Perhaps it was the unfamiliarity of her surroundings, but sleep refused to hold her for anything more than a few short bursts. She reposed, her limbs aching and eyes burning. She listened to the furnace pressing warm air through the floor vents, watched the black kaleidoscope of tree limb shadows as they splayed across the high white ceiling.

Suddenly there was sunlight.

Maxine was confused by the impossibility of the golden light that had begun to glimmer upon the ceiling and the far wall. Dawn was still many hours away; a fact that flirted with Maxine’s curious nature. She rose from the bed and moved to the window, shivering at the arctic draft that oozed through the window’s edges.

The vantage from the mansion’s third storey only deepened Maxine’s already great appreciation of the property, both its scope and its pristineness. Up here, she was able to see the source of the golden light quite plainly: it was pouring from the misshapen shack in the greenery. Seeing now the sheer symmetry of the gardens emphasized how ugly and incongruous the little structure was. It did not belong here.

‘Maybe it’s you who doesn’t belong,’ Maxine said to herself, then immediately hushed her doubting mind.

The golden light suddenly became a backdrop for flickering movements. Black shapes began to flitter in the micro-cabin’s tiny window; shapes that became elongated into a mass of lean, ropy things that pulsed and flexed like characters in a shadow-play, with the pearly snow acting as a screen. Maxine stared hard at the guttering light from the window, wanting deeply, though inexplicably, to see, to know what was occurring beyond it.

A few moments later she received her answer, or a portion of at it least.

The amber light shrank and was extinguished, and shortly thereafter a figure emerged from the micro-cabin. It turned and secured the stout wooden door, then made haste along one of the stone paths that led from the gardens to the great house.

Identification was impossible at first, given Maxine’s distance, as well as the flowing, shapeless garment that the figure wore. But once the figure reached the pooled light from the house’s security lamps Maxine could see beyond any doubt that it was Mrs. Whitlock. The colourless overcoat she wore flapped like a cloak in the frigid night wind.

*

“Good morning, my dear,” Mrs. Whitlock said as Maxine entered the sitting room. The warmth in her voice was a quality Maxine had not detected on the afternoon of her and Xavier’s arrival.

“Good morning,” she returned with reticence.

“Slept well, I hope.”

“Very,” Maxine lied. “How did you sleep?”

“A few hours, but enough. At my age one doesn’t need much sleep.”