with your extraordinary good looks, will not be able to do." "But suppose, Harry, I became haggard, and gray, and wrinkled? What then?" "Ah, then," said Lord Henry, rising to go,--"then, my dear Dorian, you would have to fight for your victories. As it is, they are brought to you. No, you must keep your good looks. We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful. We cannot spare you. And now you had better dress, and drive down to the club. We are rather late, as it is." "I think I shall join you


career and my life and who raised me to believe that I could do anything I set my mind to. I foolishly believed them and here we are! Book ten! Thank you to you, my reader, for choosing this book out of all the others, for turning the pages and going on this journey back to camp with me. Sometimes, when I’m finished writing a book (and especially as I write these acknowledgments in the depths of winter) I can feel a little bit homesick for the world I’m leaving. But it helps me to remember, as I say goodbye to Camp Holly Springs, that it’s always summer somewhere. Even if it’s just in the pages of a favorite book. More from the Author The Wedding Veil Christmas in Peachtree Bluff Under the Southern Sky Feels Like Falling The Southern Side of Paradise The Secret to Southern Charm ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kristy Woodson Harvey is the New York Times bestselling author of ten novels, including The Wedding Veil, Under the Southern Sky, and the Peachtree Bluff series. Harvey is a Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s school of journalism, and her writing has appeared in numerous online and print publications, including Southern Living, Traditional Home, USA Today, Domino, and O.Henry. Kristy is the winner of the Lucy Bramlette Patterson Award for Excellence in Creative Writing and finalist for the Southern Book Prize. Her books have received numerous accolades, including Southern Living’s Most Anticipated Beach Reads, Parade’s Big Fiction Reads, and Entertainment Weekly’s Spring Reading Picks. Kristy is the cocreator and cohost of the weekly web show and podcast Friends & Fiction. She blogs with her mom, Beth Woodson, on Design Chic, and loves connecting with fans on KristyWoodsonHarvey.com. She lives on the North Carolina coast with her husband and son, where she is (always!) working on her next novel. FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR: SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Kristy-Woodson-Harvey SimonandSchuster.com @GalleryBooks ALSO FROM KRISTY WOODSON HARVEY AND GALLERY BOOKS The Wedding Veil Under the Southern Sky Feels Like Falling THE PEACHTREE BLUFF SERIES Christmas in Peachtree Bluff The Southern Side of Paradise The Secret to Southern Charm Slightly South of Simple We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster ebook. Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions. CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox. Gallery Books An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 www.SimonandSchuster.com This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living


my way down, and I lay in a heap on the floor, my vision blurry. I stared up at him, blinking to try to clear my vision, waiting for him to attack me again—but he only bent, grabbed my phone from where it had fallen, and ran out the door. The door slammed shut. The pain in my ribs throbbed with my frantic heartbeat, but I sucked down a breath and then another. He hadn’t killed me. I was alive. Every part of me hurt. I dragged myself up holding on to the end of the bed. I tasted blood and realized that my nose was bleeding. The closet mirrors showed a wild-eyed woman, red smeared over lips and cheeks and chin. I tried to get my feet under me, but standing up made the room spin. I crabbed my way over to the bedside table and fumbled for the room phone. And then I stopped. Who was I going to call? The police? Yes. Obviously. That was the sensible thing. And then I’d explain to them about the man, about the Camry, about Chester. Persephone, Liv, Stahl—they were all tangled up in this, and if I gave the police the end of that thread they would follow it. This is stupid. Call the cops. Because that had worked out so well before. The cops were at least half the reason I’d ended up on that witness stand, testifying against the wrong man. They’d wanted Stahl, and they’d used me to get him. I gathered up my things in a rush, clawing everything into my suitcase and barely getting it closed before I hurried out the door. Moving at a shuffling run, I made it down the back staircase and to my car without running into anyone. I sat behind the wheel, taking gulping, painful breaths, and watched pedestrians wander by, unconcerned. I leaned my head against the wheel and sobbed. My ribs and hips were bruised, but nothing was broken, I decided. Not even my nose, though by the time I hit Tacoma it had swollen up and was bruising fast. There was a hard-edged bruise on my ribs, though, and a splotch on my hip from where I’d fallen, and my arm was red where he’d grabbed it. But I didn’t have a concussion or any broken bones, so I was lucky. I was lucky he’d left without doing worse. I’d filled up on gas before the wedding. I drove straight through to Chester, and even taking the long way around the Sound to avoid the ferry, I didn’t stop once. I kept watching for a black Camry in my rearview, and a couple times I pulled off at weird spots to make sure no other cars were following me either. When I got to the Chester motel well after nightfall I was alone, as far as I could tell. I went straight to Ethan’s room. I hadn’t called him—without my phone, I didn’t even have his number—and he greeted me with surprise and alarm. “Naomi! I’ve been trying to


The Invisible Man- A Grotesque Romance.txt

he devised. No doubt he was almost ecstatically exasperated by Kemp's treachery, and though we may be able to understand the motives that led to that deceit, we may still imagine and even sympathise a little with the fury the attempted surprise must have occasioned. Perhaps something of the stunned astonishment of his Oxford Street experiences may have returned to him, for evidently he had counted on Kemp's co-operation in his brutal dream of a terrorised world. At any rate he vanished from human ken about midday, and no living witness can tell what he did until about half-past two. It was a fortunate thing, perhaps, for humanity, but for him it was a fatal inaction. During that time a growing multitude of men scattered over the countryside were busy. In the morning he had still been simply a legend, a terror; in the afternoon, by virtue chiefly of Kemp's drily worded proclamation, he was presented as a tangible antagonist, to be wounded, captured, or overcome, and the countryside began organising itself with inconceivable rapidity. By two o'clock even he might still have removed himself out of the district by getting aboard a train, but after two that became impossible. Every passenger train along the lines on a great parallelogram between Southampton, Manchester, Brighton, and Horsham, travelled with locked doors, and the goods traffic was almost entirely suspended. And in a great circle of twenty miles round Port Burdock, men armed with guns and bludgeons were presently setting out in groups of three and four, with dogs, to beat the roads and fields. Mounted policemen rode along the country lanes, stopping at every cottage and warning the people to lock up their houses, and keep indoors unless they were armed, and all the elementary schools had broken up by three o'clock, and the children, scared and keeping together in groups, were hurrying home. Kemp's proclamation--signed indeed by Adye--was posted over almost the whole district by four or five o'clock in the afternoon. It gave briefly but clearly all the conditions of the struggle, the necessity of keeping the Invisible Man from food and sleep, the necessity for incessant watchfulness and for a prompt attention to any evidence of his movements. And so swift and decided was the action of the authorities, so prompt and universal was the belief in this strange being, that before nightfall an area of several hundred square miles was in a stringent state of siege. And before nightfall, too, a thrill of horror went through the whole watching nervous countryside. Going from whispering mouth to mouth, swift and certain over the length and breadth of the county, passed the story of the murder of Mr. Wicksteed. If our supposition that the Invisible Man's refuge was the Hintondean thickets, then we must suppose that in the early afternoon he sallied out again bent upon some project that involved the use of a weapon. We cannot know what the project was, but the evidence that he had the iron rod in hand before he met Wicksteed is to me at


lofty terrace, formed by the swelling bank of the river, rose a plantation of orange, lemon, and palm-trees, whose fruit, in the coolness of evening, breathed delicious fragrance. With these were mingled a few trees of other species. Here, under the ample shade of a plane-tree, that spread its majestic canopy towards the river, St. Aubert loved to sit in the fine evenings of summer, with his wife and children, watching, beneath its foliage, the setting sun, the mild splendour of its light fading from the distant landscape, till the shadows of twilight melted its various features into one tint of sober grey. Here, too, he loved to read, and to converse with Madame St. Aubert; or to play with his children, resigning himself to the influence of those sweet affections, which are ever attendant on simplicity and nature. He has often said, while tears of pleasure trembled in his eyes, that these were moments infinitely more delightful than any passed amid the brilliant and tumultuous scenes that are courted by the world. His heart was occupied; it had, what can be so rarely said, no wish for a happiness beyond what it experienced. The consciousness of acting right diffused a serenity over his manners, which nothing else could impart to a man of moral perceptions like his, and which refined his sense of every surrounding blessing. The deepest shade of twilight did not send him from his favourite plane-tree. He loved the soothing hour, when the last tints of light die away; when the stars, one by one, tremble through aether, and are reflected on the dark mirror of the waters; that hour, which, of all others, inspires the mind with pensive tenderness, and often elevates it to sublime contemplation. When the moon shed her soft rays among the foliage, he still lingered, and his pastoral supper of cream and fruits was often spread beneath it. Then, on the stillness of night, came the song of the nightingale, breathing sweetness, and awakening melancholy. The first interruptions to the happiness he had known since his retirement, were occasioned by the death of his two sons. He lost them at that age when infantine simplicity is so fascinating; and though, in consideration of Madame St. Aubert's distress, he restrained the expression of his own, and endeavoured to bear it, as he meant, with philosophy, he had, in truth, no philosophy that could render him calm to such losses. One daughter was now his only surviving child; and, while he watched the unfolding of her infant character, with anxious fondness, he endeavoured, with unremitting effort, to counteract those traits in her disposition, which might hereafter lead her from happiness. She had discovered in her early years uncommon delicacy of mind, warm affections, and ready benevolence; but with these was observable a degree of susceptibility too exquisite to admit of lasting peace. As she advanced in youth, this sensibility gave a pensive tone to her spirits, and a softness to her manner, which added grace to beauty, and rendered her a very interesting object to


