creates a sense of imminent danger. The mist in this chapter, however, also symbolizes Dunstan's confused sense of right and wrong. Eliot often uses weather to express a moral environment. This chapter, for example, started on a cold, wet morning, attuned to Dunstan's malicious mind. Watch the role that weather plays as the story moves on. Typically, Dunstan still thinks he's a lucky fellow, just because he's getting home without being seen. Yet he's surrounded by mist, rain, and darkness, and he stumbles along the road until a light shines out. (Note the darkness and light imagery again.) He realizes that it's Silas' cottage. Dunsey's half-baked plan for borrowing money from Silas has been growing in his dim mind as he walked. He decides to get started on it right now. Dunstan is surprised that the old weaver isn't home and that his door's unlocked. The brightness and warmth inside are inviting, though, so Dunstan walks in and makes himself at home. Dunstan, with upperclass prejudice, is surprised that Silas has pork roasting for dinner. Of course, this is out of character for Silas' reputation as a miser, but most poor folks back then couldn't afford meat more than once a week. Remember this when you see how the gentry eat. Eliot traces Dunstan's thinking step by step. He notices the pork roasting slowly, hung over the fire from a string attached to a door-key. Silas obviously has stepped out only for a moment. Dunstan thinks of the nearby stone-pit and leaps to the conclusion that Silas has fallen in. That would make it easy for him to steal the old man's money. This is such an attractive idea that he assumes Silas is dead and starts to wonder where the money is. Dunstan can only think of obvious hiding places, but Silas has chosen an obvious one. Dunstan notices a spot in the floor where the sand has been moved around. (People scattered sand over their floors to absorb dirt back then.) He pries up the bricks to find Silas' two bags of gold. Look at how easy, almost accidental, this theft is. The money seems to fall into Dunstan's hands. Some readers see this as a sign of fate--that Dunstan was meant to steal Silas' gold for some divine purpose. Others see it as a sign that life is random, and that Silas is still a victim. Dunstan seems a little confused by this opportunity, but he doesn't stop to think clearly. He scoops up the gold, replaces the bricks, and slips outside. The darkness of night seems to be his element, now--he seeks refuge in it. Is this another case of Dunstan's good luck? Wait and see how things turn out. ^^^^^^^^^^ SILAS MARNER: CHAPTER 5 There's a sharp contrast as Eliot switches to a picture of Silas, trudging along the road. He looks pathetic, huddled under a sack against the rain, but unlike Dunstan his mind is at ease. Eliot finds this ironic--the deed that will devastate him is already done. NOTE: AUTHOR'S COMMENT Eliot digresses to discuss


needed it back. Five minutes in New York equated to five years anywhere else. People forgot. Business moved on. The road paved right over yesterday’s star and called them a speed bump. She belonged on that roof, making the toast. Celebrating a breakneck trade that added value to the fund’s coffers. Zeroes on the screen. When she’d been adding those zeroes, she’d been embraced. She’d been a member of the winning team. Here in St. Helena? She was the bumbling, cartoonish mascot. Although yesterday, for a very brief window, she’d been on a two-person team. With the most unexpected of allies. August. Maybe that’s why she was awake so early—again—trying to sear images from her desired timeline into her brain. Because it had been a little too easy to call a truce with August and let herself just . . . be. Be okay with that big arm slung around her hip and his prickly chin resting on top of her head, nuzzling her hair every so often. Was it a show for the crowd? Natalie sighed and stroked a few keys on her Mac, going to a location on the internet she absolutely should be avoiding like the pork special at an all-night diner. Her ex-fiancé’s Instagram. She hesitated briefly before tapping enter—and then there he was in all his suited, boyish charm. Her stomach turned sour at the memory of him calmly asking for her engagement ring back. He’d been even calmer while explaining that while he might love her, he couldn’t let their relationship cost him a career he’d worked so hard for. Calmer still while he asked her to leave. August wouldn’t break up with her that way—that is, if they were actually together, instead of merely pretending. There would be shouting and door slamming and insults from both of them. They would bring the house down. Why was she even thinking about this? Moreover, why was she suddenly taking note of Morrison’s shoulders and musing that they could fit into her fake fiancé’s shoulders three times? It wasn’t a competition— Natalie drew in a breath as a new image popped up on the screen. Just posted. A picture of Morrison on the balcony where she used to have her coffee overlooking Central Park South. Beside him was a familiar blonde in a white bathrobe sipping green juice from a glass, rolling her eyes over having the photo taken. That blonde . . . Krista, right? Natalie knew her. One of their board member’s daughters. He’d traded up. Feeling out of breath, Natalie smacked the laptop shut. She stood up and walked a half circle around the bed. Her heart wasn’t breaking. That damage had already been done and, if she was being honest, it had been the easiest part to mend. But her confidence? That was a different story—and it took another pounding now, an invisible mallet flattening her like a chicken cutlet between two sheets of wax paper. “Deep breath,” she murmured to herself, stretching her arms up over her head and letting them float down


this the hard way. She found the chunk of the Berlin Wall her dad had brought back from their trip to Germany and picked it up with both hands, centered its pointiest point in the middle of a pane of glass above the doorknob, and gave it a poke. The pane made a silvery splitting sound and glass tinkled out of the frame. She held still, listening. No lights went on, no neighbors’ dogs barked, no sound came from inside the house. She pulled her shirtsleeve around her hand, reached through the empty pane, unlocked the garage door, and stepped inside. Quietly, she walked up the three steps into the kitchen. A woman’s voice came from the living room. “. . . Doll Pajama Party here on HSN, and this wonderful Prayerful Little Boy Doll by Leigh Hamilton. I’m going to put him on my lap so you can see how big he is . . .” Slowly, Louise reached out and picked up the hammer she’d left on the kitchen counter. She hefted it in one hand as she crept toward the dining room in a half crouch, the muscles in her thighs aching, scanning the flickering blue light in the front hall for a person-shaped shadow. “. . . an invitation into the magical world of Leigh Hamilton, and you can see this little-boy doll is praying, he’s praying to say whatever wrongs he’s done, you’ll please forgive them, everyone . . .” Louise made herself get it over with, walking fast out of the dining room, onto the hall carpet, stepping around the corner into the living room. “Hey!” she said, to startle whoever it was. Pupkin sat in the easy chair watching TV, the remote beside him. A song she hadn’t thought of in years popped into Louise’s head. Pupkin here! Pupkin here! Everybody laugh! Everybody cheer! She interrupted it, forced it to stop. Pupkin sat in her dad’s chair, watching TV. Her mom’s favorite puppet, the one she’d taken everywhere with her, the one she’d used to tell Bible stories to young audiences, the one she’d learned ventriloquism for, the one who had told Mark and Louise bedtime stories, the one who’d been in her life before them, the one she’d had since she was a little girl, the one she’d loved more than she loved them. The one who made Louise’s skin crawl. The one she hated the most. Pupkin was a red-and-yellow glove puppet with two stumpy fabric legs dangling down from his front and two little nubbin arms. His chalk-white plastic face had a big smiling mouth and a little pug nose, and he looked out of the corners of his wide eyes like he was up to some kind of mischief. His mouth and eyes were outlined in thick black lines and he wore a bloodred bodysuit with a pointed hood and a yellow stomach. Sitting here in the dark with the Home Shopping Network flickering across his face, he looked like he’d crawled straight out of a nightmare. Louise hated Pupkin, but


whole family, and my job with my new podcast, and yours, Ty. You were supposed to go to Washington tomorrow—wait, I mean today, it’s after midnight. So you’ve got a plane reservation for this afternoon.” “It’ll keep.” “But the boys have school and sports and what’re we going to do about Rambo? I might not be able to find a kennel for him at the drop of a hat.” “We’ll figure it out,” Ty said. “Plans can be shuffled. Nothing’s set in stone.” “Some things are.” “Nothing that important.” His jaw was rock hard, his lips compressed. He pushed himself out of the banquette and walked up to his wife. “I’m not taking a chance on losing you to that psycho, okay? And I don’t want the boys here, anywhere close to danger.” She nodded, acquiescing slightly at the mention of her sons and their safety. “Nothing is worth that.” “You’re right. Okay . . . okay.” She finished her wine in one long gulp. “We’ll go.” Wheeler gave his wife a squeeze. “Good.” To Bentz he said, “Just keep us informed. About every damned thing.” “I will,” Bentz promised, standing. “And we’ll get him. I promise.” “Don’t just get him,” Wheeler said, his eyes hard. “This time when you find him and take aim and shoot? Don’t miss. I want that prick dead.” * * * God help me. Luna’s silent prayer reverberated through her head. Petrified, she moved, the “priest” prodding her forward, through the thickets and bracken, the tall grass, and marshy ground. Tall cypress rose like pale ghosts and the air was heavy with the scent of earth and rotting vegetation. She shivered. Darkness surrounded them, the only glint of light from the small beam of his flashlight that he swung in front of them where reeds and brambles grew, rough scrub brushing against her bare legs, causing her to shiver. “I want to go back,” she said for what had to have been the fiftieth time. “I didn’t agree to this—” “Shut up!” he snarled, and her skin crawled as if a thousand snakes were sliding over her. “I paid for you and you do what I say.” “No—no—I—” “Don’t argue, Luna!” he warned, reaching forward, grabbing her shoulder, and squeezing so hard she let out a yelp of pain. “Just keep going.” This was wrong. So, so wrong. She bit her lip and told herself to think. She’d been in tight jams before. You didn’t grow up on a working cattle ranch in Wyoming and not get tough. But this—this was different, way different from rounding up strays in the middle of winter, or mending fence, or chopping wood for the fire, or dodging passes from drunken ranch hands. This was pure evil. All dressed up in a priest’s robe. But he wasn’t a man of the cloth, that much was evident, and she should never have gotten in the car with him. Big mistake. She was far from defenseless, but she put on the sniveling, frail act so his defenses might come down, but now


