The O’Laughlens are half a block up the street. “Wilkes!” they cry and he dashes ahead to walk with them. Edwin’s friend John Sleeper appears. He says hello to Edwin and nothing at all to Asia, but he reaches over, takes her books from her. Sleeper is a tall, awkward boy with a messy head of curls. They walk a few blocks and then Sleeper hands her books back, as Asia’s school is to the right and the boys’ to the left.

School is school and everything there seems quite ordinary and all as it should be. The fact that Edwin smells like pig shit is remarked on. Perhaps as recompense, Miss Hyde asks him to read aloud “The Wreck of the Hesperus.” She finds his performance surprisingly lethargic, notes the shadows under his eyes, and sends him back home.

As he turns onto North Exeter, he sees a woman ascending the steps of his house. The brim of her black silk bonnet is so old-fashionedly large, it entirely hides her profile. He watches her knock. No one comes. He slows his footsteps rather than encounter this woman at his own front door. She’s leaning across the railing now, looking through the window into the parlor, which is very nosy of her and something he thinks she shouldn’t be doing.

Harriet Struthoff is standing in the doorway of her next-door grocery, her hair falling from its pins, burlap apron over her shirtwaist. She calls his name as he passes. “Why aren’t you at school, young master?”

“Miss Hyde sent me home, because I wasn’t feeling well.”

“You’ll find the house empty,” Miss Struthoff says. “Your mother took Rose and Joe to the farm this morning. She told me to tell you all not to worry. Everything is fine. But will you be all right on your own?”

“Are they coming back?” Edwin asks.

Harriet’s older sister is calling for her. “Of course,” Miss Struthoff says. The calling is more insistent. “Only I don’t know when. Now, you come right over here if you need any little thing. Milk or bread or something sweet.” She disappears down the steps into the store.

All this time, the other woman, the woman in the black bonnet, has been walking towards him. “You’re Junius Booth’s boy?” she asks.

Edwin admits to it.

He’s never seen this woman before. She’s old, but not elderly. Under the shadow of her bonnet brim, deep lines frame her mouth and cross her forehead. The bit of hair the bonnet doesn’t cover is the color of rusty iron. Her accent is almost British, but with something mixed in. Edwin practices reproducing her accent in his head. He’s good at mimicry. “Are you from England?” Edwin asks the woman. “I went to England once.”

The woman responds with a sharp inhale of air. “When was this then?”