A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.txt

with the manifold functions of women for the propagation of the species. It may be so. The world, it seems, is drearier than even you, Lynch, imagined. For my part I dislike that way out. It leads to eugenics rather than to esthetic. It leads you out of the maze into a new gaudy lecture-room where MacCann, with one hand on THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES and the other hand on the new testament, tells you that you admired the great flanks of Venus because you felt that she would bear you burly offspring and admired her great breasts because you felt that she would give good milk to her children and yours. --Then MacCann is a sulphur-yellow liar, said Lynch energetically. --There remains another way out, said Stephen, laughing. --To wit? said Lynch. --This hypothesis, Stephen began. A long dray laden with old iron came round the corner of Sir Patrick Dun's hospital covering the end of Stephen's speech with the harsh roar of jangled and rattling metal. Lynch closed his ears and gave out oath after oath till the dray had passed. Then he turned on his heel rudely. Stephen turned also and waited for a few moments till his companion's ill-humour had had its vent. --This hypothesis, Stephen repeated, is the other way out: that, though the same object may not seem beautiful to all people, all people who admire a beautiful object find in it certain relations which satisfy and coincide with the stages themselves of all esthetic apprehension. These relations of the sensible, visible to you through one form and to me through another, must be therefore the necessary qualities of beauty. Now, we can return to our old friend saint Thomas for another pennyworth of wisdom. Lynch laughed. --It amuses me vastly, he said, to hear you quoting him time after time like a jolly round friar. Are you laughing in your sleeve? --MacAlister, answered Stephen, would call my esthetic theory applied Aquinas. So far as this side of esthetic philosophy extends, Aquinas will carry me all along the line. When we come to the phenomena of artistic conception, artistic gestation, and artistic reproduction I require a new terminology and a new personal experience. --Of course, said Lynch. After all Aquinas, in spite of his intellect, was exactly a good round friar. But you will tell me about the new personal experience and new terminology some other day. Hurry up and finish the first part. --Who knows? said Stephen, smiling. Perhaps Aquinas would understand me better than you. He was a poet himself. He wrote a hymn for Maundy Thursday. It begins with the words PANGE LINGUA GLORIOSI. They say it is the highest glory of the hymnal. It is an intricate and soothing hymn. I like it; but there is no hymn that can be put beside that mournful and majestic processional song, the VEXILLA REGIS of Venantius Fortunatus. Lynch began to sing softly and solemnly in a deep bass voice: IMPLETA SUNT QUAE CONCINIT DAVID FIDELI CARMINE DICENDO NATIONIBUS REGNAVIT A LIGNO DEUS. --That's great!


my seventh male. He wears a long robe in dark blue fabric. His gray hair laps at the curve of his stooped shoulders. I’m afraid to approach, but I must. I walk up to my father, pull on his sleeve, and say, “Respectful Lady is awake, and she asks that I be the go-between.” The man I take to be the doctor says, “Prefect Tan, it would be proper for you to do this duty.” But when my father’s eyes brim with tears, the doctor turns to Miss Zhao. “I suspect you have some experience with the ailments that afflict women.” I am only a girl, but I must honor my mother’s wishes. “Respectful Lady wants—” My father slaps the back of his hand against his other palm to stop me from saying another word. Silently he weighs the possibilities. Then he speaks. “Doctor Ho, you will use my daughter.” Father looks down at me. “You repeat exactly what the doctor says to your mother and what your mother says back to the doctor. Do you understand?” I nod solemnly. His decision reflects his love for my mother. I’m sure of it. The adults exchange a few more words, and then my father is led away by Miss Zhao. The doctor asks me a series of questions, which I take to Respectful Lady. She answers, “No, I have not eaten spicy foods. You can tell him my sleep is fine. I am not suffering from excessive emotions.” I go back and forth between Doctor Ho in the colonnade and my mother in her bed. The questions—and the responses—seem to have little to do with my mother’s infection. That she doesn’t volunteer these details puzzles me. After the doctor is satisfied, he writes a prescription. The scullery maid is sent to a pharmacy to pick up the herbs for the formula. The cook brews the decoction, and a few hours later, when it’s ready, it’s brought to my mother’s room. I lift the cup to her lips, and she takes a few sips before falling back on her pillow. “It’s late,” she says in a soft voice. “You should go to bed.” “Let me stay here. I can hold the cup for you.” She turns her head to face the wooden panels on the back wall of the marriage bed. Her fingers press against one of them, idly wiggling it in its frame. “I will have finished the drink by the time you’ve washed your face.” I go to my room, change into bedclothes and sleeping slippers, lie down, and nestle between the goose-down-filled mattress and a cotton quilt. I’m drained by all I’ve seen and find myself drifting off to sleep. I don’t know how much time has passed before I’m awakened abruptly by the sound of people running. In the gloom, I see Poppy sit up and yawn. She lights the oil lamp. The sputtering flame casts dancing shadows on the walls. We quickly dress and go out to the corridor. The rain has stopped, but it’s dark. The birds singing


to show its age. Will they both be thrown out? Will Second Uncle keep the girl to raise as an amusement for the boys in the household or sell her to a Tooth Lady? Neither of these futures will come to pass if the girl dies. “Would your mama let you visit me in my room tomorrow?” “I think so.” “Why don’t you ask her?” I encourage. I bet that Yining used to love to run, because even with her feet bound I sense restrained eagerness in her steps as she walks to the cluster of concubines. Second Uncle’s first concubine smiles when she sees her daughter. Her manner—even more than Yining’s pulse—is proof of my diagnosis. While Yining implores her mother, I place my fingertips on my wrist. Grandmother has always said that only a fool is a doctor to herself, but what else can I do? I read the three levels of pulses and come to the same conclusion I did yesterday and the day before that. My qi and Blood are growing more deficient. With a sigh, I let my fingers fall back to my lap. As the hours spool out, some women switch to painting, while others compose poetry. I’ve never been good at these pursuits. In the late afternoon, women begin to retire to their own chambers—the wives to make sure their children are fed, and each concubine to prepare in case she’s to be her master’s chosen one tonight. As soon as Lady Kuo leaves, I go to my room. Until Maoren comes for dinner, I’ll be alone. In the mornings my thoughts go to Grandmother and our lessons. This time of day I spend with Meiling. In my mind, I transport myself back to my bedchamber in the Mansion of Golden Light. I see her before me clearly. I can smell her hair and the jasmine tea we were drinking. We are thirteen years old. She’s had her first monthly moon water; I haven’t. I’ve just listened to her read to me and watched her practice her calligraphy. Her voice was even in her reading, and her written characters showed improvement. When our secret lessons are finished, we go outside to our favorite spot—the bridge overlooking the stream in the fourth courtyard. “There were acrobats and archers, storytellers and puppeteers,” Meiling recounts, her eyes wide as she tells me about a festival she and her mother attended to celebrate cherry-blossom season in the hills above Lake Tai. I ask my favorite question. “What did you eat?” “Scallion pancakes and grilled meat from a stand. So tasty!” “What else did you do?” “Mama and I walked to the pagoda.” I take her hand and hold it over my heart. We stay this way in quiet companionship, listening to the trickle of water over rocks in the stream and the breeze soughing through the trees. “It’s been a while since our last visit,” she says at last. “Are you ready for me to feed your nightmares?” “I never have nightmares!” I protest, although her stories do make


for space, and wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing --at least, what untattooed parts might remain --I did not trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale. .. <p 449 > .. < chapter ciii 10 MEASUREMENT OF THE WHALE'S SKELETON > In the first place, I wish to lay before you a particular, plain statement, touching the living bulk of this leviathan, whose skeleton we are briefly to exhibit. Such a statement may prove useful here. According to a careful calculation I have made, and which I partly base upon Captain Scoresby's estimate, of seventy tons for the largest sized Greenland whale of sixty feet in length; according to my careful calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the largest magnitude, between eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty feet in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at least ninety tons; so that reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would considerably outweigh the combined population of a whole village of one thousand one hundred inhabitants. Think you not then that brains, like yoked cattle, should be put to this leviathan, to make him at all budge to any landsman's imagination? Having already in various ways put before you his skull, spout-hole, jaw, teeth, tail, forehead, fins, and divers other parts, I shall now simply point out what is most interesting in the general bulk of his unobstructed bones. But as the colossal skull embraces so very large a proportion of the entire extent .. <p 450 > of the skeleton; as it is by far the most complicated part; and as nothing is to be repeated concerning it in this chapter, you must not fail to carry it in your mind, or under your arm, as we proceed, otherwise you will not gain a complete notion of the general structure we are about to view. In length, the Sperm Whale's skeleton at Tranque measured seventy-two feet; so that when fully invested and extended in life, he must have been ninety feet long; for in the whale, the skeleton loses about one fifth in length compared with the living body. Of this seventy-two feet, his skull and jaw comprised some twenty feet, leaving some fifty feet of plain back-bone. Attached to this back-bone, for something less than a third of its length, was the mighty circular basket of ribs which once enclosed his vitals. To me this vast ivory-ribbed chest, with the long, unrelieved spine, extending far away from it in a straight line, not a little resembled the hull of a great ship new-laid upon the stocks, when only some twenty of her naked bow-ribs are inserted, and the keel is otherwise, for the time, but a long, disconnected timber. The ribs were ten on a side. The first, to begin from the neck, was nearly six feet long; the second, third, and fourth were each successively longer, till