to finish a residency, get a teaching position with a university and become a professor. Unlike Tifẹ́, Wúràọlá could not imagine any paths for herself outside of medicine. “When are you going to get married?” Bíódún, who had been their class representative in medical school, asked when Tifẹ́ was done. “You should be asking me if I plan to get married at all.” There was an uproar. Laughter and a dozen aaahhhs sprinkled through with snickers. Springhill had been filling up with guests since Wúràọlá and Kingsley arrived, and it was now packed. Tifẹ́ raised up her arms as though to stop traffic. “You people need to calm down. I’m just trying to decide if marriage is what I want or what I’m supposed to want. It’s so easy to confuse the two.” “Are we starting this party with prayers or—?” Grace asked. Tifẹ́ shrugged. “Sister Grace, pray for us if you want now. I don’t mind.” Grace pulled out a handkerchief from her handbag and covered her hair with it. “Let’s all bow our heads, please. Bíódún, take off that face cap.” Wúràọlá shut her eyes but did not hear Grace’s words. There was no point discussing her concerns about Kúnlé with Tifẹ́. Not when Tifẹ́ had such clarity about her life, could slice neatly between her desires and what was being imposed on her, and would want Wúràọlá to do the same. She did not have the words to explain how such distinctions had never been a primary consideration for her. She could not explain how much she still wanted Kúnlé. Why, even though she worried that he might never stop slapping her, she could no longer imagine a future without him in it. Maybe it was because she did love him, could not remember being enamoured with anyone the way she was with him. Could no longer imagine the possibility of someone like that in her future. Didn’t options thin out the older one got? Kúnlé loved her, needed her, even. And hearing him reiterate how much he needed her always felt so good. Besides, it would be an utter disgrace to her family to turn back now, her mother would not be able to show her face in the Mothers’ Union for months. But perhaps this was not only about that. Maybe she did want to get married before turning thirty, did not want to be like her cousin who married at thirty-five and had, for the last five years of her spinsterhood, been the subject of extended family gossip, wild speculations and mountain-top prayers. Whichever way her mind swung, Wúràọlá found explanations that Tifẹ́ would surely disdain. No, there was no way to talk about what was going on without Tifẹ́ becoming disappointed in her. * * * Wúràọlá slipped the key into the lock, but her door swung open before she turned the key. Kúnlé was on the other side of the door. “How did you get in?” “With my key.” “What do you mean?” Kúnlé shut the door behind her. There was a key in


ties and fresh affections, think you that any can replace those who are gone? Can any man be to me as Clerval was, or any woman another Elizabeth? Even where the affections are not strongly moved by any superior excellence, the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain. They know our infantine dispositions, which, however they may be afterwards modified, are never eradicated; and they can judge of our actions with more certain conclusions as to the integrity of our motives. A sister or a brother can never, unless indeed such symptoms have been shown early, suspect the other of fraud or false dealing, when another friend, however strongly he may be attached, may, in spite of himself, be contemplated with suspicion. But I enjoyed friends, dear not only through habit and association, but from their own merits; and wherever I am, the soothing voice of my Elizabeth and the conversation of Clerval will be ever whispered in my ear. They are dead, and but one feeling in such a solitude can persuade me to preserve my life. If I were engaged in any high undertaking or design, fraught with extensive utility to my fellow creatures, then could I live to fulfil it. But such is not my destiny; I must pursue and destroy the being to whom I gave existence; then my lot on earth will be fulfilled and I may die." My beloved Sister, September 2nd I write to you, encompassed by peril and ignorant whether I am ever doomed to see again dear England and the dearer friends that inhabit it. I am surrounded by mountains of ice which admit of no escape and threaten every moment to crush my vessel. The brave fellows whom I have persuaded to be my companions look towards me for aid, but I have none to bestow. There is something terribly appalling in our situation, yet my courage and hopes do not desert me. Yet it is terrible to reflect that the lives of all these men are endangered through me. If we are lost, my mad schemes are the cause. And what, Margaret, will be the state of your mind? You will not hear of my destruction, and you will anxiously await my return. Years will pass, and you will have visitings of despair and yet be tortured by hope. Oh! My beloved sister, the sickening failing of your heart-felt expectations is, in prospect, more terrible to me than my own death. But you have a husband and lovely children; you may be happy. Heaven bless you and make you so! My unfortunate guest regards me with the tenderest compassion. He endeavours to fill me with hope and talks as if life were a possession which he valued. He reminds me how often the same accidents have happened to other navigators who have attempted this sea, and in spite of myself, he fills me with cheerful auguries. Even the sailors feel the power of his eloquence; when he speaks, they


tricky comes up, one of the boys’ll know where to find me. I can be back in a jiffy. Believe me.” He scratched his nose. “I was thinking about going on holiday myself.” Mrs. Bone told him his fee. His eyes popped. “Why didn’t you say so? I thought business was slow?” Mrs. Bone leaned in, gripped him by the arm. He smelled of sugar and oil, pomade and cologne. His skin was polished and creamy. He looked like an egg. “Business is never slow,” she said. Great confidence: that’s what she would always project. * * * Arriving at Park Lane was quite something. The house was like a hotel, Mrs. Bone thought, wiping a line of sweat from her brow. Doors opening and closing, parcels and goods coming in and out. A place this big needed feeding, laundering, delivering, restocking. Waste of money. Of course Danny had an army of servants. Typical of his extravagant tastes. Mrs. Bone tugged her ugly hat down over her ears. I’m a poor, humble creature, she told herself sternly. I’m as low as can be. I’m a rat; I’m a worm. She reached out and jabbed the tradesmen’s bell. Heard it ring, shrilly, somewhere in the depths of the house. She looked up. White walls, fancy pillars, windows the size of buses. So big it could squash you. “I’ll tear you limb from limb,” she told the house, under her breath. She corrected herself. She hadn’t made any decisions about investing in this job yet. She was here to check the lay of the land—that was all. It wasn’t the first time she’d visited. Back then the house was only half-built. She’d seen the dust cloud all the way across the park, heard the clang and clatter of construction as she approached through the trees. The scaffolding was immense: a monstrous, sprawling mass of beams and joists and planks and cranes. There must have been fifty men employed on the site. Carts lined up around the street. White tarpaulin flapping in the breeze, a tall ship with a hundred sails. It frightened her, somewhere far, far down in her gut. It made her feel nastily tiny. She’d seen Danny stretched out on a picnic blanket, watching the men at work. Tweed jacket, white boater tied with a yellow ribbon—immaculate silk, that. His butler had crossed the grass with a silver platter, a jug of lemonade, ice bobbing on the surface. She’d balled her fists. “Danny,” she’d called, voice hoarse. He’d aged. Of course he had: it had been a decade since they’d seen each other. But she still recognized that quick, lethal turn of the head. That was an O’Flynn, through and through. If anyone could spot it, she could. Wealth hadn’t made him soft, not at all. She’d wanted to scare him. At first she reckoned she’d managed it. She noted the click in his jaw. But then his mouth revealed a Cheshire Cat grin. She remembered that, too. He loved it: the thrill of winning, of beating her, of having something over


TNO sketch) before I start questioning not just the premise of the screenplay but all the life choices I’ve ever made up to now, abandoning that idea, and starting over. Btw the other secret to becoming a TNO writer, besides getting your own TV in fifth grade, is being obsessed with Mad Libs. Did you like Mad Libs? In fourth grade, my friends and I were doing them on the bus ride back from a field trip to a nature center and, to this day, nothing has ever made me laugh more than the sentence “I was so happy that I couldn’t wipe the smile off my penis.” I’m embarrassed that you remember when I said I’d be leaving TNO sooner rather than later. The truth is that it’s probably time for me to go, but with all the other uncertainty now, I was too chicken. Plus, selling screenplays is a far less reliable paycheck than writing for a weekly show. I’m not that eager to work in a typical writers’ room—the freedom and craziness and instant gratification of TNO may have spoiled me for life—although maybe I should try it before I decide. Now that there are Zoom writers’ rooms, I could theoretically remain in Kansas City while joining one in NY or LA, which sounds like the worst of both worlds? The full story of my departure from the city is that I lasted about two weeks after things shut down. My apartment (on the Upper West Side) is pretty small and dark, and ambulances were racing past at all hours. I wasn’t interacting with anyone and I wasn’t eating that much because I didn’t want to go out and buy food, but I also felt uncomfortable asking some delivery guy to bring it to me. (I wasn’t NOT eating, but I was eating weird shit I found in my cupboard like protein bars two years past their Best By date. And no, I don’t like to cook.) One evening after a day of not leaving the apartment, I was washing my hands in the kitchen before eating a can of soup from when Obama was in office, I knocked a knuckle on my right hand against the faucet spout, and my knuckle came away smeared with some kind of black grime or mold. I bent over and looked up at the underside of the spout, and it was caked in this grime. I then went and looked at the faucet in the bathroom and it was the same. And I have a cleaning person who comes every few weeks. But I’d been drinking the water, using it to brush my teeth, etc. and I just felt so grossed out and like I’d been holding my sanity together so tenuously and feeling so worried about germs and the virus and what it was or wasn’t on the surface of, and I almost couldn’t withstand simultaneously confronting Covid and my disgusting faucets. (Do you remember speculating a few emails ago about if I’d think you were a baby for feeling terrible


the narrow ways were completely blocked up; and at this time, between the rush of some to regain the space in front of the house, and the unavailing struggles of others to extricate themselves from the mass, the immediate attention was distracted from the murderer, although the universal eagerness for his capture was, if possible, increased. The man had shrunk down, thoroughly quelled by the ferocity of the crowd, and the impossibility of escape; but seeing this sudden change with no less rapidity than it had occurred, he sprang upon his feet, determined to make one last effort for his life by dropping into the ditch, and, at the risk of being stifled, endeavouring to creep away in the darkness and confusion. Roused into new strength and energy, and stimulated by the noise within the house which announced that an entrance had really been effected, he set his foot against the stack of chimneys, fastened one end of the rope tightly and firmly round it, and with the other made a strong running noose by the aid of his hands and teeth almost in a second. He could let himself down by the cord to within a less distance of the ground than his own height, and had his knife ready in his hand to cut it then and drop. At the very instant when he brought the loop over his head previous to slipping it beneath his arm-pits, and when the old gentleman before-mentioned (who had clung so tight to the railing of the bridge as to resist the force of the crowd, and retain his position) earnestly warned those about him that the man was about to lower himself down--at that very instant the murderer, looking behind him on the roof, threw his arms above his head, and uttered a yell of terror. 'The eyes again!' he cried in an unearthly screech. Staggering as if struck by lightning, he lost his balance and tumbled over the parapet. The noose was on his neck. It ran up with his weight, tight as a bow-string, and swift as the arrow it speeds. He fell for five-and-thirty feet. There was a sudden jerk, a terrific convulsion of the limbs; and there he hung, with the open knife clenched in his stiffening hand. The old chimney quivered with the shock, but stood it bravely. The murderer swung lifeless against the wall; and the boy, thrusting aside the dangling body which obscured his view, called to the people to come and take him out, for God's sake. A dog, which had lain concealed till now, ran backwards and forwards on the parapet with a dismal howl, and collecting himself for a spring, jumped for the dead man's shoulders. Missing his aim, he fell into the ditch, turning completely over as he went; and striking his head against a stone, dashed out his brains. CHAPTER LI AFFORDING AN EXPLANATION OF MORE MYSTERIES THAN ONE, AND COMPREHENDING A PROPOSAL OF MARRIAGE WITH NO WORD OF SETTLEMENT OR PIN-MONEY The events narrated in the last chapter were yet


