“I have just come from speaking with the yard man, Ichabod. He had been speaking earlier this morning with the yard man next door, whose name is Isak.”

“Yes, Uncle Joshua,” she said. “That is very interesting, but are you certain it requires my immediate attention?”

“Isak had the toothache last night and could not sleep.” Penelope nodded absently and took another doughnut from the basket. Redolent of sugar and spice, the doughnut occupied her attention as she consumed it, interspersing bites with sips of coffee, which aided her chewing as well as adding an attractive variation of flavor.

“Walking the floor with his toothache,” Joshua continued inexorably, “he observed, or says he observed, in the early hours of the morning, a figure leaving these premises, a young female leaving these premises.”

Penelope finished chewing and swallowed, presenting then a countenance more worthy of his serious scrutiny.

“Absurd,” she said. “I am here of a certainty. Miss Sarah is here; and Miss Lauretta is indisposed and resting in her room.”

“Is she, Miss Pea?”

The old man looked at her, a look heavy with doubt and gloomy insinuation.

“Aunt Pea,” Sarah said hastily, “I haven’t had the chance to—I don’t really know how to tell you—” Uncle Joshua and Aunt Pea stared at her with a fearful intensity. Sarah took the letter from her pocket and unfolded it and put it into her aunt’s hands.

Penelope read without pause or exclamation, but her eyes moved nervously as wasps around a threatened nest. “Well,” she said when she came to the end, then turned the letter back to its beginning and read it through again. She had left an unfinished doughnut beside her coffee cup, but when she finished rereading the letter, her fingers remembered, if her pride did not, and presently had stuffed into her mouth the remains of the doughnut she had seemed to abandon in the air of emotion. “Well. And how is it I have known nothing of this?”

“You remember our going to the play, Aunt Pea—you, Lauretta, and I?”

“Shakespeare is better ignored than read, better read than seen performed; I have always said so. The words made flesh are—” She shivered and pursed her lips.

Sarah told her everything she knew, blaming herself to the point of boasting, for what had happened. Penelope made her tell it all again. When the story was twice told, she declared that she should never as long as she lived recover from the blow, that Lauretta had lost her good name and by now must have sailed from Port Wentworth to Boston or New York, that she and—her husband (she steeled herself to use the word, and then hoped that it was true) had gone by stage coach to Atlanta. The next second she decided they had traveled west toward Alabama, or north into Carolina. Or perhaps they were still in Port Wentworth.