know that I see what he is about. He has a very satirical eye, and if I do not begin by being impertinent myself, I shall soon grow afraid of him.'' On his approaching them soon afterwards, though without seeming to have any intention of speaking, Miss Lucas defied her friend to mention such a subject to him, which immediately provoking Elizabeth to do it, she turned to him and said, ``Did not you think, Mr. Darcy, that I expressed myself uncommonly well just now, when I was teazing Colonel Forster to give us a ball at Meryton?'' ``With great energy; -- but it is a subject which always makes a lady energetic.'' ``You are severe on us.'' ``It will be _her_ turn soon to be teazed,'' said Miss Lucas. ``I am going to open the instrument, Eliza, and you know what follows.'' ``You are a very strange creature by way of a friend! -- always wanting me to play and sing before any body and every body! -- If my vanity had taken a musical turn, you would have been invaluable, but as it is, I would really rather not sit down before those who must be in the habit of hearing the very best performers.'' On Miss Lucas's persevering, however, she added, ``Very well; if it must be so, it must.'' And gravely glancing at Mr. Darcy, ``There is a fine old saying, which every body here is of course familiar with -- "Keep your breath to cool your porridge," -- and I shall keep mine to swell my song.'' Her performance was pleasing, though by no means capital. After a song or two, and before she could reply to the entreaties of several that she would sing again, she was eagerly succeeded at the instrument by her sister Mary, who having, in consequence of being the only plain one in the family, worked hard for knowledge and accomplishments, was always impatient for display. Mary had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached. Elizabeth, easy and unaffected, had been listened to with much more pleasure, though not playing half so well; and Mary, at the end of a long concerto, was glad to purchase praise and gratitude by Scotch and Irish airs, at the request of her younger sisters, who, with some of the Lucases and two or three officers, joined eagerly in dancing at one end of the room. Mr. Darcy stood near them in silent indignation at such a mode of passing the evening, to the exclusion of all conversation, and was too much engrossed by his own thoughts to perceive that Sir William Lucas was his neighbour, till Sir William thus began. ``What a charming amusement for young people this is, Mr. Darcy! -- There is nothing like dancing after all. -- I consider it as one of the first refinements of polished societies.'' ``Certainly, Sir; -- and it


of these clouds as they changed in shape and tints, and to watch their various effect on the lower world, whose features, partly veiled, were continually assuming new forms of sublimity. After traversing these regions for many leagues, they began to descend towards Rousillon, and features of beauty then mingled with the scene. Yet the travellers did not look back without some regret to the sublime objects they had quitted; though the eye, fatigued with the extension of its powers, was glad to repose on the verdure of woods and pastures, that now hung on the margin of the river below; to view again the humble cottage shaded by cedars, the playful group of mountaineer-children, and the flowery nooks that appeared among the hills. As they descended, they saw at a distance, on the right, one of the grand passes of the Pyrenees into Spain, gleaming with its battlements and towers to the splendour of the setting rays, yellow tops of woods colouring the steeps below, while far above aspired the snowy points of the mountains, still reflecting a rosy hue. St. Aubert began to look out for the little town he had been directed to by the people of Beaujeu, and where he meant to pass the night; but no habitation yet appeared. Of its distance Valancourt could not assist him to judge, for he had never been so far along this chain of Alps before. There was, however, a road to guide them; and there could be little doubt that it was the right one; for, since they had left Beaujeu, there had been no variety of tracks to perplex or mislead. The sun now gave his last light, and St. Aubert bade the muleteer proceed with all possible dispatch. He found, indeed, the lassitude of illness return upon him, after a day of uncommon fatigue, both of body and mind, and he longed for repose. His anxiety was not soothed by observing a numerous train, consisting of men, horses, and loaded mules, winding down the steeps of an opposite mountain, appearing and disappearing at intervals among the woods, so that its numbers could not be judged of. Something bright, like arms, glanced in the setting ray, and the military dress was distinguishable upon the men who were in the van, and on others scattered among the troop that followed. As these wound into the vale, the rear of the party emerged from the woods, and exhibited a band of soldiers. St. Aubert's apprehensions now subsided; he had no doubt that the train before him consisted of smugglers, who, in conveying prohibited goods over the Pyrenees, had been encountered, and conquered by a party of troops. The travellers had lingered so long among the sublimer scenes of these mountains, that they found themselves entirely mistaken in their calculation that they could reach Montigny at sun-set; but, as they wound along the valley, the saw, on a rude Alpine bridge, that united two lofty crags of the glen, a group of mountaineer-children, amusing themselves with dropping pebbles into a torrent below,


bright, bustling, cheery place. It felt like a party. Now, we ordered slices of cake—mine, a yellow diner slice with chocolate icing; his, death by chocolate—and then we wedged ourselves into a small table in the middle of it all. Joe had insisted on paying, and he must have told them we were celebrating a birthday, because when the slices arrived at the table, the waiter lit two giant sparkler candles, stuck them in the slices, and shouted, “Everybody! Let’s sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to—” And then he looked at me. “Nora!” I shouted—and it felt so great to just shout my mom’s name. And so the whole room began to sing. And I swear I had never thought of the “Happy Birthday” song as anything particularly special until that moment—but sitting in front of that sparkler candle as the entire room launched into a rich rendition of it, I suddenly wondered why that song didn’t bring me to tears every time. Maybe it was how crowded the room was, or the acoustics, or the sound of all those people singing warm wishes to my long-lost mother: Happy Birthday, Dear Nora … But my voice got too wobbly to sing. I spent the second half of the song just taking it all in. Savoring it, the way I know she would have. It was nothing like what I usually did to celebrate my mom’s birthday. But maybe different wasn’t so bad. * * * THERE WERE LOTS of upsides to that night. It had felt surprisingly good to help out the girl in the coffee shop, and it had been surprisingly satisfying to tell off Parker. Sue, while woefully off target, had at least been sweetly trying to cheer me up. Joe had turned out to be great at anti-panic back rubs. And creating power outages. And I had celebrated my mom’s birthday not alone for the first time since she died. But what, in the end, was my takeaway? None of the upsides. Just the one crushingly disappointing downside: I got stood up. That was the sentence that ticker-taped through my head all the next day. I got stood up. By my future husband. On our very first date. How would we spin that to the grandkids? I mean, fine. He’d had a work emergency. I got it. I wouldn’t have wanted him to have left some Saint Bernard dying alone in the clinic. He’d been busy doing something noble. It was a fair excuse. But here was the problem. It was now the next day, and the admirable, flawless, and perfect Dr. Oliver Addison, DVM, had not called to apologize. I mean, if you leave a lady sitting in a coffee shop, even for a good reason, you should call the next day and grovel a little bit. Right? Make some voice contact? Stress in real time how sorry you are? Maybe demonstrate enthusiasm by setting a new date to try again? Nothing from this guy. Crickets. Which forced me to wonder something horrible: Maybe this perfect man wasn’t so perfect


scrub her feet, and Clytemnestra catches her face under the feeble light—her features are calm, just like Clytemnestra taught her, but the wavering in her voice is unmistakable. “You will not go,” Clytemnestra says. “He can find some other servant to entertain him.” Aileen looks relieved but catches herself and tries to keep her face expressionless. “But who?” “There are plenty of women in this citadel who would like to fuck my husband.” Aileen nods, and for a moment, they are silent. “What should I do, then?” she asks, unable to contain herself. All these years, and she is still scared of him. Clytemnestra can’t judge her for that. Aileen told her how Agamemnon’s father used to sleep with her mother before Atreus was killed, of how his brother Thyestes would terrorize the servants with burns and floggings, of how, when Agamemnon took back the citadel, he executed all the people who hadn’t been faithful. For many nights, after they put the children to bed, Aileen would speak to Clytemnestra of the violence of the Atreidai’s line. She had frightened words for all men except one: Agamemnon’s estranged cousin, Aegisthus. “Aegisthus didn’t like violence when he lived in this palace. He killed and hurt others only when he had to.” In Aileen’s whispered words, Aegisthus was a shy child, eager to be loved, and then a watchful young man, silent and slippery. While other men his age brought girls to their room, he never requested any servant’s presence, and when his father flogged his enemies and made everyone watch, Aegisthus would later sneak into the prisoners’ cells, bringing them food and salves to ward off infection. “He sounds like an interesting man,” Clytemnestra said once, “though harmless.” A shadow passed on Aileen’s face. “He wasn’t always harmless. He could be cruel too, and dangerous.” And now Aegisthus is out there, somewhere, the Atreidai’s last standing enemy. Guards have been looking for him for fifteen years, yet no one has found him. As the elders pointed out in their last meeting, he is probably dead. “My queen?” Aileen says. Clytemnestra stands and water drips onto the stone floor. Aileen hurries to bring her tunic and wrap it around her shoulders. “You will do nothing,” Clytemnestra says. “I will deal with it.” * * * She finds Agamemnon in his frescoed bedroom, sitting on a chair lost in thought. The painted trees and happy fish jumping in the river clash with his stark figure. He raises his head when she comes in. His look is hard—he is angry, though Clytemnestra can’t tell why. Not that she cares. “Your red-haired servant won’t come tonight,” he finally says. “No.” “You told her not to.” “You will find someone else to fuck,” she says calmly. That makes him laugh; the sound scratches the painted walls. He pours himself some wine from the jug. Clytemnestra does the same, taking the other chair. “And who would that be?” he asks, looking as she brings the cup to her lips. “You?” “Hopefully not.” He laughs again and relaxes in his