I's gwyne to set down here and listen tell I hears it agin." So he set down on the ground betwixt me and Tom. He leaned his back up against a tree, and stretched his legs out till one of them most touched one of mine. My nose begun to itch. It itched till the tears come into my eyes. But I dasn't scratch. Then it begun to itch on the inside. Next I got to itching under- neath. I didn't know how I was going to set still. This miserableness went on as much as six or seven minutes; but it seemed a sight longer than that. I was itching in eleven different places now. I reckoned I couldn't stand it more'n a minute longer, but I set my teeth hard and got ready to try. Just then Jim begun to breathe heavy; next he begun to snore -- and then I was pretty soon comfortable again. Tom he made a sign to me -- kind of a little noise with his mouth -- and we went creeping away on our hands and knees. When we was ten foot off Tom whispered to me, and wanted to tie Jim to the tree for fun. But I said no; he might wake and make a dis- turbance, and then they'd find out I warn't in. Then Tom said he hadn't got candles enough, and he would slip in the kitchen and get some more. I didn't want him to try. I said Jim might wake up and come. But Tom wanted to resk it; so we slid in there and got three candles, and Tom laid five cents on the table for pay. Then we got out, and I was in a sweat to get away; but nothing would do Tom but he must crawl to where Jim was, on his hands and knees, and play something on him. I waited, and it seemed a good while, everything was so still and lonesome. As soon as Tom was back we cut along the path, around the garden fence, and by and by fetched up on the steep top of the hill the other side of the house. Tom said he slipped Jim's hat off of his head and hung it on a limb right over him, and Jim stirred a little, but he didn't wake. Afterwards Jim said the witches be- witched him and put him in a trance, and rode him all over the State, and then set him under the trees again, and hung his hat on a limb to show who done it. And next time Jim told it he said they rode him down to New Orleans; and, after that, every time he told it he spread it more and more, till by and by he said they rode him all over the world, and tired him most to death, and his back was all over saddle-boils. Jim was monstrous proud about it, and he got so he wouldn't hardly notice the other niggers. Niggers would come miles


I could stop them. Lin Ta ignores my outburst. “Punishments include expulsion from the palace, flogging, and beheading. Your family will be required to pay restitution, as well as reimburse the palace for all expenses accrued during your visit to the capital—whether you are dead or alive.” He looks us over. “You are protected here, so your bodyguards will remain on your boat until I receive the order to send you back to Wuxi. Do you have any questions?” Miss Zhao and I shake our heads. “Tonight I will send food to your room,” he says. “Tomorrow morning, you’ll be taken to the Great Within—those rooms in the palace reserved exclusively for women. Please dress appropriately. Now follow me.” I’ve been told that eunuchs have a peculiar walk that makes them recognizable even from a great distance. This turns out to be true. Lin Ta leans slightly forward. He keeps his thighs close together as he takes short, choppy steps, with his toes turned outward. We women trail an aroma from our feet. Lin Ta smells of leaking urine. Once he sees us to our room and closes the door behind him, Miss Zhao whispers, “I’ve heard that the Great Within has the largest private gathering of women anywhere in the world. The empress, the ladies of the royal family, and thousands of concubines all serve the Imperial Presence. The spoutless teapots guarantee that any child born in the Great Within is the emperor’s alone.” “I’ll never be as informed as you, Miss Zhao, but please don’t repeat the words spoutless teapot again. Or tailless dog. Even I know these are the worst things you can call those creatures. Maoren says eunuchs are powerful—” “They are watchdogs and spies!” “So refrain from using either epithet while we’re here as we don’t know the punishment for insulting a eunuch.” “Your caution is well taken,” Miss Zhao says. The next morning, we wake to the quiet of snowflakes falling from the sky. Poppy helps us bathe and dress in our finest, most elegant clothes. Then Miss Zhao and I drape ermine-lined cloaks over our gowns and leave the room. Considering how many women must serve the thousands of ladies in the Forbidden City, the halls in the Lodge of Ritual and Ceremony are surprisingly silent. I peer at Miss Zhao out of the corner of my eye. She looks unsettled, telling me this is not what she expected either. We step into the courtyard. I hate the cold, but I can appreciate the brutal purity of it. Snowflakes dance in the air, carried by the wind. Icicles hang like ivory chopsticks from the eaves. “It’s rare for snow to come so early here in the north,” Lin Ta says in greeting. Crystalline flakes catch on his eyelashes as he looks upward. Then he returns his gaze to me. “I’ve had coal-heated foot and hand warmers placed in the carriage to make your ride more comfortable.” I appreciate the gesture, but the warmers do little to keep us from shivering. The windows in the carriage


she was simply curious or if there was more to her question. She barely spared him a glance, which rather bothered him. How could he guess her thoughts if he couldn’t see her expression? Blast it all, why should he even care what she thought? It wasn’t like he could pursue her. He simply wanted to get to know his future sister-in-law, and pretending to be fond of traveling would only make things awkward between them when the family inevitably pointed out his contrary opinions. “I prefer the wilder parts of the world,” he said. “Well, the wilder parts of England, more like.” When she had no reaction outside of another glance, he added a bit more. “Truth be told, I would be content to stay at the Park the rest of my life. At least, I do not particularly enjoy traveling when everyone I love is here.” It was at that moment they crested the hill that overlooked Simon’s pond, and Lucy stopped dead in her tracks, her eyes going wide as she took in the scene. Simon had to admit he had timed his confession well. The late-afternoon sunlight glittered across the surface of the water and bathed the oak trees and grasses in gold, leaving the whole space warm and enchanting. The pond had never been more spectacular, despite it being Simon’s most favorite place in the world. Lucy clasped her hands together and held them to her heart as she took in the scene, and her eyes seemed to glow in the sunlight like everything else. As if she belonged here. “It is breathtaking, Simon,” she whispered. He thought his heart might have stopped beating, because she had not said his name before now, and it sounded like music to his ears. That was going to be a problem. Chapter Eleven Lucy had never seen anything more beautiful. She had never imagined anything could look or feel the way this pond looked and felt. It felt like . . . she could hardly put a word to it, but the closest she could think of was home. And as much as she had been missing the feel of home before arriving at Calloway Park, the ache of longing settled deeper in her heart. The more in love she fell with this place and the people who lived there, the harder it would be to leave. Lord Calloway watched her carefully, as if waiting for her to pass judgment, and she did her best to give him a smile. The tears that had built up inside her eyes made that a little difficult, however, and she swiped them away so she could still see the paradise before her. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” she told him. “Are you sure?” he replied, lifting one thick eyebrow and gazing at her as if she might faint at any moment. “Your tears say otherwise.” Taking hold of his arm, Lucy did her best to make him understand. “This place feels familiar,” she said. “Like a piece of something I


modest bringing up is wealth beyond the dream of avarice, but Jonathan feels it on another account. He says the amount of responsibility which it puts upon him makes him nervous. He begins to doubt himself. I try to cheer him up, and my belief in him helps him to have a belief in himself. But it is here that the grave shock that he experienced tells upon him the most. Oh, it is too hard that a sweet, simple, noble, strong nature such as his, a nature which enabled him by our dear, good friend's aid to rise from clerk to master in a few years, should be so injured that the very essence of its strength is gone. Forgive me, dear, if I worry you with my troubles in the midst of your own happiness, but Lucy dear, I must tell someone, for the strain of keeping up a brave and cheerful appearance to Jonathan tries me, and I have no one here that I can confide in. I dread coming up to London, as we must do that day after tomorrow, for poor Mr. Hawkins left in his will that he was to be buried in the grave with his father. As there are no relations at all, Jonathan will have to be chief mourner. I shall try to run over to see you, dearest, if only for a few minutes. Forgive me for troubling you. With all blessings, "Your loving Mina Harker" DR. SEWARD' DIARY 20 September.--Only resolution and habit can let me make an entry tonight. I am too miserable, too low spirited, too sick of the world and all in it, including life itself, that I would not care if I heard this moment the flapping of the wings of the angel of death. And he has been flapping those grim wings to some purpose of late, Lucy's mother and Arthur's father, and now. . . Let me get on with my work. I duly relieved Van Helsing in his watch over Lucy. We wanted Arthur to go to rest also, but he refused at first. It was only when I told him that we should want him to help us during the day, and that we must not all break down for want of rest, lest Lucy should suffer, that he agreed to go. Van Helsing was very kind to him. "Come, my child," he said. "Come with me. You are sick and weak, and have had much sorrow and much mental pain, as well as that tax on your strength that we know of. You must not be alone, for to be alone is to be full of fears and alarms. Come to the drawing room, where there is a big fire, and there are two sofas. You shall lie on one, and I on the other, and our sympathy will be comfort to each other, even though we do not speak, and even if we sleep." Arthur went off with him, casting back a longing look on Lucy's face, which lay in her


