“Lightly,” she admitted. “You know, Ben, it isn’t your pen that’s been keeping you alive. It isn’t all those pages you pile up every day. I’ve been keeping you alive. The old brute would dispose of you at once if I complained, and I’m very tempted to complain.”

“Where’s the aquarium?” I asked, amused by her threat—a novel one, in my experience.

“That’s better, we’ll go tomorrow,” she said. “It can be our little outing.”

She smiled again, and left.

8.

I had not been asleep an hour before I heard a terrible howling sound from Cecily’s room. When I first awoke it was only an angry murmur, but before I could even swing my feet out of the bed it had risen to a bloodcurdling scream.

I leaped up and rushed to her door, regretting that I had no firearm. The screaming was terrible—I could only think of scalpings and savage torture. Perhaps a lone Comanche had found his way into the house and was scalping Cecily, as revenge for the war Isinglass had made on his people.

I rushed to the door, thinking it would be locked, but it wasn’t, and before I could get my balance I had very nearly tumbled into Cecily Snow’s bed. She was propped up on a pile of pillows, calmly reading a large book called Plant Geography. The howling came from one of her closets.

“Why, Ben,” she said, amused. She marked her place in her book. “Perhaps I’ve done you an injustice. I confess I never expected you to show quite this degree of initiative.”

“But who’s screaming?” I asked, completely confused. My mind still held a picture of a Comanche with a bloodstained knife gloating over Cecily’s rich tresses—yet there the woman sat, coolly pursuing her scholarship.

“Oh, that’s only Van Leeuwenhoek, my little hyrax,” she said. “He does scream quite remarkably, doesn’t he? It means the nigger’s coming. Van Leeuwenhoek hates the nigger.”

She got out of bed and went to her closet, emerging a moment later with a small odd-looking furry creature not much bigger than a rabbit. It had ceased screaming, but continued to emit an angry murmur.

“Van Leeuwenhoek is from the Congo,” she said. “He’s a tree hyrax, nocturnal, but that’s not the unusual thing about him. Observe his footpads.”

She held the trembling little creature up so that I could see. His footpads were rather curious, though I found it hard to care. Many animals must have curious feet.

“What do you make of those footpads, Ben?” Cecily asked. “Now look closely. It’s part of your examination.”

“Cecily, I thought you were being scalped!” I said. “I don’t care about the animal’s footpads. I admit it’s curious that he can scream like a woman who’s being scalped.”