When I emerged into the front hall, there was no one in sight, and I wandered through the dining room and suddenly found myself pausing at the top of the kitchen stairs. I stood looking down into the dark well, one toe out in the air, making ready to descend. The sound of rushing water came through the pipes beside the door, and for an instant I felt the House spoke out a little. Perhaps this thought nudged my toe downward, and then the next down still more, as I stepped to where she worked.

She stood alone at the sinks, pumping up water into the pipes overhead, her back to me. The sun blanked out the windows before her as it streamed low and bright straight across the kitchen floor, rendering her edgeless for an instant, an enormous dark spot at the center of such light. Blinded, I stopped where I was, the kitchen dizzyingly alive and seeming to spin about this thick old woman whose arm worked the pump in regular strokes, a counterpoint to the steady stream of water rushing through the pipes above us with a motion nearly elemental.

Her arm dropped and her enormous frame wheeled round. “Ah. Maisie Thomas.”

“What have you to tell me?” I could not quash my nerves and my voice skittered out from my mouth.

She considered me for an eternal moment and then replied quite calmly, without a trace of her former violence. “Ask me the question.”

“Cook”—I had lost all ability for nicety, though my voice was soft—“please tell me. Are you Abby?”

She started, an unguarded expression upon her face—one almost of sympathy. “Abby! Nay, nay, she is dead long ago.”

“Mary Ames, then?”

A shiver swept across her frame, and she appraised me from the other side of her table, the several spoons and ladles drying on the towels between us. This time she could see I would not fly, and neither would I bend.

“Cook,” she replied in a queer, high voice. “I am Cook.”

One of the iron servant’s bells rang out, but she did not appear to hear as she advanced, fearful in her earnestness, indeed as if she did have something particular to convey. The bell rang again, louder this time. She looked up into the corner where the bells hung, and then back at me. The impatience in her face just then recalled someone—though read or remembered, I could not say.

“Janie!” she snapped, still looking at me. “There’s the front bedroom calling for you.”

“I am coming, Cook!” the girl replied from the back bowels belowstairs.

“Go on,” Cook invited me.

I looked at her. “I must finish this story.” I crossed my arms at my chest. “I must finish the story Miss Grange gave me before she died.”

“A sight more than a story is what she gave unto you, my girl.” Cook also folded her arms above her heart.