my purse," said Mary. "Mrs. Morrison gave me five shillings and Mrs. Medlock gave me some money from Mr. Craven." "Did he remember thee that much?" exclaimed Martha. "Mrs. Medlock said I was to have a shilling a week to spend. She gives me one every Saturday. I didn't know what to spend it on." "My word! that's riches," said Martha. "Tha' can buy anything in th' world tha' wants. Th' rent of our cottage is only one an' threepence an' it's like pullin' eye-teeth to get it. Now I've just thought of somethin'," putting her hands on her hips. "What?" said Mary eagerly. "In the shop at Thwaite they sell packages o' flower-seeds for a penny each, and our Dickon he knows which is th' prettiest ones an, how to make 'em grow. He walks over to Thwaite many a day just for th' fun of it. Does tha' know how to print letters?" suddenly. "I know how to write," Mary answered. Martha shook her head. "Our Dickon can only read printin'. If tha' could print we could write a letter to him an' ask him to go an' buy th' garden tools an' th' seeds at th' same time." "Oh! you're a good girl!" Mary cried. "You are, really! I didn't know you were so nice. I know I can print letters if I try. Let's ask Mrs. Medlock for a pen and ink and some paper." "I've got some of my own," said Martha. "I bought 'em so I could print a bit of a letter to mother of a Sunday. I'll go and get it." She ran out of the room, and Mary stood by the fire and twisted her thin little hands together with sheer pleasure. "If I have a spade," she whispered, "I can make the earth nice and soft and dig up weeds. If I have seeds and can make flowers grow the garden won't be dead at all--it will come alive." She did not go out again that afternoon because when Martha returned with her pen and ink and paper she was obliged to clear the table and carry the plates and dishes downstairs and when she got into the kitchen Mrs. Medlock was there and told her to do something, so Mary waited for what seemed to her a long time before she came back. Then it was a serious piece of work to write to Dickon. Mary had been taught very little because her governesses had disliked her too much to stay with her. She could not spell particularly well but she found that she could print letters when she tried. This was the letter Martha dictated to her: "My Dear Dickon: This comes hoping to find you well as it leaves me at present. Miss Mary has plenty of money and will you go to Thwaite and buy her some flower seeds and a set of garden tools to make a flower-bed. Pick the prettiest ones and easy to grow because she has never done it before and lived in India


Kane feels she can define what she experienced as “ACTUAL assault” while dismissing the very real experience of someone like me. It went on from there, but I was back at the video, staring at her sandy hair, feeling as dumb as when I’d thought Omar was Middle Eastern. I texted Jerome: Person of color??? You didn’t feel this was worth alerting me to? He answered: IDK what the hell she’s talking about. I swear, that was never something she mentioned. She has blue eyes! I have no fucking idea, Bodie. I dug around Twitter. Someone asking in another thread what Jasmine’s ethnic background was, someone else saying this question was an aggression, someone bringing up Rachel Dolezal, someone writing She’s a quarter Bolivian and linking to an interview where she mentioned her Bolivian abuela who herself had a German father, which meant, someone else noted, she was actually one-eighth Bolivian. Below that, someone dropped a racist Elizabeth-Warren-as-Pocahontas GIF, someone else wrote She doesn’t even speak Spanish, someone answered with an eight-tweet tirade about how racist it was to gatekeep ethnicity. My first instinct was to explain myself, but there was no way that didn’t make everything worse. Apology would make it worse, too, for everyone involved; I knew how the internet worked. A text from Lance: Please call? We just lost Flower People and Fresh Feast. Instead I closed Twitter and hoped it would somehow make everything go away. And it would go away, I reminded myself. I wouldn’t say anything else. People would move on. Trump would say something dangerously idiotic any moment now, and everyone’s attention would turn. I texted Lance and said as much. I added, I’m not going near it anymore. I will never type again. I managed not to defenestrate my computer, and instead took it and my headphones to the dining hall to make editing notes on the students’ first episodes and wait for Yahav. This way, if he didn’t show, I’d have something to do besides stew. Sitting by the fruit salad bar (a fruit salad bar!), I watched kids roll in to brunch—sleepy and alone, or in chatty pairs, or in loud, sweaty, post-sports-practice hordes—and did my best to compartmentalize, to ignore the dull fire alarm in the back of my head. My students would have another chance to edit, and they had a second edited episode due the following Friday. I’d told them if they produced a third, they could send it to me after mini-mester and I’d still give them feedback. The idea was for them to launch their group portal on the school website before Feb Week. I had a whole fresh wave of concerns about my voice being in Britt’s first episode: If her podcast got out there now and someone angry latched on to it, Britt could get dragged into the vortex with me and Jerome. Alder hadn’t been ready to play his podcast in class, had only emailed it to me late Friday night. The episode proved a good distraction, though it was confused, too ambitious. Halfway


features in shadow, limning their edges gold. It illuminated him like rays around a sun, like a halo. CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT Sometimes, you can see love coming. And when it takes a different path, you should be thankful. —Fragment from the work of Marya Addou, Malfouran poet The walk back to their apartments was silent. Gabe stayed behind her, a one-eyed shadow dogging her steps and making sure she went where she was supposed to. She no longer wore chains, but it was the first time Lore had truly felt like a prisoner in the Citadel. Their room was locked. Lore had the key half fitted in the door before Gabe stepped up beside her. “It won’t work.” His voice was low. “Anton had the lock changed.” She looked at him and said nothing. There was nothing to say. Gabe swallowed. He unlocked the door with a key he produced from his pocket, then stepped aside to let her in first. The apartments felt strange now—foreign and ill fitting, where before they’d been as close to comfortable as she could find here. Especially knowing Anton had changed the lock sometime after she left last night. Myriad hells, he’d probably had someone waiting in the halls, watching for her to leave so they could immediately set to work. Because Gabe told him. Gabe told him everything. Her wrists felt raw. The iron had made them itch. Lore rubbed and rubbed at them, trying to force the feeling out of her skin, trying to make it stop— Gentle pressure, Gabe’s fingers interposed where hers had been. “Lore, you’re going to hurt yourself—” It’d been the truth when she told Gabe and Bastian that she was no good at brawling, but instinct made do. Lore snatched her wrist from Gabe’s hand and struck out with the heel of her opposite palm, smacking him in the shoulder, pushing him off balance and away. “Don’t touch me,” she snarled. “Don’t fucking touch me.” He stared at her, one blue eye wide. His jaw clenched beneath the reddish stubble on his chin. “I was trying to keep you safe.” “By going to the very person we knew was lying?” “He’s on our side! You heard everything I just did, you know that Anton is working against August!” “But you didn’t.” Her fingers went back to her wrist again, itching, itching. “You had no idea what Anton was involved in, and it’s pure stupid luck you didn’t get all three of us murdered!” “It was either that or watch you go to a far more likely murder in the damn catacombs!” Gabe ran his hands over his close-shorn hair, turned away. “I wanted him to stop you from going down there at all. Both of you. That seemed like a much more pressing matter than playing politics—” “It’s more than playing politics! If we’d been right, if Anton and August were still on the same side, Bastian might’ve—” “Forgive me,” Gabe cut in, nearly a snarl. “I forgot that one must always be thinking of Bastian first.” “Save it,” Lore


he’d never interfered, I could continue as normal and not have to face the disgruntled and whispered re- criminations of my colleagues. I put my head in my hands just to break eye con- tact with him. 145/551 “Why is it so important to you?” I ask, desperately trying to hold on to my fraying temper. I look up at his impassive stare, his eyes luminous, giving nothing away, his earlier hurt now hidden. But even as I ask the question, deep down I know the answer before he says it. “I want everyone to know that you’re mine.” “I am yours—look.” I hold up my left hand, showing my wedding and en- gagement rings. “It’s not enough.” “Not enough that I married you?” My voice is barely a whisper. He blinks, registering the horror on my face. Where can I go from here? What else can I do? “That’s not what I mean,” he snaps and runs a hand through his overlong hair so that it flops onto his forehead. “What do you mean?” He swallows. “I want your world to begin and end with me,” he says, his ex- pression raw. His comment completely derails me. It’s like he’s punched me hard in the stomach, winding and wounding me. And the vision comes to mind of a small, frightened, copper-haired gray-eyed boy in dirty, mismatched, ill-fitting clothes. “It does,” I say without guile, because it’s the truth. “I’m just trying to estab- lish a career, and I don’t want to trade on your name. I have to do something, Christian. I can’t stay imprisoned at Escala or the new house with nothing to do. I’ll go crazy. I’ll suffocate. I’ve always worked, and I enjoy this. This is my dream job; it’s all I’ve ever wanted. But doing this doesn’t mean I love you less. You are the world to me.” My throat swells and tears prick the back of my eyes. I must not cry, not here. I repeat it over and over in my head. I must not cry. I must not cry. He stares at me, saying nothing. Then a frown crosses his face as if he’s con- sidering what I’ve said. “I suffocate you?” His voice is bleak, and it’s an echo of a question he’s asked me before. “No . . . yes . . . no.” This is such an exasperating conversation—not one that I want to have now, here. I close my eyes and rub my forehead, trying to fathom how we got to this. 146/551 “Look, we were talking about my name. I want to keep my name here be- cause I want to put some distance between you and me . . . but only here, that’s all. You know everyone thinks I got the job because of you, when the reality is—” I stop, when his eyes widen. Oh no . . . it is because of him? “Do you want to know why you got the job, Anastasia?” Anastasia? Shit. “What? What do you mean?” He shifts in his


