Nonetheless, I put my hands flat on the table and felt the surface of the wood grain, and tried to release my mind. The wood meant “usefulness in death” to me; the wood meant “you may be dead and you may still serve.” I had never tried to read the lifelines of a piece of timber before.

“Are you quite all right?” asked the Nanny, beginning to gather up her things, including the bottle. Apparently I looked as if I were about to expire, or explode.

“You have to leave the way you came,” I said to her.

“I only saw the one staircase,” she asserted.

“That’s not what I meant,” I said, though I wasn’t quite sure what I did mean, or if it had anything to do with her at all. “History waits to be written, and this family has a part to play in it.”

5

H AH,” SAID the Lion. “You have to leave the way you come in? So what did you mean by that? You have to go out of the world the way you came into it? Imbecilic and diapered?”

Yackle didn’t speak. He pressed his point. “Did you decipher your own gibberish? You’ve been trying to die as a human, but if you never were born as a human, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Ha-ha.”

She was silent for a long time. Her hands moved as if she were picking up the green glass bottle in her mind, all over again. When she spoke, her voice had an opacity to it.

“So you did have something to give me after all,” she said. “You come in all rough edges and smarmy clothes, and it seems you have something to say.”

He shrugged. He didn’t know what she meant.

“That’s why I’ve been down in the crypt for a year without having the plea sure of a visit from a gentleman caller named Master Death. My first prophecy, and I read it wrong. ‘You have to leave the way you came.’ That was for me. Not for that Cattery Spunge.”

“Don’t look at me,” he said. His paws went up and flat like the palms of a human hand, protesting. Like a Bear cub playing dead. “I’m not certified.”

She was shaken. She left the chairback and meandered to the window. She stood there for a long time. Then, as if trying to change the subject, she said, “Someone’s got a cook fire down there. One of the houses to our west.”

“You can see now? Or are you ’seeing’ it?”

“I’m smelling it, you blasted bog-wart. The wind is pressing up from the west, and I remember a few stone cottages out that way. If we’re in as much of a skirmish moment as you say, I’d have thought the residents of the small farms that supply the mauntery would be huddling in our great hall for protection. That’s the origin of this establishment in the first place, after all-a keep.”