I trail off, rather astounded by my brazen lie. My mother isn’t sick at all. She’s doing fine. “So perhaps it’s the stress of that situation that is affecting my conduct, and for that I truly apologize . . .” “I understand.” Peggy doesn’t seem the least bit suspicious. If anything, she sounds eager. Perhaps she, too, has been secretly hoping I would quit on my own. I egg her along. “I’m sorry to leave the class . . .” “Oh, we’ll figure it out. There are some local writers in the area. We’ll have to find a substitute for tomorrow, so I might ask Rachel from the office to step in . . .” She trails off. “Anyhow, we’ll deal with it. We’ll tell the class you had a family emergency. I’m sure they’ll be disappointed, but they’ll understand.” “Thank you, Peggy. That means a lot. I’m sorry for the inconvenience.” “You take care, June. I’m sorry again.” I hang up, then flop back onto my bed and groan in relief. That was agonizing, but at least I’m free. I once read somewhere that Asian people are so polite because they have this cultural concept of letting each other save face. They might be judging the shit out of you on the inside, but on the outside, at least, they’ll let you walk away with your pride intact. Nineteen AS IT TURNS OUT, I DO GO TO SEE MY MOTHER. Mom lives in a suburb outside Philly—near enough to Boston that I can get on the Amtrak and be there by lunchtime the next day. I have to root around my phone for her street address—I haven’t been to the Philly house in years, and I never see Mom outside of our yearly Christmas and Thanksgiving gatherings at Rory’s. I’m sure this spur-of-the-moment visit is a product of vulnerability, motivated by fear and childlike regression. I’m also sure, past the initial hugs and tenderness, that I’ll regret coming at all; that once the “I’ve missed you” and “You look good!” chatter turns to the same overcontrolling, patronizing comments that have spiraled into blowout fights in the past, I’ll hop on the train and hurtle back to DC. Right now, though, I just want to be near someone who doesn’t hate me on principle. Mom’s waiting for me on the front porch when I pull up. I called a few hours ago to ask if I could come stay for a bit. She agreed without even asking what was going on. I wonder how much she knows; if she’s seen my name smeared all over the internet. “Hey, Junie.” She envelops me in a hug, and the touch alone makes my eyes sting with tears. No one’s hugged me in so long. “Is everything all right?” “Yeah, of course—I was teaching a workshop in Boston, and it’s just finished, so I thought I’d make a pit stop here before I head back home.” “Well, you’re always welcome here.” Mom turns, and I follow her into the house. She doesn’t ask how the


be thankful that a substantial raise and my first book royalty check finally allowed me to help my mother. It all came too late to be of any use to my father. * * * I am still anxious when making a big purchase, whether it is necessary or not, and usually have to work myself up to justifying it. The car is fifteen years old, the air conditioner can’t be repaired, it’s too small for all of us to be comfortable on long road trips → expenditure reluctantly approved. I tend to choose smaller, less important things—sneakers, nightstands, the number of streaming services we pay for—to be stingy about, as if that will compensate for money I’m forced to spend elsewhere. If I want to splurge on something, I will tell myself that I have to take on a freelance assignment or speaking engagement, earn additional income, to make up for it. And yet I feel an undeniable thrill when I buy “nice things” for myself or for others, because to me it will always seem like a luxury to spend money on something I want but don’t strictly need. In contrast, my husband’s approach to finances is rational, evenhanded, devoid of fear or strong emotion. He’s never had a meltdown over math. He can see the numbers in the columns for what they are: incoming funds, outgoing expenses, things we want, and things we need. He does not find himself worrying or becoming upset because our kids, like many, do not yet understand the advantages they have. Even when we discuss how much money we might need to be able to retire someday—or potentially provide for our disabled child after we’re dead—he doesn’t panic. While both his family and mine might have described themselves as “middle class,” there’s an ocean, deep and wide, between our formative experiences around money and stability, and this disparity continues to influence our instincts and decisions around saving and spending. I know it’s a good thing that he doesn’t make financial decisions from the same bottomless well of worry I do, but sometimes I can’t help but envy his sense of security, the reassurance that comes with a lifetime of believing that you will most likely be okay. Witnessing his calm consistency can also make me feel foolish for fretting, though he would never condemn me for it. I tell myself that I should be able to recognize how lucky I am, put away these fears once and for all. I remind myself that I have taken risks, made decisions that were neither frugal nor practical, and it wasn’t the end of the world: my financial anxiety couldn’t override my desire to become a parent, a notoriously expensive proposition; nor did it stop me from pursuing a career in writing, a job that supports me now but might not a year from now. I did these things despite assuming, for years, that I might also need to be my parents’ retirement plan. Yet even when things are going well, I half expect to lose what


a detective, are you not?” Clio asked in what could have passed for a motherly tone, if your mother was a viper. “You watch, you examine, you investigate. We want no more from you than that.” “An investigation?” “A question, if you will.” “You want to ask me a question? That’s it? Your protégés could do that for you.” “No, they can’t, silly!” Polyhymnia giggled from the floor. “Haven’t you been paying attention?” “Your art is yours and yours alone,” said Clio. “This question can only be asked by you.” This last line had come from the corner of the room, from Calliope, in a sweet, crooning voice. She was still watching Io like a hawk, her pen scraping ceaselessly over the paper, tracing the same lines over and over, ink laid so thick that the letters were bleeding into each other. It was unnerving—Io took a step closer to Edei, and closer to the door. It all made sense now: their staged performance, the spooky way they spoke, the web they were trying to weave around her. Their powers had limits, just like any other-born’s. They knew the answers and truths of the world, but only if the right person was asking the questions. And at the moment, the right person was Io, for some reason. “Three questions you can ask,” said Clio. “And the fourth one, we will choose.” “Five questions for me, one for you,” Io bargained. “No vague prophecies, no double meanings.” Clio gave a curt nod of her head. “You may begin.” The first question was easy: the most obvious and urgent. “Did you order Horatio Long to kill the women named Raina, Drina Savva and Emmeline Segal twelve years ago?” The Muses shot narrowed glances at each other, not calculating but inquisitive. As though trying to decide who should answer. Polyhymnia took the lead, saying, “Horatio Long was instructed to remove these women from Alante, in whatever way he saw fit.” “Instructed by you.” The women shuffled. “Yes.” “Why?” A shared look again, laced with urgency. Clio raised a palm to her sisters and answered Io, “We had our reasons. The women were dangerous to this city.” “We agreed no vagueness,” Io said harshly. “Try again.” Urania was the one to continue, speaking rapidly while her hands fluttered above the cards on the floor before her. “Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story. We saw this story unfold in maps of stars, in the chirp of songbirds, on the cracked paint of a half-finished portrait, but it was snippets, bits and pieces, nothing concrete, no beginning and no middle and no end. We made a story of the scraps and knew the women were dangerous. They had to die to stop the city from burning to the ground, and the children from wailing, and the streets from running red with blood.” Io and Edei shared a glance, each of them connecting the dots. On the same day, twelve years ago, Horatio Long kidnapped and attempted to kill Emmeline Segal, Drina Savva, and Raina—other


bacon and eggs- only toast and marmalade. It was very sad. They hid the box under the bed in the boys' room. Tim had been left with the fisher-boy- or rather, had been tied up in his back yard, for Alf had gone out fishing, and was even now gazing from his father's boat at the strange wreck. "We can make a bit of money taking sightseers out to this wreck," said Alf. And before the day was out scores of interested people had seen the old wreck from the decks of motor-boats and fishing-smacks. George was furious about it. But she couldn't do anything. After all, as Julian said, anybody could have a look! Chapter Nine THE BOX FROM THE WRECK Contents- Prev/Next THE first thing that the children did after breakfast was to fetch the precious box and take it out to the tool-shed in the garden. They were simply longing to force it open. All of them secretly felt certain that it would hold treasure of some sort. Julian looked round for a tool. He found a chisel and decided that would be just the thing to force the box open. He tried, but the tool slipped and jabbed his fingers. Then he tried other things, but the box obstinately refused to open. The children stared at it crossly. "I know what to do," said Anne at last. "Let's take it to the top of the house and throw it down to the ground. It would burst open then, I expect." The others thought over the idea. "It might be worth trying," said Julian. "The only thing is- it might break or spoil anything inside the box." But there didn't seem any other way to open the box, so Julian carried it up to the top of the house. He went to the attic and opened the window there. The others were down below, waiting. Julian hurled the box out of the window as violently as he could. It flew through the air and landed with a terrific crash on the crazy paving below. At once the french window there opened and their Uncle Quentin came out like a bullet from a gun. "Whatever are you doing?" he cried. "Surely you aren't throwing things at each other out of the window? What's this on the ground?" The children looked at the box. It had burst open, and lay on the ground, showing a tin lining that was waterproof. Whatever was in the box would not be spoilt! It would be quite dry! Dick ran to pick it up. "I said, what's this on the ground?" shouted his uncle and moved towards him. "It's- it's something that belongs to us," said Dick, going red. "Well, I shall take it away from you," said his uncle. "Disturbing me like this! Give it to me. Where did you get it?" Nobody answered. Uncle Quentin frowned till his glasses nearly fell off. "Where did you get it?" he barked, glaring at poor Anne, who was nearest. "Out of the wreck," stammered the little


had been her forever. She blinked, and the layout of the tunnels overlaid the back of her eyelids. “No one is coming,” she’d said. “Not right now.” In the present, Lore shook her head. She’d gotten better at only tapping into her awareness of the catacombs when she needed it—even now, as the strange skill seemed to be growing in strength alongside her sense of Mortem —but standing so close made it nearly impossible to ignore, made it seep through her thoughts like ink in water. She felt the tunnels like phantom limbs, like the catacombs and the Mortem within them were part of her. Sometimes Lore thought that if you peeled off her skin and turned it inside out, there’d be a map on the slick underside, pressed into the meat of her. With a sigh, she leaned against the side of the building. She was a little earlier than Val had told her to be, and Val was nothing if not punctual. A minute later, Val was striding down the street toward her, with the same determined gait that equally served for a casual stroll or a charge into a knife fight. A middle-aged woman more severe than traditionally pretty, with a paper-pale face, bottle-green eyes, and a scarf that had faded to near colorlessness holding back her gold hair. Lore raised a hand in greeting. Val took hold of her fingers and pulled her into a hug instead. “You keeping out of trouble, mouse?” “Only the kind you don’t want me in.” Lore hugged her back, the familiar scent of beeswax candles and whiskey a soothing weight in her lungs. Val and Mari had raised her since that day when she’d emerged from the dark into a world she didn’t know. They’d protected her and given her purpose, even when it was a risk. Even when the effects of her strange childhood had manifested in terrifying ways. None of them talked about that, though. Val snorted and straightened her arms, hands still on Lore’s shoulders. Her gaze had always cut like a scalpel, and now was no different. “I’m pulling you out,” she said with no preamble. Lore’s brow knit. “What?” “We have all the info we need on Gilbert’s outfit; if he’s moving as much contraband this week as you say, he won’t be running poison for much longer, anyway. There’s always a rush of religious feeling after a royal Consecration. The Presque Mort might be distracted now, but after that ceremony, they’ll have their noses to the ground like you won’t believe.” For all that Lore loved her surrogate mothers, there was no denying that they were cutthroat. Val and Mari had visions of being the only poison suppliers in Dellaire—once they were, they’d be nigh untouchable. Bloodcoats took any bribe you threw at them, and even the Presque Mort and the rest of the Church turned their backs sometimes. The criminal underbelly of Auverraine was only criminal until the right amount of gold crossed the right palm. Still, Lore shook her head, telling herself that her