to see. “That was good,” he said. “I think they liked us.” We were jostled in the car so I was flush against his profile, standing on my tiptoes. The angles of his body felt good against mine. “I think you’re right,” I whispered in his ear. * * * In the five years since we’d met Carol, we had been able to extract more and more money from her. We spent two years visiting her and her friends in the Bassetter and then at her penthouse in New York and mansion in L.A., Synthesizing them until they wept and had epiphanies, and Carol always insisted on paying us for our services. She paid us so well that we were able to quit our jobs at the Boyd. But Orson got restless again. I hated seeing him restless. “What do you want?” I asked him as gently as possible one night, watching him play a game of chess against himself. “What can I give you?” He snorted. “What can you give me?” I blushed. “I mean, you’ve, you know, figured so much out. So I want to figure something out for you. I want you to feel—I want you to feel as happy as possible.” “Okay,” he said, and castled his rooks. “Okay, well—I want Synthesis to be so much bigger.” I concealed a sigh. I was hoping for once it wouldn’t be about work. “Bigger how?” “We could do it for more than just Carol and her friends. Maybe we could, I don’t know—make more money off it.” “Yeah,” I said, my brain beginning to fire unbidden. “Yeah what?” “I can make that happen.” The key was to invent something purchasable that would make people think they were being Synthesized. To do that, I needed to make us look like maverick inventors. To do that, we needed to move to the cheapest possible apartment we could find in Palo Alto, start auditing graduate classes at Stanford, and pretend to be tech-aspirants. So we found a two-bedroom I called our “little Menlo Park.” In Palo Alto, we started to meet Stanford students, whom we hung out with and convinced that we, too, were Stanford students. To make this claim more believable, we asked professors if we could audit their engineering and biochemistry and physics courses, pretending to take notes in the back row but really jotting down our future plans: We had to build something sellable, but what? And who would we sell it to? A professor in Orson’s fluid mechanics class once asked him to demonstrate his knowledge of the continuity equation to the other students. At first, Orson deflected—he was just auditing, after all—but the professor insisted that “even auditors can contribute to the classroom environment.” Orson stood from his seat and walked as slowly as he could to the chalkboard, the other students’ eyes on him. He wrote the words “CONTINUITY EQUATION” on the board. And then his hand began trembling, and the chalk snapped between his thumb and forefinger. He dropped to the floor and did his best


Dorantes that I’d never heard before. A raunchy one.” “Were there any occultists in that one?” “No.” “Beyond the Yellow Door is the kind of stuff they might cover on Enigma,” Montserrat mused. “Cornelia’s still working there.” “That’s a terrible show. I don’t understand how it’s on the air.” “Because people watch that stuff. Nino Canún has guests talking about UFOs every damn month on his show. He and Jaime Maussan, that’s all they talk about.” “What’s going through that devious little brain of yours?” “Nothing,” she said, sliding her arms into her jacket and adjusting the collar. “Liar.” But he was right. There was something going through her mind, and that was the simple fact that Enigma had money and needed content. American money, to be exact. The backers for that show were folks from Miami who were trying to slide into the Latin American market. Telemundo was now aiming to make their own soap operas, and the folks backing Enigma were looking for the same thing: original programming. Montserrat didn’t know how to pitch stories to TV suits, but Cornelia did. You could get a two-hour special out of a German occultist if Nino Canún could get eleven hours and ten minutes on the air showing grainy video footage of lights that were supposed to be spaceships. Amphibian babies, little gray men who abducted women in the middle of the night, pyramids designed by people from Atlantis. That’s what people wanted, and there was money to be made in that stupid line of work. She knew it because she’d seen Cornelia’s condo and her fancy furniture. Meanwhile, editing audio at Antares wasn’t leading her anywhere, and her sister was in a tight financial spot. She checked her wristwatch. “I’ve gotta run.” “Wish me luck,” Tristán said as he held open the front door for her. “What luck?” “For the ad campaign.” “No such thing as luck, but I’ll tell Araceli to buy you a rabbit’s foot next time she goes to the Mercado de Sonora.” “Very funny. Have lunch with me next week. You can help me run a few lines.” “I need to finish the project I’m working on.” “Phone me!” She smiled, taking three steps from his doorway, hands in her pockets. “Go get that gig, handsome!” she yelled before she trotted off to find her car. 4 Tristán’s coping tactic was erasure. He was avoiding newsstands, he had vanished the calendar from his home, he had placed the box with Karina’s photos at the back of his closet where he couldn’t get to it easily. The little picture he carried in his wallet remained there because he never took that one out, but otherwise he was determined to pretend this was an ordinary month. He had plenty of other things to worry about, anyway. The ad campaign for the whiskey was going to another guy, and Yolanda had phoned—the line was finally working—still talking about the missing CD, but really suggesting they should meet for dinner. Well…for fucking. Tristán felt everything was a bit too raw to


it had become clear we’d be staying awhile—and I heard Charlotte Larsen gasp. Around his neck, Noah wore a metal contraption that at first glance looked like an intense form of orthodontia but in fact was a harmonica in a holder. He walked to the eastern side of the deck and stood with the railing behind him. Noah glanced at Jerry and me, then at the Larsens, then back at me, and said, “I want to dedicate a song to you, Sally.” Addressing the five other people and one dog, he said, “Sally and I met a couple years ago, but it’s only recently that we’ve reconnected. I feel very grateful. And since the way I express my feelings is through music, I want to sing a little something tonight. Thank you all for humoring me.” Looking at me, he said, “So, Sally Milz, this goes out to you.” Next to Jerry, sitting at the table where we’d just eaten, I experienced a sort of internal lurching. Had Noah written a song for me? Was he calling my bluff after I’d said that maybe I’d like such a thing? Could I handle this in front of Jerry and the Larsens? In a different way, could Charlotte Larsen handle this? Then Noah glanced down and began strumming. I knew right away, just from the first few chords, even before he looked at me and sang, “I heard that you were drunk and mean / Down at the Dairy Queen…” I didn’t need to fake-smile; I didn’t need to make an effort to express my delight or conceal my distress. It was better than if he’d written a song for me, though perhaps, as I realized he hadn’t, I did sort of hope he would in the future? It also was better than if he’d sung some happily-ever-after ballad. There was nothing about Noah Brewster standing on Jerry’s deck singing “Dairy Queen” that I didn’t love. He sang, “Ain’t it funny how we lose one day / And a lifetime slips away,” and in the third verse, after the lines “It was good for a time / I am told,” he pressed his lips against the harmonica and closed his eyes as the instrument’s magnificently nasal, twangy sound filled the air and Charlotte Larsen whooped and clapped. The odd part was that, although I had listened to the song hundreds of times, and seen the Indigo Girls perform it, I had always focused on what I thought of as the spectacularly devastating lines about a relationship that hadn’t lasted. I’d hardly noticed that the song ended with the lines “Hey, I love you more and more / Oh, I love you more and more”—with those lines in the present tense. Watching Noah as he sang them, as he watched me—his eyes were open again—I wondered if I’d always understood the song a little wrong, or possibly if I’d always understood life a little wrong. Wondering this was not a bad thing; it was a beautiful, unexpected relief. He bent his head once more to


a sitting room, a couple of men sit in front of the television. “Christ, Nicky,” says one of them, a dark-haired man who looks startlingly like Nick but maybe ten years older. “Nice of you to show your face around here. Who’s your friend?” Beside Andy, Nick goes rigid. “Andy, this is my brother Michael.” Then he turns to his brother. “I just saw Chrissy and Danielle. Is Sal here? Where’s Bev?” Michael ignores Andy and looks Nick over, radiating disapproval, although Andy can’t imagine at what—Nick’s wearing the navy crewneck sweater that Andy got him for Christmas and a pair of wool trousers. “Bev’s in the kitchen,” Nick’s brother finally says. “And Sal’s with her.” There’s something about the man’s tone that makes Andy think that Sal, whoever that is, shouldn’t be in the kitchen. It also makes Andy think that if this is how Nick’s brother usually acts, it’s no wonder Nick doesn’t enjoy coming home. But what does Andy know? He doesn’t have siblings. He really doesn’t have any experience with family whatsoever. Nick introduces Andy to two old women and one very old woman, all dressed in black. They’re apparently aunts, or something like aunts, and before Andy can figure out how there could be any doubt on that score, Nick is gone, and Andy’s left behind, attempting to have a conversation with three women who apparently don’t speak English. One of them hands him a glass of something sweet and alcoholic. “Nick’s looking after me because my fiancée left me for her mother’s heart doctor,” Andy says when conversation flags. And by “conversation,” he means smiling broadly and then taking a long sip of his mystery drink, as if he’s on a television commercial for whatever this stuff is. It tastes a little like ginger ale but is a confusing orange color. “Heart doctor?” repeats one of the women. “Cardiologist,” Andy agrees, as if this explains everything. One of the merely old women says something in rapid-fire Italian to the very old woman, who then turns to Andy, frowns, and says something that makes the other two laugh. For lack of any better idea, Andy smiles, drinks some more, and looks around the room. One wall is covered in photographs. Most of the recent photos are of Michael and what Andy assumes are Michael’s wife and children. But the older photographs catch Andy’s eye, especially three separate portraits of boys on what has to be their First Communion. Andy guesses he’s looking at Nick and his brothers. There’s also one wedding photograph of a tiny woman and a large man, presumably Nick’s parents. He knows Nick’s father died when Nick was still pretty young. “Jesus, Andy, there you are,” says Nick. He says something in Italian to the women, which results in the oldest getting to her feet and pinching his cheek and murmuring something in his ear that makes Nick blush. “You shouldn’t drink what they give you,” Nick says, looking at Andy’s mouth. “They’ve been in training for decades.” He reaches his hand out, as


