If there was comfort, it lay in the fact that Ellen had bogged down completely. She, who was so articulate when speaking, stiffened into trite phrases and stilted sentences as soon as she put pen to paper. And they both decided that Jem had been extremely clever to concentrate his powers on dates and tables, and leave the real work to others.

“The trouble, of course,” Christina said after struggling along for what seemed like hours and was less than one, “is that when you start to write you discover how little you know. I have a sense of the structure of the house, so to speak, but it is bare of furniture, rugs, all the things that make a house the personal thing it is, that would make a person walking into it sense what sort of life had been lived in it. Oh dear!”

“Well, surely you have a pretty good idea about the sort of life.”

“Yes, but what I realize more and more is that it is the small details that count. It’s all very well to talk about Sophia’s pluck and imagination, but I need facts—facts and more facts, Cornelius. And I need to know so much more than I do about the period itself. I get stopped all the time by ignorance.”

Christina laid down her pad on the pile of books she had been dipping into and had then set aside in a sort of desperation. Anyway, it was time to think about a drink and supper, time to draw the curtains against the bitter-cold dark outside.

“Strange,” Cornelius murmured, “but that sound of the curtain rings being drawn always brings Mary to mind. You remember how she used to come in on her silent feet and draw the curtains after dinner. Those were summer nights. My mother played Chopin. My father read the Wall Street news and smoked a cigar.”

Christina stood there a moment, one hand on his shoulder.

“My mother …” Cornelius murmured. But whatever he had meant to say sank down into silence, and Christina tiptoed out to the kitchen.

Later that evening the phone rang to tell them that Jane had slipped away in her sleep. She had not, after all, been able to make her great journey lucid. For days she had been unconscious, while the doctor came and went, but there was nothing to do but wait for the weak heartbeat to stop. The minister would spend the night in the house, and he assured Christina that Hannah was all right. Luckily the doctor had left her a sedative on his last call that afternoon.

“She died as she had lived, in perfect gentleness,” Dr. Park assured Christina.