when he leans over me, slips his hand inside my underwear. “About how wet I wanted to make you?” An amused chuckle. “I think you’re already there.” I practically tear my panties in my rush to get them down my legs. “More.” A hum against my mouth as he parts me with his fingers. “I want you to be loud,” he says, timing his words with his strokes. He draws a circle. A square. A shape that mathematicians haven’t discovered yet. “I want to feel your body tremble, until you just can’t keep it in any longer, and then I want you to come on my tongue.” I’m gasping now, clutching his shoulders. His finger isn’t enough. I need more. He lowers his head to my chest, dropping kisses to my abdomen, my thighs. My lips. Then, when I’m squirming and shaking and more than ready for him, he gives me a long, slow lick. I let out a moan at the contact, the hot, slick feel of his mouth on me. “God, you taste so good.” He keeps teasing, alternating quick strokes with longer, torturous ones. Only when I’m aching for it does he finally take his tongue to my clit, quickly learning that the softest little flicks are enough to drive me wild. “Finn,” I murmur as he falls into a steady rhythm. “Finn.” He pauses for a moment. Glances up at me. “What?” I ask. “I think that’s the first time you’ve said my name. When we’re like this.” He’s right—I’ve avoided it. Now I say it again, which makes him sigh and press his mouth against me harder. For a moment, I can almost forget that he’s Finnegan Walsh and I’m the nameless person writing his book. For a moment, we are just two people with a desperate attraction warming up on a snowy day. Except, of course, this isn’t real. He’s not doing any of these things because he’s madly in love with me—he’s trying to learn. So he can eventually please someone who isn’t me. I still my hand in his hair. “Hold on.” Immediately he stops, glancing up at me. “Sorry, I—I have to pee.” I haul myself off the floor, untangling myself from the blankets, slipping on a T-shirt—I don’t stop to check whether it’s his or mine—on my way to the bathroom. Of course it’s his. Of course it fits the way a boyfriend’s shirt should fit, baggy and sexy and perfect. Get a grip, I tell my reflection once I’ve locked myself inside. My face is flushed, hair wild. You are not having feelings for him. Two months, and it already feels like I’m deeper than I ever was with Wyatt. It doesn’t make sense. My feelings for Wyatt grew over the course of ten years of friendship, classes and parties and late nights talking about our futures. I tended to that crush like a fussy succulent, giving it all the sunshine it needed to become a full-on invasive species. With Finn, the way I feel is a fierce and foreign thing.


Peanut. I stood up as Dr. Addison got closer, totally unaware that I was rocking the opposite of his GQ cover shoot vibe: I was still in the cotton calico baby-doll pajamas I’d slept in. And I should’ve popped on my sneakers as I headed out the door, but I somehow traveled two blocks to the vet clinic in my fuzzy slippers shaped like bunny rabbits, instead. But the mortification of that would hit me later. Right now, there were only two things in the world: the little fuzzball dog burrito in my arms and the man who needed to save him. Dr. Addison slowed as he got close, taking in the sight of us. “There’s something wrong,” I said, my voice trembly from crying. “He won’t eat. He won’t move.” And now, we both noticed, he was panting. Dr. Addison nodded like an unflappable hero and said, “Let’s get him inside.” He led us straight past all the exam rooms, back to the back, where the real veterinary medicine took place. All the boarded dogs in their kennels woke up as we came in and started barking and whining and rattling around. Dr. Addison didn’t even notice. When we got to an exam table, he said, “Remind me of his age?” “Fourteen,” I said—then added, “A very youthful fourteen,” like that might matter. Dr. Addison reached for Peanut, and I handed him over like a swaddled babe. Then he unwrapped him, saying, “Hey, buddy. Let’s get a look at you.” Peanut must have really been feeling bad, because even though he didn’t like men in general, he tolerated Dr. Addison—holding still and crouching on the stainless-steel exam table. Dr. Addison ran his hands all around, feeling for lumps and bumps. Palpating things. Checking his gums, which were, apparently, too white. “That’s bad?” I asked. “They should be pinker,” Dr. Addison answered, but he was already on to checking other things. When the rest of the staff arrived, they gently led me back out to the waiting area, saying they could work faster that way. The faceless tech I’d met the first day said they’d be running blood work and chemistries, checking red and white cells and platelets and kidney and liver function. “We’ll know a lot more in a few hours,” she said. “You can go home. We’ll call you when we get the results.” “I’ll stay here, if that’s all right.” The faceless tech nodded. “Sure.” Then she held out a folded lab coat to me. “Dr. Addison said you might say that. And he thought you might be … cold.” And so I put it on and stayed. I think I was hungry, but I didn’t notice. I hadn’t had any coffee that morning, and I did notice the caffeine headache creeping up the back of my neck. I didn’t have anything to do—hadn’t even brought my phone—so I just squeezed over and over on that little spot between your thumb and forefinger that’s supposed to be a pressure point for relieving tension. Pressing on one hand, then the


"They found a miserable asylum in the cottage in Germany, where I discovered them. Felix soon learned that the treacherous Turk, for whom he and his family endured such unheard-of oppression, on discovering that his deliverer was thus reduced to poverty and ruin, became a traitor to good feeling and honour and had quitted Italy with his daughter, insultingly sending Felix a pittance of money to aid him, as he said, in some plan of future maintenance. "Such were the events that preyed on the heart of Felix and rendered him, when I first saw him, the most miserable of his family. He could have endured poverty, and while this distress had been the meed of his virtue, he gloried in it; but the ingratitude of the Turk and the loss of his beloved Safie were misfortunes more bitter and irreparable. The arrival of the Arabian now infused new life into his soul. "When the news reached Leghorn that Felix was deprived of his wealth and rank, the merchant commanded his daughter to think no more of her lover, but to prepare to return to her native country. The generous nature of Safie was outraged by this command; she attempted to expostulate with her father, but he left her angrily, reiterating his tyrannical mandate. "A few days after, the Turk entered his daughter's apartment and told her hastily that he had reason to believe that his residence at Leghorn had been divulged and that he should speedily be delivered up to the French government; he had consequently hired a vessel to convey him to Constantinople, for which city he should sail in a few hours. He intended to leave his daughter under the care of a confidential servant, to follow at her leisure with the greater part of his property, which had not yet arrived at Leghorn. "When alone, Safie resolved in her own mind the plan of conduct that it would become her to pursue in this emergency. A residence in Turkey was abhorrent to her; her religion and her feelings were alike averse to it. By some papers of her father which fell into her hands she heard of the exile of her lover and learnt the name of the spot where he then resided. She hesitated some time, but at length she formed her determination. Taking with her some jewels that belonged to her and a sum of money, she quitted Italy with an attendant, a native of Leghorn, but who understood the common language of Turkey, and departed for Germany. "She arrived in safety at a town about twenty leagues from the cottage of De Lacey, when her attendant fell dangerously ill. Safie nursed her with the most devoted affection, but the poor girl died, and the Arabian was left alone, unacquainted with the language of the country and utterly ignorant of the customs of the world. She fell, however, into good hands. The Italian had mentioned the name of the spot for which they were bound, and after her death the woman of the house in which


the hard, aching knot in my chest, I assumed it was because I was angry and heartbroken over what was happening to her. But the chest tightness was a symptom of anxiety—like the tension headaches that came and went, the perpetual stiffness in my neck and shoulders, the faint twitch under my left eye, the unsettled stomach that sometimes made it hard to eat. I wasn’t having the sort of breakdown I’d once imagined, one announced in more obvious signs of distress: trembling, shortness of breath, a sudden elevated heart rate, dizziness or weakness or chills. Not until the pandemic hit and I suddenly felt like a rat trapped in a maze, frantically circling and unable to escape, did it occur to me that I might be experiencing a constant, low-level panic attack, a slow but inexorable spiral from which there would be no escape so long as my mother suffered and I could not get to her. And even then, I kept working, taking care of my children, doing what needed to be done. I cannot recall every symptom I’ve ever experienced, every moment when I have felt the heave and pull of anxiety in my head or my chest or my stomach, but I suspect that I have probably always lived with it, this inheritance from both my families. I don’t feel it in my body so often now; the physical symptoms crested while my mom was dying, and began to recede after. Sometimes I think that my anxiety is more easily triggered in the wake of my parents’ deaths. Or maybe it is only that I can now recognize it for what it is, no longer overlooking or dismissing it when it returns. It is like a dog attempting to warn me, barking at something I cannot quite see in the dark—I might be tempted to ignore it in the hope that it stops, but have learned that if I acknowledge it instead, give it some of my attention, it may quiet, its warning delivered. It has taken time to understand the ways in which grief can interact with and feed my anxiety; sometimes, I think, I lean too far into it, let my mind run away with worrying and planning, so that grief is not all that I feel. When my thoughts are churning, trying to find some way to avert catastrophe and wish us into a different, better world, I don’t have to focus on the fact that I live in this one, where my heart is still broken. * * * I wasn’t thinking about my anxiety when we decided to get a dog; I was thinking about my family and the fact that we had never been more in need of comfort and a limitless source of uncomplicated love. More than once, I thought of what my mother said when she got Buster: He’s good for me. He gets me out of the house. No matter how I feel or what I want, I have to take him for his walk. I’m never alone anymore.