how romantic!" exclaimed Meg. "How silly!" said Jo. "Let him be a musician if he wants to, and not plague his life out sending him to college, when he hates to go." "That's why he has such handsome black eyes and pretty manners, I suppose. Italians are always nice, " said Meg, who was a little sentimental. "What do you know about his eyes and his manners? You never spoke to him, hardly," cried Jo, who was not sentimental. "I saw him at the party, and what you tell shows that he knows how to behave. That was a nice little speech about the medicine Mother sent him." "He meant the blanc mange, I suppose." "How stupid you are, child! He meant you, of course." "Did he?" And Jo opened her eyes as if it had never occurred to her before. "I never saw such a girl! You don't know a compliment when you get it," said Meg, with the air of a young lady who knew all about the matter. "I think they are great nonsense, and I'll thank you not to be silly and spoil my fun. Laurie's a nice boy and I like him, and I won't have any sentimental stuff about compliments and such rubbish. We'll all be good to him because he hasn't got any mother, and he may come over and see us, mayn't he, Marmee?" "Yes, Jo, your little friend is very welcome, and I hope Meg will remember that children should be children as long as they can." "I don't call myself a child, and I'm not in my teens yet," observed Amy. "What do you say, Beth?" "I was thinking about our `PILGRIM'S PROGRESS'," answered Beth, who had not heard a word. "How we got out of the Slough and through the Wicket Gate by resolving to be good, and up the steep hill by trying, and that maybe the house over there, full of splendid things, is going to be our Palace Beautiful." "We have got to get by the lions first," said Jo, as if she rather liked the prospect. -------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Chapter" I.6 Beth Finds the Palace Beautiful The big house did prove a Palace Beautiful, though it took some time for all to get in, and Beth found it very hard to pass the lions. Old Mr. Laurence was the biggest one, but after he had called, said something funny or kind to each one of the girls, and talked over old times with their mother, nobody felt much afraid of him, except timid Beth. The other lion was the fact that they were poor and Laurie rich, for this made them shy of accepting favors which they could not return. But, after a while, they found that he considered them the benefactors, and could not do enough to show how grateful he was for Mrs. March's motherly welcome, their cheerful society, and the comfort he took in that humble home of theirs. So they soon forgot their pride and interchanged kindnesses without stopping to think which was the


hard to influence the process. The DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis objected. Blanket bans on U.S.-bound immigrants and travelers were foolish, they explained, since 99 percent of those people were harmless. I agreed. If this was really about combating terrorism, the process should be simple. First, career spies should rank the most dangerous terrorist hot spots. Second, State Department envoys should assess which of those places were cooperating with the United States to combat the threat (and which weren’t). And third, DHS should recommend temporary screening measures or travel limitations from “high risk” locations—not based on religion, not based on politics, just based on threat assessments. John Kelly approved the way forward. We’d call the White House’s bluff and get them a small tailored list, knowing it wouldn’t be the one Trump wanted. Secretary Kelly put me and Gene Hamilton in charge of monitoring the process, since one of us handled counterterrorism and the other handled immigration. Gene was a friendly guy whose office was next to mine, and while we disagreed on immigration policy, we agreed generally that the White House needed to stay out of this. But through the thin drywall separating us, I could hear the phone calls to Gene from Stephen Miller. There were a lot of countries Trump didn’t like—Somalia, Haiti, El Salvador. Were they on the draft list? Miller wanted to know. The president would be “upset” if the process didn’t produce the correct results. Although Gene and I had our differences, I was heartened to hear him push back on the demands. If we cherry-picked countries Trump wanted to block, the courts would surely strike down the plan. We were aided in elbowing out political meddling by an analyst named Olivia Troye. When I met the seasoned intelligence officer, I was told she was one of the best in the entire department—hardworking, apolitical, by-the-book. Olivia exceeded the description. Over several months, she ran aggressive interference, blocking attempts by political minions at the White House to tip the scales on certain countries, while making sure the outcome of the process was driven solely by the analysis of intelligence personnel and diplomats. Secretary Kelly was gone by the time the plan was finalized, and Elaine Duke had taken his place. Career officials presented her with a plan to lift travel restrictions on countries that were cooperating with the United States, to add new ones (including Venezuela and North Korea, both of which refused to help America catch terrorists), and, most important, to end blanket travel bans in favor of narrower, country-specific restrictions. While imperfect, it was better than allowing Trump to personally block travel from whatever country he disliked on a given day. Very late one night, Olivia and I huddled in the SCIF looking over the updated country chart her team had developed. Short of getting Trump to rescind his executive order, this was probably the best we could do. She confessed that when we’d first met she was worried I was “one of the MAGA ones.” Now, she said half-jokingly, we’d probably both get


Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town some score or two of families from our own island of Nantucket? Why did Britain between the years and pay to her whalemen in bounties upwards of 1,000,000 pounds? And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of America now outnumber all the rest of the banded whalemen in the world; sail a navy of upwards of seven hundred vessels; manned by eighteen thousand men; yearly consuming 00824,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth, at the time of sailing, 20,000,000 dollars; and every year importing into our harbors a well reaped harvest of 00847,000,000 dollars. How comes all this, if there be not something puissant in whaling? But this is not the half; look again. I freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his life, point out one single peaceful influence, which within the last sixty years has operated more potentially upon the whole broad world, taken in one aggregate, than the high and mighty business of whaling. One way and another, it has begotten events so remarkable in themselves, and so continuously momentous in their sequential issues, that whaling may well be regarded as that Egyptian mother, who bore offspring themselves pregnant from her womb. It would be a hopeless, endless task to catalogue all these things. Let a handful suffice. For many .. <p 108 > years past the whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest and least known parts of the earth. She has explored seas and archipelagoes which had no chart, where no Cook or Vancouver had ever sailed. If American and european men-of-war now peacefully ride in once savage harbors, let them fire salutes to the honor and glory of the whale-ship, which originally showed them the way, and first interpreted between them and the savages. They may celebrate as they will the heroes of Exploring Expeditions, your Cookes, Your Krusensterns; but I say that scores of anonymous Captains have sailed out of Nantucket, that were as great, and greater than your Cooke and your Krusenstern. For in their succorless emptyhandedness, they, in the heathenish sharked waters, and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands, battled with virgin wonders and terrors that Cooke with all his marines and muskets would not willingly have dared. All that is made such a flourish of in the old South Sea Voyages, those things were but the lifetime commonplaces of our heroic Nantucketers. Often, adventures which Vancouver dedicates three chapters to, these men accounted unworthy of being set down in the ship's common log. Ah, the world! Oh, the world! Until the whale fishery rounded Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial, scarcely any intercourse but colonial, was carried on between Europe and the long line of the opulent Spanish provinces on the Pacific coast. It was the whaleman who first broke through the jealous policy of the Spanish crown, touching those colonies; and, if space permitted, it might be distinctly shown how from those whalemen at last eventuated the liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the yoke of Old Spain,


with mutual mudslinging. And the identical same with murderers. You had to come back. That haunting sense kind of drew you. To show the understudy in the title ROLE how to. He saw him once on the auspicious occasion when they broke up the type in the INSUPPRESSIBLE or was it UNITED IRELAND, a privilege he keenly appreciated, and, in point of fact, handed him his silk hat when it was knocked off and he said THANK YOU, excited as he undoubtedly was under his frigid exterior notwithstanding the little misadventure mentioned between the cup and the lip: what's bred in the bone. Still as regards return. You were a lucky dog if they didn't set the terrier at you directly you got back. Then a lot of shillyshally usually followed, Tom for and Dick and Harry against. And then, number one, you came up against the man in possession and had to produce your credentials like the claimant in the Tichborne case, Roger Charles Tichborne, BELLA was the boat's name to the best of his recollection he, the heir, went down in as the evidence went to show and there was a tattoo mark too in Indian ink, lord Bellew was it, as he might very easily have picked up the details from some pal on board ship and then, when got up to tally with the description given, introduce himself with: EXCUSE ME, MY NAME IS SO AND SO or some such commonplace remark. A more prudent course, as Bloom said to the not over effusive, in fact like the distinguished personage under discussion beside him, would have been to sound the lie of the land first. --That bitch, that English whore, did for him, the shebeen proprietor commented. She put the first nail in his coffin. --Fine lump of a woman all the same, the SOI-DISANT townclerk Henry Campbell remarked, and plenty of her. She loosened many a man's thighs. I seen her picture in a barber's. The husband was a captain or an officer. --Ay, Skin-the-Goat amusingly added, he was and a cottonball one. This gratuitous contribution of a humorous character occasioned a fair amount of laughter among his ENTOURAGE. As regards Bloom he, without the faintest suspicion of a smile, merely gazed in the direction of the door and reflected upon the historic story which had aroused extraordinary interest at the time when the facts, to make matters worse, were made public with the usual affectionate letters that passed between them full of sweet nothings. First it was strictly Platonic till nature intervened and an attachment sprang up between them till bit by bit matters came to a climax and the matter became the talk of the town till the staggering blow came as a welcome intelligence to not a few evildisposed, however, who were resolved upon encompassing his downfall though the thing was public property all along though not to anything like the sensational extent that it subsequently blossomed into. Since their names were coupled, though, since he was her declared favourite, where was the particular


a moment before he said, "Are there any among you who wish to leave our company? If so, go now, and no one shall think the less of you." No one moved. "Well and good," said Mormont. "You may take your vows here at evenfall, before Septon Celladar and the first of your order. Do any of you keep to the old gods?" Jon stood. "I do, my lord." "I expect you will want to say your words before a heart tree, as your uncle did," Mormont said. "Yes, my lord," Jon said. The gods of the sept had nothing to do with him; the blood of the First Men flowed in the veins of the Starks. He heard Grenn whispering behind him. "There's no godswood here. Is there? I never saw a godswood." A GAME OF THRONES 455 "You wouldn't see a herd of aurochs until they trampled you into the snow," Pyp whispered back. "I would so," Grenn insisted. "I'd see them a long way off." Mormont himself confirmed Grenn's doubts. "Castle Black has no need of a godswood. Beyond the Wall the haunted forest stands as it stood in the Dawn Age, long before the Andals brought the Seven across the narrow sea. You will find a grove of weirwoods half a league from this spot, and mayhap your gods as well." "My lord." The voice made Jon glance back in surprise. Samwell Tarly was on his feet. The fat boy wiped his sweaty palms against his tunic. "Might I . . . might I go as well? To say my words at this heart tree?" "Does House Tarly keep the old gods too?" Mormont asked. "No, my lord," Sam replied in a thin, nervous voice. The high officers frightened him, Jon knew, the Old Bear most of all. "I was named in the light of the Seven at the sept on Horn Hill, as my father was, and his father, and all the Tarlys for a thousand years." "Why would you forsake the gods of your father and your House?" wondered Ser Jaremy Rykker. "The Night's Watch is my House now," Sam said. "The Seven have never answered my prayers. Perhaps the old gods will." "As you wish, boy," Mormont said. Sam took his seat again, as did Jon. "We have placed each of you in an order, as befits our need and your own strengths and skills." Bowen Marsh stepped forward and handed him a paper. The Lord Commander unrolled it and began to read. "Haider, to the builders," he began. Haider gave a stiff nod of approval. "Grenn, to the rangers. Albett, to the builders. Pypar, to the rangers." Pyp looked over at Jon and wiggled his ears. "Samwell, to the stewards." Sam sagged with relief, mopping at his brow with,a scrap of silk. "Matthar, to the rangers. Dareon, to the stewards. Todder, to the rangers. Jon, to the stewards." The stewards? For a moment Jon could not believe what he had heard. Mormont must have read it wrong. He started to rise, to open his


