She sighed, closed the window, and was suddenly utterly still. Closed up. She remembered it now! She remembered her mother’s funeral, four years before, and she remembered the weeping in the womens’ pews, the long, long sermon from Faithful Unto Death Hervey in which he had likened Martha Slythe to the Martha in the Bible, and she also remembered the words “closed up.” Her father had prayed at the funeral, an extemporaneous prayer in which he had tussled with God, and he had used the words in the prayer. Not that there was anything special in the way he used them, more, she remembered, in the manner in which he spoke them.

He had paused just before those two words. The echo of his voice was fading between the stone pillars and embarrassment was spreading through the congregation for they thought that Matthew Slythe had broken down. The silence stretched. He had said something like, “her life on this earth is ended, her affairs…” and then he had embarrassed them by a long silence. She remembered the feet shuffling on the floor, the sobbing from Goodwife, and she had raised a head to steal a glance at her father. His face was turned up to the beams, one fist was raised, and she realized, as the pause went on, that he had not broken down. He had simply lost the thread of his words and thoughts. It was nothing more. She saw him shake his massive head and then he had simply finished the sentence by saying, “closed up.”

That was all. Yet at the time it had struck her as strange, as if some remnants of her mother’s life had been locked in a cupboard. She remembered little else of the funeral, except singing the doleful words beside the raw grave as the snow whirled off the high ridge. Closed up.

It was not much, yet the letters had come from Martha Slythe’s parents, and Cony, whoever he was, had appeared in their lives just at the time when Matthew Slythe came into his fortune, and she wondered if the seal, the secret of the seal, was hidden, not here, but in her mother’s room. Closed up still? Waiting?

She dressed quickly, blew out the candles and turned the key in the lock. It scraped as it yielded, she froze, but there was no sound from the passageway. She would search upstairs, in her parents’ bedroom that was empty, awaiting her marriage with Scammell that was confidently expected before her birthday in October.

The servants, except for Goodwife, all slept at the far end of the house where her own bedroom was. Scammell was in a room above the main entrance, and she could hear his snores as she paused at the top of the private stairs. Goodwife was the closest, in a bedroom that opened directly from her mother’s dressing room, and Campion knew she would have to move with desperate silence. Goodwife would wake at the smallest sound and then emerge, bristling with anger, to face the intruder. Campion crept on stockinged feet down the short passageway and into the large, silent room where her parents had shared their unhappy bed.