a few years have laid up a new and stainless store of recollections, to which you might revert with pleasure."     "Justly thought; rightly said, Miss Eyre; and, at this moment, I am paving hell with energy."     "Sir?"     "I am laying down good intentions, which I believe durable as flint. Certainly, my associates and pursuits shall be other than they have been."     "And better?"     "And better so much better as pure ore is than foul dross. You seem to doubt me; I don't doubt myself; I know what my aim is, what my motives are; and at this moment I pass a law, unalterable as that of the Medes and Persians, that both are right."     "They cannot be, sir, if they require a new statute to legalize them."     "They are, Miss Eyre, though they absolutely require a new statute. Unheard-of combinations of circumstances demand unheard-of rules."     "That sounds a dangerous maxim, sir, because one can see at once that it is liable to abuse."     "Sententious age! so it is; but I swear by my household gods not to abuse it."     "You are human and fallible."     "I am; so are you. What then?"     "The human and fallible should not arrogate a power with which the divine and perfect alone can be safely entrusted."     "What power?"     "That of saying of any strange, unsanctioned line of action, 'Let it be right.'"     "'Let it be right' the very words; you have pronounced them."     "Mayit be right, then," I said, as I rose, deeming it useless to continue a discourse which was all darkness to me; and, besides, sensible that the character of my interlocutor was beyond my penetration at least, beyond its present reach; and feeling the uncertainty, the vague sense of insecurity, which accompanies a conviction of ignorance."     "Where are you going?"     "To put Adle to bed; it is past her bed-time."     "You are afraid of me, because I talk like a sphinx."     "Your language is enigmatical, sir; but though I am bewildered, I am certainly not afraid."     "Youare afraid; your self-love dreads a blunder."     "In that sense I do feel apprehensive; I have no wish to talk nonsense."     "If you did, it would be in such a grave, quiet manner, I should mistake it for sense. Do you never laugh, Miss Eyre? Don't trouble yourself to answer; I see you laugh rarely, but you can laugh very merrily. Believe me, you are not naturally austere, any more than I am naturally vicious. The Lowood constraint still clings to you somewhat, controlling your features,


Didn't I give him that name? --You did. We're not deaf, said the tall consumptive. Cranly still frowned at the stout student below him. Then, with a snort of disgust, he shoved him violently down the steps. --Go away from here, he said rudely. Go away, you stinkpot. And you are a stinkpot. Goggins skipped down on to the gravel and at once returned to his place with good humour. Temple turned back to Stephen and asked: --Do you believe in the law of heredity? --Are you drunk or what are you or what are you trying to say? asked Cranly, facing round on him with an expression of wonder. --The most profound sentence ever written, Temple said with enthusiasm, is the sentence at the end of the zoology. Reproduction is the beginning of death. He touched Stephen timidly at the elbow and said eagerly: --Do you feel how profound that is because you are a poet? Cranly pointed his long forefinger. --Look at him! he said with scorn to the others. Look at Ireland's hope! They laughed at his words and gesture. Temple turned on him bravely, saying: --Cranly, you're always sneering at me. I can see that. But I am as good as you any day. Do you know what I think about you now as compared with myself? --My dear man, said Cranly urbanely, you are incapable, do you know, absolutely incapable of thinking. --But do you know, Temple went on, what I think of you and of myself compared together? --Out with it, Temple! the stout student cried from the steps. Get it out in bits! Temple turned right and left, making sudden feeble gestures as he spoke. --I'm a ballocks, he said, shaking his head in despair. I am and I know I am. And I admit it that I am. Dixon patted him lightly on the shoulder and said mildly: --And it does you every credit, Temple. --But he, Temple said, pointing to Cranly, he is a ballocks, too, like me. Only he doesn't know it. And that's the only difference I see. A burst of laughter covered his words. But he turned again to Stephen and said with a sudden eagerness: --That word is a most interesting word. That's the only English dual number. Did you know? --Is it? Stephen said vaguely. He was watching Cranly's firm-featured suffering face, lit up now by a smile of false patience. The gross name had passed over it like foul water poured over an old stone image, patient of injuries; and, as he watched him, he saw him raise his hat in salute and uncover the black hair that stood stiffly from his forehead like an iron crown. She passed out from the porch of the library and bowed across Stephen in reply to Cranly's greeting. He also? Was there not a slight flush on Cranly's cheek? Or had it come forth at Temple's words? The light had waned. He could not see. Did that explain his friend's listless silence, his harsh comments, the sudden intrusions of rude


on. Tunuva offered the purse to Canthe, who tucked it away. The guards parted to let them through. Tunuva washed her hands in a barrel of red wine and stood to have her clothes smoked before she was permitted to set foot on the ship. Canthe found them a place below deck, where they lay on their cloaks and tried to cool down. ‘What I would not give for a cold bath,’ Canthe sighed. ‘I already miss the Minara.’ Tunuva rested her head on her arm. ‘How long will this voyage take?’ ‘As long as it takes.’ Canthe looked at her. ‘Tuva, we can still turn back.’ Tunuva gazed at the ceiling. ‘No,’ she said softly. ‘I have carried this weight in my heart for too long. In the Priory, we learn to bear pain, as the Mother did . . . but mine is like a wound that never healed, never became a scar. I will exalt her by seeking the truth. Truth is what sustains the Priory.’ ‘She would be proud.’ With a nod, Tunuva closed her eyes. As the ship forged into the Halassa Sea, she tried to still the restlessness inside and sleep. **** Summer had always had a smell: corn ripening in the fields, wildflowers courting honeybees. This summer stank of wool sticking to sweat, and turning earth, and fear. Where the farmworkers of Arondine might once have been out shearing and reaping, they dug trenches. Where blacksmiths had made nails and horseshoes, they forged swords. At the coming of wyrms, bells would ring across the city, warning people to make for the old tunnel and flee with all haste to the caves. To avoid confusion, there would be no bells for the Feast of Early Summer. So far, there had been no sound from the wyrms, either. Wulf visited as often as he could, and yet her blood kept coming. As Glorian watched him train with Thrit, her thoughts drifted elsewhere. It had been weeks, but she still thought of the light she had found in her dream, and the voice that had called for it. ‘Glorian,’ Florell said, interrupting her thoughts. ‘Lady Marian is finally here.’ At once, Glorian looked to the east, where riders flew the banners of the House of Berethnet. ‘I will meet her in the throne room,’ she said, walking after Florell. ‘See her in.’ The Regency Council had voted, by a narrow majority, to make her grandmother Lady Protector of Inys. Though she held the position in law, it had taken a season for Marian to even set out – first because of the heavy spring rains, which had burst the rivers of the Fens, then no sooner had the waters receded than Marian had been stricken with marsh fever. Bourn arrived before anyone else, looking exhausted. ‘Mastress,’ Glorian said, ‘thank you. Thank you for saving her.’ ‘Lady Marian fought hard, Your Grace. I only had a modest supply of a bark that eases fever.’ At last, Marian Berethnet, third of that name, appeared with her small and wayworn household,


had been written a day later than the conclusion of the first: ``By this time, my dearest sister, you have received my hurried letter; I wish this may be more intelligible, but though not confined for time, my head is so bewildered that I cannot answer for being coherent. Dearest Lizzy, I hardly know what I would write, but I have bad news for you, and it cannot be delayed. Imprudent as a marriage between Mr. Wickham and our poor Lydia would be, we are now anxious to be assured it has taken place, for there is but too much reason to fear they are not gone to Scotland. Colonel Forster came yesterday, having left Brighton the day before, not many hours after the express. Though Lydia's short letter to Mrs. F. gave them to understand that they were going to Gretna Green, something was dropped by Denny expressing his belief that W. never intended to go there, or to marry Lydia at all, which was repeated to Colonel F., who, instantly taking the alarm, set off from B. intending to trace their route. He did trace them easily to Clapham, but no farther; for on entering that place they removed into a hackney-coach and dismissed the chaise that brought them from Epsom. All that is known after this is that they were seen to continue the London road. I know not what to think. After making every possible enquiry on that side London, Colonel F. came on into Hertfordshire, anxiously renewing them at all the turnpikes, and at the inns in Barnet and Hatfield, but without any success; no such people had been seen to pass through. With the kindest concern he came on to Longbourn, and broke his apprehensions to us in a manner most creditable to his heart. I am sincerely grieved for him and Mrs. F., but no one can throw any blame on them. Our distress, my dear Lizzy, is very great. My father and mother believe the worst, but I cannot think so ill of him. Many circumstances might make it more eligible for them to be married privately in town than to pursue their first plan; and even if _he_ could form such a design against a young woman of Lydia's connections, which is not likely, can I suppose her so lost to every thing? -- Impossible. I grieve to find, however, that Colonel F. is not disposed to depend upon their marriage; he shook his head when I expressed my hopes, and said he feared W. was not a man to be trusted. My poor mother is really ill and keeps her room. Could she exert herself it would be better, but this is not to be expected; and as to my father, I never in my life saw him so affected. Poor Kitty has anger for having concealed their attachment; but as it was a matter of confidence, one cannot wonder. I am truly glad, dearest Lizzy, that you have been spared something of these distressing scenes; but now, as the first shock