had gone too far. The answer to my appeal was instantaneous, but it came in the form of an extraordinary blast and chill, a gust of frozen air, and a shake of the room as great as if, in the wild wind, the casement had crashed in. The boy gave a loud, high shriek, which, lost in the rest of the shock of sound, might have seemed, indistinctly, though I was so close to him, a note either of jubilation or of terror. I jumped to my feet again and was conscious of darkness. So for a moment we remained, while I stared about me and saw that the drawn curtains were unstirred and the window tight. "Why, the candle's out!" I then cried. "It was I who blew it, dear!" said Miles. XVIII The next day, after lessons, Mrs. Grose found a moment to say to me quietly: "Have you written, miss?" "Yes--I've written." But I didn't add--for the hour--that my letter, sealed and directed, was still in my pocket. There would be time enough to send it before the messenger should go to the village. Meanwhile there had been, on the part of my pupils, no more brilliant, more exemplary morning. It was exactly as if they had both had at heart to gloss over any recent little friction. They performed the dizziest feats of arithmetic, soaring quite out of MY feeble range, and perpetrated, in higher spirits than ever, geographical and historical jokes. It was conspicuous of course in Miles in particular that he appeared to wish to show how easily he could let me down. This child, to my memory, really lives in a setting of beauty and misery that no words can translate; there was a distinction all his own in every impulse he revealed; never was a small natural creature, to the uninitiated eye all frankness and freedom, a more ingenious, a more extraordinary little gentleman. I had perpetually to guard against the wonder of contemplation into which my initiated view betrayed me; to check the irrelevant gaze and discouraged sigh in which I constantly both attacked and renounced the enigma of what such a little gentleman could have done that deserved a penalty. Say that, by the dark prodigy I knew, the imagination of all evil HAD been opened up to him: all the justice within me ached for the proof that it could ever have flowered into an act. He had never, at any rate, been such a little gentleman as when, after our early dinner on this dreadful day, he came round to me and asked if I shouldn't like him, for half an hour, to play to me. David playing to Saul could never have shown a finer sense of the occasion. It was literally a charming exhibition of tact, of magnanimity, and quite tantamount to his saying outright: "The true knights we love to read about never push an advantage too far. I know what you mean now: you mean that--to be let alone yourself and not followed up--you'll cease to


Eliot describes his reaction to this visit in more detail than she did with Mr. Macey's. A need for other people is faintly stirring in Silas. Dolly offers him her homemade lard-cakes, speaking gently. Dolly is surprised that Silas can read the letters she traced on the tops of the--I.H.S.-which she copied from the pulpit-cloth at church. Though Dolly doesn't know the formal meaning of these letters (they stand for the Greek spelling of "Jesus"), she has the spirit right. Silas, on the other hand, can read, but these letters weren't part of his church's rituals so he can't understand their spirit. Similarly, he doesn't understand the meaning of church bells, which weren't rung in Lantern-Yard. His sect referred to worship as "chapel," so he doesn't even share the meaning of the word "church" with Dolly. Then Dolly expresses the spirit of her religion--a faith that comforts her through life's troubles. She trusts in God and Heaven, although her concept is almost pagan--she sees a group of divinities, "Them as are above us." This is totally different from the religion Silas knew, and he can't even imagine it. Silas has a hard time communicating with Dolly because he isn't used to talking with people. Yet he's trying. Dolly has brought her little boy Aaron with her, and Silas quietly offers him some cake. Dolly thinks it's good for Silas to have contact with a child (watch for another child to enter his life soon). But short-sighted Silas can hardly see Aaron's face--he's still withdrawn from humanity. Aaron sings a Christmas carol, but Silas' ears aren't used to music--just as his soul isn't used to kindness--and he can't enjoy it. Dolly leaves, with a last bit of advice to give up working on a Sunday. (This is partly because it's against church law, and partly because of old superstitions.) Silas is relieved to be left alone. Eliot paints a bleak picture of his lonely Christmas day. Possessed by grief, he still doesn't lock his door; he thinks of his cottage as "his robbed home." Eliot adds a sad, short paragraph contrasting him to his loving, trusting youthful self. He is now at his lowest point. In comparison, the villagers have a merry Christmas, full of traditional celebrations. In the world of the gentry, though, Squire Cass' party on New Year's Eve is the big event, and Eliot describes the eager preparations for it. (No one worries about Dunstan's absence.) Only Godfrey looks forward to the party with conflicting emotions. Eliot dramatizes this in a dialogue between hopeful Godfrey and his demon Anxiety. He seems literally split in two. Compare Silas and Godfrey at this point. Which do you feel sorrier for? Why? ^^^^^^^^^^ SILAS MARNER: CHAPTER 11 After hearing so much about her, at last you meet Nancy Lammeter, riding to the Casses' party. Eliot tries not to idealize Nancy. Though she's lovely, she's dressed in dowdy clothes. Clinging to her father's waist, glancing nervously down at the mud, she appears unselfconscious. As you read the rest of this chapter, however, you may


little by little his chin descended and touched the enemy, who seized it. There was a sharp yelp, a flirt of the poodle's head, and the beetle fell a couple of yards away, and lit on its back once more. The neighboring spectators shook with a gentle inward joy, several faces went behind --------------------------------------------------------- -64- fans and handkerchiefs, and Tomwas entirely happy. The dog looked foolish, and probably felt so; but there was resentment in his heart, too, and a craving for revenge. So he went to the beetle and began a wary attack on it again; jumping at it from every point of a circle, lighting with his fore-paws within an inch of the creature, making even closer snatches at it with his teeth, and jerking his head till his ears flapped again. But he grew tired once more, after a while; tried to amuse himself with a fly but found no relief; followed an ant around, with his nose close to the floor, and quickly wearied of that; yawned, sighed, forgot the beetle entirely, and sat down on it. Then there was a wild yelp of agony and the poodle went sailing up the aisle; the yelps continued, and so did the dog; he crossed the house in front of the altar; he flew down the other aisle; he crossed before the doors; he clamored up the home-stretch; his anguish grew with his progress, till presently he was but a woolly comet moving in its orbit with the gleam and the speed of light. At last the frantic sufferer sheered from its course, and sprang into its master's lap; he flung it out of the window, and the voice of distress quickly thinned away and died in the distance. By this time the whole church was red-faced and suffocating with suppressed laughter, and the sermon had come to a dead standstill. The discourse was resumed presently, but it went lame and halting, all possibility of impressiveness being at an end; for even --------------------------------------------------------- -65- the gravest sentiments were constantly being received with a smothered burst of unholy mirth, under cover of some remote pew-back, as if the poor parson had said a rarely facetious thing. It was a genuine relief to the whole congregation when the ordeal was over and the benediction pronounced. Tom Sawyer went home quite cheerful, thinking to himself that there was some satisfaction about divine service when there was a bit of variety in it. He had but one marring thought; he was willing that the dog should play with his pinchbug, but he did not think it was upright in him to carry it off. --------------------------------------------------------- -66- Chapter VI MONDAY morning found Tom Sawyer miserable. Monday morning always found him so -- because it began another week's slow suffering in school. He generally began that day with wishing he had had no intervening holiday, it made the going into captivity and fetters again so much more odious. Tom lay thinking. Presently it occurred to him that he wished he was sick; then he could stay


that he would be humiliated if she came upon him in the midst of his tears, then she rattled the door handle. When she went in Philip was poring over the prayer-book, hiding his eyes with his hands so that she might not see he had been crying. "Do you know the collect yet?" she said. He did not answer for a moment, and she felt that he did not trust his voice. She was oddly embarrassed. "I can't learn it by heart," he said at last, with a gasp. "Oh, well, never mind," she said. "You needn't. I've got some picture books for you to look at. Come and sit on my lap, and we'll look at them together." Philip slipped off his chair and limped over to her. He looked down so that she should not see his eyes. She put her arms round him. "Look," she said, "that's the place where our blessed Lord was born." She showed him an Eastern town with flat roofs and cupolas and minarets. In the foreground was a group of palm-trees, and under them were resting two Arabs and some camels. Philip passed his hand over the picture as if he wanted to feel the houses and the loose habiliments of the nomads. "Read what it says," he asked. Mrs. Carey in her even voice read the opposite page. It was a romantic narrative of some Eastern traveller of the thirties, pompous maybe, but fragrant with the emotion with which the East came to the generation that followed Byron and Chateaubriand. In a moment or two Philip interrupted her. "I want to see another picture." When Mary Ann came in and Mrs. Carey rose to help her lay the cloth. Philip took the book in his hands and hurried through the illustrations. It was with difficulty that his aunt induced him to put the book down for tea. He had forgotten his horrible struggle to get the collect by heart; he had forgotten his tears. Next day it was raining, and he asked for the book again. Mrs. Carey gave it him joyfully. Talking over his future with her husband she had found that both desired him to take orders, and this eagerness for the book which described places hallowed by the presence of Jesus seemed a good sign. It looked as though the boy's mind addressed itself naturally to holy things. But in a day or two he asked for more books. Mr. Carey took him into his study, showed him the shelf in which he kept illustrated works, and chose for him one that dealt with Rome. Philip took it greedily. The pictures led him to a new amusement. He began to read the page before and the page after each engraving to find out what it was about, and soon he lost all interest in his toys. Then, when no one was near, he took out books for himself; and perhaps because the first impression on his mind was made by an Eastern town, he found his chief amusement in


sense. And I want you to teach me to understand what I read." Faber examined Montag's thin, blue-jowled face. "How did you get shaken up? What knocked the torch out of your hands?" "I don't know. We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy. Something's missing. I looked around. The only thing I positively knew was gone was the books I'd burned in ten or twelve years. So I thought books might help." "You're a hopeless romantic," said Faber. "It would be funny if it were not serious. It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the `parlour families' today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios and televisors, but are not. No, no, it's not books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us. Of course you couldn't know this, of course you still can't understand what I mean when I say all this. You are intuitively right, that's what counts. Three things are missing. "Number one: Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more `literary' you are. That's my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. "So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality. Do you know the legend of Hercules and Antaeus, the giant wrestler, whose strength was incredible so long as he stood firmly on the earth. But when he was held, rootless, in mid-air, by Hercules, he perished easily. If there isn't something in that legend for us today, in this city, in our time, then I am completely