ritual, or kept in a gilded cage, a tool to aid in controlling a mad and dying King. Lore knew it. Gabe knew it. Bastian did, too. Of the three of them, he was the most likely to try to change the unchangeable, the one most predisposed to thinking he could shift the world to suit him. But even Bastian had to realize it was pointless this time. Lore was caught. But just because she was caught didn’t have to mean all of them were. “I can’t leave,” Lore repeated, a murmur against his ear. “But you can.” For the first time, Bastian stuttered in their dance; other courtiers swirled around them as if she and the Sun Prince were rocks in a stream, but he and Lore just stood still, her hands on his shoulders, his on her waist, his eyes boring down into hers. “And leave you.” Gruff, not quite angry, but more than halfway there. “Leave you here.” “Anton said he’d stop the ritual.” A thin defense, but it was all she had. “Say he does. Then what?” People were starting to stare; Bastian swept her up into the dance again, the tight line of his jaw a stark contrast to fluid movement. “I leave, and you just stay a prisoner in the Citadel? You hope August doesn’t try to kill you again, that Anton doesn’t find a way to use you like a weapon? Those two will never come to any kind of peace, and you will always be in the middle of it.” “Notice all of that has to do with me, not you.” “Dammit, Lore, do you not get it?” He spun her with greater force than necessary, cinched his arm around her waist and jerked her close. “I told you in the catacombs. We’re in this together, somehow, you and me and Remaut, too, even though I fucking hate that. I can’t just abandon you here, even if I wanted to. Even if it’d save my hide.” “If?” Half a laugh bubbled in her throat, but when it came out, it was indistinguishable from the beginning of a sob. “Abandoning me would absolutely save your hide.” “And yet.” The dance ended; they stood motionless, still locked together. “You’re stuck with me. Whatever comes next.” Whatever comes next. She looked up. The sun was low in the sky. Movement at the front of the atrium, behind August’s throne. Severin Bellegarde slipped through a small door, dressed just as dourly as usual. He stepped to the side, not attracting attention, and waited next to the potted poison flowers with his hands clasped behind his back. August stood from his throne, as if Bellegarde’s entrance had been a sign. He raised his hands, the picture of a benevolent ruler. “Thank you for joining us,” he said, in tones clearly meant as a dismissal. “Tomorrow will mark the beginning of a triumphant new era for Auverraine. I can feel it.” He smiled. “Even the darkness can be wielded to strengthen the light.” Polite applause from the gathered crowd. Then


or three days dragged by heavily. The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future. He heard nothing of the Countess Olenska, or of the perfect little house, and though he met Beaufort at the club they merely nodded at each other across the whist-tables. It was not till the fourth evening that he found a note awaiting him on his return home. "Come late tomorrow: I must explain to you. Ellen." These were the only words it contained. The young man, who was dining out, thrust the note into his pocket, smiling a little at the Frenchness of the "to you." After dinner he went to a play; and it was not until his return home, after midnight, that he drew Madame Olenska's missive out again and re-read it slowly a number of times. There were several ways of answering it, and he gave considerable thought to each one during the watches of an agitated night. That on which, when morning came, he finally decided was to pitch some clothes into a portmanteau and jump on board a boat that was leaving that very afternoon for St. Augustine. XVI. When Archer walked down the sandy main street of St. Augustine to the house which had been pointed out to him as Mr. Welland's, and saw May Welland standing under a magnolia with the sun in her hair, he wondered why he had waited so long to come. Here was the truth, here was reality, here was the life that belonged to him; and he, who fancied himself so scornful of arbitrary restraints, had been afraid to break away from his desk because of what people might think of his stealing a holiday! Her first exclamation was: "Newland--has anything happened?" and it occurred to him that it would have been more "feminine" if she had instantly read in his eyes why he had come. But when he answered: "Yes--I found I had to see you," her happy blushes took the chill from her surprise, and he saw how easily he would be forgiven, and how soon even Mr. Letterblair's mild disapproval would be smiled away by a tolerant family. Early as it was, the main street was no place for any but formal greetings, and Archer longed to be alone with May, and to pour out all his tenderness and his impatience. It still lacked an hour to the late Welland breakfast-time, and instead of asking him to come in she proposed that they should walk out to an old orange-garden beyond the town. She had just been for a row on the river, and the sun that netted the little waves with gold seemed to have caught her in its meshes. Across the warm brown of her cheek her blown hair glittered like silver wire; and her eyes too looked lighter, almost pale in their youthful limpidity. As she walked beside Archer with her long swinging gait her face wore the vacant


the town. I knowed I was all right now. Nobody else would come a-hunting after me. I got my traps out of the canoe and made me a nice camp in the thick woods. I made a kind of a tent out of my blankets to put my things under so the rain couldn't get at them. I catched a catfish and haggled him open with my saw, and towards sundown I started my camp fire and had supper. Then I set out a line to catch some fish for breakfast. When it was dark I set by my camp fire smoking, and feeling pretty well satisfied; but by and by it got sort of lonesome, and so I went and set on the bank and listened to the current swashing along, and counted the stars and drift logs and rafts that come down, and then went to bed; there ain't no better way to put in time when you are lonesome; you can't stay so, you soon get over it. And so for three days and nights. No difference -- just the same thing. But the next day I went explor- ing around down through the island. I was boss of it; it all belonged to me, so to say, and I wanted to know all about it; but mainly I wanted to put in the time. I found plenty strawberries, ripe and prime; and green summer grapes, and green razberries; and the green blackberries was just beginning to show. They would all come handy by and by, I judged. Well, I went fooling along in the deep woods till I judged I warn't far from the foot of the island. I had my gun along, but I hadn't shot nothing; it was for protection; thought I would kill some game nigh home. About this time I mighty near stepped on a good-sized snake, and it went sliding off through the grass and flowers, and I after it, trying to get a shot at it. I clipped along, and all of a sudden I bounded right on to the ashes of a camp fire that was still smoking. My heart jumped up amongst my lungs. I never waited for to look further, but uncocked my gun and went sneaking back on my tiptoes as fast as ever I could. Every now and then I stopped a second amongst the thick leaves and listened, but my breath come so hard I couldn't hear nothing else. I slunk along an- other piece further, then listened again; and so on, and so on. If I see a stump, I took it for a man; if I trod on a stick and broke it, it made me feel like a person had cut one of my breaths in two and I only got half, and the short half, too. When I got to camp I warn't feeling very brash, there warn't much sand in my craw; but I says, this ain't no time to be fooling around. So I got all my traps into my


to everyone he knew in Abuja to make sure the Honourable would pay for what had happened. “In the meantime, you should all come stay with us. We have enough room in the house for everyone.” Yèyé shook her head. “That won’t be necessary ma, I’ve already paid for a hotel.” “But—” “My in-law, my wonderful in-law.” Yèyé smiled. “Don’t worry. It’s so thoughtful of you, but it’s not necessary.” “I’ve booked the hotel for a week,” Láyí said. “Such good people,” Yèyé said to her children after Kúnlé’s mother left. She did not seem to notice that only Láyí nodded in agreement. “We need to start packing for the hotel.” Láyí glanced at his wristwatch. “Can we try to leave within the hour?” “Which hotel?” Yèyé asked. “Were you serious just now?” “We can’t sleep here,” Láyí said. “Kílódé? Nobody can chase me from my home.” Yèyé frowned at Láyí. “The person who will chase me from this place has not been born. Even his mother has not been born yet. My husband is going to come here, and when he returns, you want him to meet an empty house?” “But everything smells like smoke,” Wúràọlá said, realizing that a brittle layer was hidden beneath all her mother’s optimism about the kidnapping. “As long as there is a roof over this house, this is where we stay. I don’t want to hear another word about sleeping elsewhere. What nonsense.” No one suggested hotels again. By Wednesday morning, Kúnlé was texting apologies to Wúràọlá from another number. She was too distracted to block him or to respond. Policemen had come to question Yèyé, Mọ́tárá and everyone in the boys’ quarters. Láyí was sitting in on the interrogation, so Wúràọlá was alone in her room when the texts began coming in, one every fifteen minutes. She did not care if he wasn’t able to eat or focus because of how sorry he was; her mind was preoccupied with her father. Were his abductors making sure he took his medication? Was he afraid? Was he getting enough sleep? When would she see him again? Kúnlé’s apologies turned to insults by noon. She was a coward, an idiot, a fucking whore. She had to face him and say they were over. It did not count if she wouldn’t face him. She responded with one sentence—you know my dad is missing right—before blocking that number. When he began texting curses from another number within an hour, Wúràọlá left her phone on her bed and went into the family room. The policemen were gone. Yèyé was alone in the room. Mọ́tárá and Láyí were chatting on the balcony. Láyí beckoned her to them. “We need to talk about Daddy,” Láyí said, glancing back at the living room where Yèyé was moving throw pillows around as though life on earth depended on the right arrangement. Teenaged Wúràọlá and Láyí had switched to calling their parents Ọ̀túnba and Yèyé. But since Monday, their missing father had become Daddy again. “I think we need to start looking at the morgues,”


drove him farther away. As Silas' coins begin to pile up, he becomes obsessed with accumulating more. He hides them in a hole in the floor, which Eliot shows you precisely. She explains that there's little robbery in Raveloe, however--everyone would recognize the stolen objects if the thief used them. Some readers believe here that Silas feels his loom and his coins are alive. But others are quick to point out that in the next paragraph, Eliot says he becomes harder, narrower, and bent, until he has a "mechanical relation to the objects of his life." Do you think Silas is a machine? Consider this as you read on. One day, however, Silas drops an old brown pot that he's used for years. The familiar object felt like a real living thing to him. He grieves when it breaks, and he carries the pieces home to keep on a shelf. Notice Eliot's simple language here--what kind of an effect does it create? Before the chapter ends, Eliot gives you another detailed picture of Silas, weaving all day, caressing his coins at night. Once again, he ignores the herbs in the fields for his new "religion" of gold. Notice repeated imagery--the coins are like "unborn children" (another foreshadowing of Eppie) and his life has dwindled to one narrow channel of thought. (Literally, he never walks off the path on his daily journeys. Metaphorically, his life has become like a dried-up rivulet, trickling through the sand.) But now that Silas' metamorphosis is complete, Eliot tells you, an event is coming to change his life. ^^^^^^^^^^ SILAS MARNER: CHAPTER 3 Eliot leaves you in suspense about Silas' great change while she shifts to the other end of the social spectrum. Squire Cass is the greatest man in Raveloe, she tells you, although her tone is ironic. She first discusses the local gentry as villagers might--pointing out Cass' big brick house, casually mentioning the Osgoods. But then she discusses these landowners with an outsider's perspective. She makes you aware that political conditions later brought this class to ruin, through their wasteful living habits and poor farming. Yet when she describes the generous feasts that people like Cass and Osgood hold, she paints a glowing picture of old-fashioned plenty. (You'll see one of these feasts later, in Chapter 11.) The poor enjoy this bounty, too. Do you think Eliot approves or disapproves of this social system? What evidence supports your opinion? There's a reason why Squire Cass throws big raucous parties and spends his time at the local pub--his wife died long ago. Eliot expresses here her ideal of woman's role--as a source of order, refinement, and loving feelings. Lacking a mother, the Cass sons have turned out badly. Compare this all-male family to Silas Marner's, which seems to consist only of himself, a mother, and a sister. Eliot lets you hear the village gossip about Dunstan and Godfrey. While Dunstan sounds thoroughly bad, Godfrey seems good-hearted. But people have been worried about Godfrey's behavior lately. Everyone's hoping he'll straighten himself out by marrying Nancy Lammeter, obviously