Mr. Creakle directed the door of the cell to be unlocked, and Twenty Seven to be invited out into the passage. This was done; and whom should Traddles and I then behold, to our amazement, in this converted Number Twenty Seven, but Uriah Heep! He knew us directly; and said, as he came out - with the old writhe, - 'How do you do, Mr. Copperfield? How do you do, Mr. Traddles?' This recognition caused a general admiration in the party. I rather thought that everyone was struck by his not being proud, and taking notice of us. 'Well, Twenty Seven,' said Mr. Creakle, mournfully admiring him. 'How do you find yourself today?' 'I am very umble, sir!' replied Uriah Heep. 'You are always so, Twenty Seven,' said Mr. Creakle. Here, another gentleman asked, with extreme anxiety: 'Are you quite comfortable?' 'Yes, I thank you, sir!' said Uriah Heep, looking in that direction. 'Far more comfortable here, than ever I was outside. I see my follies, now, sir. That's what makes me comfortable.' Several gentlemen were much affected; and a third questioner, forcing himself to the front, inquired with extreme feeling: 'How do you find the beef?' 'Thank you, sir,' replied Uriah, glancing in the new direction of this voice, 'it was tougher yesterday than I could wish; but it's my duty to bear. I have committed follies, gentlemen,' said Uriah, looking round with a meek smile, 'and I ought to bear the consequences without repining.' A murmur, partly of gratification at Twenty Seven's celestial state of mind, and partly of indignation against the Contractor who had given him any cause of complaint (a note of which was immediately made by Mr. Creakle), having subsided, Twenty Seven stood in the midst of us, as if he felt himself the principal object of merit in a highly meritorious museum. That we, the neophytes, might have an excess of light shining upon us all at once, orders were given to let out Twenty Eight. I had been so much astonished already, that I only felt a kind of resigned wonder when Mr. Littimer walked forth, reading a good book! 'Twenty Eight,' said a gentleman in spectacles, who had not yet spoken, 'you complained last week, my good fellow, of the cocoa. How has it been since?' 'I thank you, sir,' said Mr. Littimer, 'it has been better made. If I might take the liberty of saying so, sir, I don't think the milk which is boiled with it is quite genuine; but I am aware, sir, that there is a great adulteration of milk, in London, and that the article in a pure state is difficult to be obtained.' It appeared to me that the gentleman in spectacles backed his Twenty Eight against Mr. Creakle's Twenty Seven, for each of them took his own man in hand. 'What is your state of mind, Twenty Eight?' said the questioner in spectacles. 'I thank you, sir,' returned Mr. Littimer; 'I see my follies now, sir. I am a good deal troubled when I think of the


too. I rubbed my eyes wide. No, it wasn’t a dream. I didn’t recognise her. She had dark hair and was wearing a puffy jacket, which seemed strange. Had I fainted? That was when I became aware of the sound of the traffic. I was outside, on the street, lying in a heap of rubbish. ‘Where am I?’ I asked. ‘Thank God, will I call ya an ambulance?’ ‘What? No, of course not.’ I attempted to get to my feet, but as soon as I moved, I felt a splitting headache over my right eye. Instinctively, my hand went to touch it and when I felt a dampness on my fingertips, I realised I was bleeding. ‘He looks fairly battered, doesn’t he, Marie?’ Great. I had an audience. I tried to retrace my steps, but all I found were blank spaces. Why was I feeling so unbelievably ill? I heaved myself upright against the steps beside me. ‘The smell of drink off him,’ I heard the woman say. ‘Like a brewery.’ Oh God. That’s when it all started coming back to me. The pub. The whiskey. The blokes who came in to celebrate their friend’s last night as a bachelor. The bet that they could drink me under the table. The whiskey. The sing-song. Had I sung ‘Molly Malone’? Standing on a chair? Oh God. Smoking a joint with someone outside on the street. Then some other people, they thought he owed them money. Me explaining I’d only just met this guy. Then the punch in the face, the rubbish bin being dumped on me, repeatedly. ‘Thank you, ladies, I think I’ll be perfectly fine in a minute. Just need to get my bearings,’ I groaned, as I held on to the railings and stood swaying, adjusting to the daylight. ‘Are ya sure, love?’ I wasn’t really sure of anything. When I’d returned to the B&B, Nora’s husband Barry had told me how Martha had called by, looking for me. He’d told her I had packed up and gone home to England. The idiot! If only his wife had been there, she would have told Martha I was coming back. And now she wanted nothing to do with me. I’d upended my entire life to be with her and now she wouldn’t even see me. I took a few tentative steps, wincing with the effort. I looked up and saw the street sign. Ha'penny Lane. I was right outside her house. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t show up looking like this and besides, she’d made her feelings abundantly clear. The decision was taken out of my hands when I saw her pulling the curtains at the front window. She looked out, disbelieving, and bent down to get a better look. Then her hand went to her mouth. I tried to wave with my good hand. She disappeared back into the shadows and reappeared at the front door. ‘What in God’s name has happened to you?’ ‘Um, I believe I had a disagreement of sorts.’ She gave me a look


Aubert, whose anxiety for his wife overcame every other consideration, detained the physician in his house. He remembered the feelings and the reflections that had called a momentary gloom upon his mind, on the day when he had last visited the fishing-house, in company with Madame St. Aubert, and he now admitted a presentiment, that this illness would be a fatal one. But he effectually concealed this from her, and from his daughter, whom he endeavoured to re-animate with hopes that her constant assiduities would not be unavailing. The physician, when asked by St. Aubert for his opinion of the disorder, replied, that the event of it depended upon circumstances which he could not ascertain. Madame St. Aubert seemed to have formed a more decided one; but her eyes only gave hints of this. She frequently fixed them upon her anxious friends with an expression of pity, and of tenderness, as if she anticipated the sorrow that awaited them, and that seemed to say, it was for their sakes only, for their sufferings, that she regretted life. On the seventh day, the disorder was at its crisis. The physician assumed a graver manner, which she observed, and took occasion, when her family had once quitted the chamber, to tell him, that she perceived her death was approaching. 'Do not attempt to deceive me,' said she, 'I feel that I cannot long survive. I am prepared for the event, I have long, I hope, been preparing for it. Since I have not long to live, do not suffer a mistaken compassion to induce you to flatter my family with false hopes. If you do, their affliction will only be the heavier when it arrives: I will endeavour to teach them resignation by my example.' The physician was affected; he promised to obey her, and told St. Aubert, somewhat abruptly, that there was nothing to expect. The latter was not philosopher enough to restrain his feelings when he received this information; but a consideration of the increased affliction which the observance of his grief would occasion his wife, enabled him, after some time, to command himself in her presence. Emily was at first overwhelmed with the intelligence; then, deluded by the strength of her wishes, a hope sprung up in her mind that her mother would yet recover, and to this she pertinaciously adhered almost to the last hour. The progress of this disorder was marked, on the side of Madame St. Aubert, by patient suffering, and subjected wishes. The composure, with which she awaited her death, could be derived only from the retrospect of a life governed, as far as human frailty permits, by a consciousness of being always in the presence of the Deity, and by the hope of a higher world. But her piety could not entirely subdue the grief of parting from those whom she so dearly loved. During these her last hours, she conversed much with St. Aubert and Emily, on the prospect of futurity, and on other religious topics. The resignation she expressed, with the firm hope of


God! .. <p 115 > .. < chapter xxvii 2 KNIGHTS AND SQUIRES > Stubb was the second mate. He was a native of Cape Cod; and hence, according to local usage, was called a Cape-Cod-man. A happy-go-lucky; neither craven nor valiant; taking perils as they came with an indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent crisis of the chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner engaged for the year. Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over his whale-boat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his crew all invited guests. He was as particular about the comfortable arrangement of his part of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about the snugness of his box. When close to the whale, in the very death-lock of the fight, he handled his unpitying lance coolly and off-handedly, as a whistling tinker his hammer. He would hum over his old rigadig tunes while flank and flank with the most exasperated monster. Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death into an easy chair. What he thought of death itself, there is no telling. Whether he ever thought of it at all, might be a question; but, if he ever did chance to cast his mind that way after a comfortable dinner, no doubt, like a good sailor, he took it to be a sort of call of the watch to tumble aloft, and bestir themselves there, about something which he would find out when he obeyed the order, and not sooner. What, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such an easygoing, unfearing man, so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in a world full of grave peddlers, all bowed to the ground with their packs; what helped to bring about that almost impious good-humor of his; that thing must have been his pipe. For, like his nose, his short, black little pipe was one of the regular features of his face. You would almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without his nose as without his pipe. .. <p 116 > He kept a whole row of pipes there ready loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy reach of his hand; and, whenever he turned in, he smoked them all out in succession, lighting one from the other to the end of the chapter; then loading them again to be in readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed, instead of first putting his legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his mouth. I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of his peculiar disposition; for every one knows that this earthly air, whether ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it; and as in time of the cholera, some people go about with a camphorated handkerchief to their mouths; so, likewise, against all mortal tribulations, Stubb's tobacco smoke might have operated as a sort of disinfecting agent. The third