in Loverville! “We were at Mike Stiles’s ski place in Vermont, and there was a security camera set up on their front porch. So Dorian somehow moved it into the bedroom, and then he brought me in there. He’d told everyone else to watch on the monitor, and I had no idea.” In the mirror, my eyes widened, my mouth searched dumbly for words. “That’s horrible.” “They all sat there and watched what we were doing. Which wasn’t even anything I wanted to do. Dorian thought it was hilarious.” “That’s horrible.” I was doing a mental inventory of who’d likely been there, who might have sat watching, laughing. Mike Stiles, for one. Robbie. I couldn’t imagine Thalia sitting through it. She’d have told them they were being disgusting, left the room. “It’s so hot,” I remembered Donna Goldbeck saying to me, about Beth and Dorian. “The way they fight. It’s, like, steamy. They were screaming at each other at Stiles’s house and then, like, five minutes later they’re upstairs fucking.” And I took her word for it: that it was hot, that it was enviable, that it was some level of relationship I could only aspire to. “You don’t understand, though,” Beth said. “You say it’s horrible, and you have no idea. You were safe. You were never in that position.” “I was safe?” I tried to comprehend this. “Jesus, Bodie. You were weird. You were intimidating. You were always rolling your eyes at everything we said, like you thought we were the cheesiest people in the world.” I couldn’t disagree. I could have told her things about my own life, my childhood, could have reminded her that she named me the Masturbator. But I’d learned long ago not to counter people’s trauma with my own. I said, “I am so sorry you went through that. I had no idea, and I’m really fucking sorry.” “And I’m sorry to hate you this much. But, Bodie, I hate you so much. You set this all in motion, and now I have to face these people. My husband is having surgery this week, and I should be focusing on that, and instead I’m here. I’d like to just keep living my life. I hate you for bringing me back here.” We were still looking only into the mirror, two women of the same age sitting in the same position. Her smallness had seemed such currency to me at Granby, when I believed the smaller you could be, as a girl, the more the world revolved around you. Next to me now, two-thirds my size, she looked like someone overwhelmed by a too-large world, someone never allowed more power than a little girl. I said, again, “I had no idea.” She stood without using her hands, just lifted weightlessly up. She said, “I am so fucking happy to leave this place.” 20 Dane Rubra was breathless. He’d found you. Or someone from his “community” had. There was a D. Stanley Bloch in Silver Spring, Maryland, aged fifty-nine, working with a community youth orchestra. I was


somebody calls you,” Mr. Prescott told him coldly. “Yassuh, Mr. Prescott.” “We are handling this case. Another word out of you, out of any of you niggers back there, and I’ll bind you over to the big court.” “Yassuh.” The white women made a little applause and Mr. Prescott 220 Zora Neale Hurston glared at the back of the house and stepped down. Then the strange white man that was going to talk for her got up there. He whispered a little with the clerk and then called on Janie to take the stand and talk. After a few little questions he told her to tell just how it happened and to speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. So help her God. They all leaned over to listen while she talked. First thing she had to remember was she was not at home. She was in the court-house fighting something and it wasn’t death. It was worse than that. It was lying thoughts. She had to go way back to let them know how she and Tea Cake had been with one another so they could see she could never shoot Tea Cake out of malice. She tried to make them see how terrible it was that things were fixed so that Tea Cake couldn’t come back to himself until he had got rid of that mad dog that was in him and he couldn’t get rid of the dog and live. He had to die to get rid of the dog. But she hadn’t wanted to kill him. A man is up against a hard game when he must die to beat it. She made them see how she couldn’t ever want to be rid of him. She didn’t plead to anybody. She just sat there and told and when she was through she hushed. She had been through for some time before the judge and the lawyer and the rest seemed to know it. But she sat on in that trial chair until the lawyer told her she could come down. “The defense rests,” her lawyer said. Then he and Prescott whispered together and both of them talked to the judge in secret up high there where he sat. Then they both sat down. Their Eyes Were Watching God 221 “Gentlemen of the jury, it is for you to decide whether the defendant has committed a cold blooded murder or whether she is a poor broken creature, a devoted wife trapped by unfortunate circumstances who really in firing a rifle bullet into the heart of her late husband did a great act of mercy. If you find her a wanton killer you must bring in a verdict of first degree murder. If the evidence does not jus- tify that then you must set her free. There is no middle course.” The jury filed out and the courtroom began to drone with talk, a few people got up and moved about. And Janie sat like a lump and waited. It was not death she feared. It


cryptic poem and your face on a painting, and you’re willing to give up everything else to run back to them?” he asked, a trace of irritation in his voice. “It’s my face, Edei. My hand that will end the world.” “It’s a story. A story they told you. It’s not real.” “How can you be certain? They’re the Nine.” “They’re manipulative bullies.” The dome above their heads began to vibrate with the coming of another trolley. The Modiano station was located at the very peak of the domed market. The world filled with the trembling of metal and glass, the sounds proof of this city’s delicate disposition: one wrong move, one earthquake or building collapse, and Alante would crash into a million pieces. Right now, Io was feeling just as delicate. “Do you realize what they just told us? They confessed to putting a hit out on those women as if it was nothing more than tax fraud. They admitted it freely because they know we can’t do anything about it. If we go to the leeches with this, or the newspapers, you know what the Nine will say? We did it because of destiny. Because our artists foresaw that these women were dangerous, because it’s our duty to protect this city.” His voice rose to a sharp howl. “And no one will bat an eye. No human judge would ever dare indict them. The only ones that could—the Order of the Furies—are long dead. They will go unpunished even as they gloat that they ordered the death of innocent women!” Edei’s face was all eyebrows, two thick straight lines of fury over guarded eyes. His gaze darted from face to face as they shouldered through the crowd. “They have a hundred portraits of you burning the world down—the whole world, Io, not just the Silts. If they ordered the death of those girls because they believed them dangerous, what do you think they’d do with you? No matter what the answer to their precious question was, what they foresaw in your destiny, you think they’d let you leave that House alive? And you want to go back!” Io dropped her eyes to her boots, the paved street beneath them, the seawater gathered in the crevices of the stones. The carcass of a squid-moth chimerini, squashed out of shape. She wasn’t the target of his anger, and yet it pierced her skin, a bull’s-eye hit. He said, “The Nine have amassed all this knowledge, all this power. Three women were changed by gods know what, turned into murderous wraiths—and instead of telling you how to save them, these assholes harass you about some mystical prophecy. Bianca is right: the only way to deal with people like the Nine is a knife to the throat.” She startled. When had the conversation taken a turn to a knife to the throat? Her fury rose to meet his, and she snapped, “You know I’m people like the Nine, right?” “That’s not—” His scowl instantly mellowed. “You don’t abuse your powers like they do.” “But


XIX. ALICE'S POSIES XX. THE FLOWER OF EDEN XXI. THE DEPARTURE INTRODUCTORY NOTE. THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. IN September of the year during the February of which Hawthorne had completed "The Scarlet Letter," he began "The House of the Seven Gables." Meanwhile, he had removed from Salem to Lenox, in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, where he occupied with his family a small red wooden house, still standing at the date of this edition, near the Stockbridge Bowl. "I sha'n't have the new story ready by November," he explained to his publisher, on the 1st of October, "for I am never good for anything in the literary way till after the first autumnal frost, which has somewhat such an effect on my imagination that it does on the foliage here about me-multiplying and brightening its hues." But by vigorous application he was able to complete the new work about the middle of the January following. Since research has disclosed the manner in which the romance is interwoven with incidents from the history of the Hawthorne family, "The House of the Seven Gables" has acquired an interest apart from that by which it first appealed to the public. John Hathorne (as the name was then spelled), the great-grandfather of Nathaniel Hawthorne, was a magistrate at Salem in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and officiated at the famous trials for witchcraft held there. It is of record that he used peculiar severity towards a certain woman who was among the accused; and the husband of this woman prophesied that God would take revenge upon his wife's persecutors. This circumstance doubtless furnished a hint for that piece of tradition in the book which represents a Pyncheon of a former generation as having persecuted one Maule, who declared that God would give his enemy "blood to drink." It became a conviction with The Hawthorne family that a curse had been pronounced upon its members, which continued in force in the time of The romancer; a conviction perhaps derived from the recorded prophecy of The injured woman's husband, just mentioned; and, here again, we have a correspondence with Maule's malediction in The story. Furthermore, there occurs in The "American Note-Books" (August 27, 1837), a reminiscence of The author's family, to the following effect. Philip English, a character well-known in early Salem annals, was among those who suffered from John Hathorne's magisterial harshness, and he maintained in consequence a lasting feud with the old Puritan official. But at his death English left daughters, one of whom is said to have married the son of Justice John Hathorne, whom English had declared he would never forgive. It is scarcely necessary to point out how clearly this foreshadows the final union of those hereditary foes, the Pyncheons and Maules, through the marriage of Phoebe and Holgrave. The romance, however, describes the Maules as possessing some of the traits known to have been characteristic of the Hawthornes: for example, "so long as any of the race were to be found, they had been marked out from other men--not strikingly,