Cover Page

Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Editor's Preface

Prologue

Book One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Book Two

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Book Three

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Book Four

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Book Five

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Epilogue

Afterword

About the Author

Also by Laurie R. King

Copyright Page

Dedication

To the ’06 survivors, especially
Robert John Dickson and Florence Frances Adderley,
“Dick” and “Flossie—”
my grandparents

Editor's Preface

Editor's Preface

This is the eighth chapter in the continuing memoirs of Mary Russell, based on a set of manuscripts I received in the early 1990s.* Some of the manuscripts were neatly collated and tied by ribbons; others, comprising as they did varied sizes and qualities of paper, required considerable work to decipher. Still others were mere fragments apparently unrelated to larger bodies of the work, and thus, for lack of a better approach, are best published as short stories.

The following episode in the memoirs looked, at first glance, like a collection of those fragments, but on closer examination I realized that they combined two separate narratives which had been either clumsily filed together, twenty pages here and fifty there, or else roughly interleaved, matching up the chronological progress of both story lines. One document was handwritten in Miss Russell's distinctive script; the other was a typewritten, third-person narrative following the actions of her partner/husband. Certain instances of grammar and punctuation would seem to indicate that the writer (or, typist) was Russell herself, but whether she is transcribing a story given her, or creating a more or less speculative document based on learned material, is anyone's guess. Personally, having had some time to consider the matter, I venture to say that she put together those chapters of her story based on at least two separate accounts, and found that typing them instead of using her customary handwriting provided her a necessary psychological distance from the tale, as did the shift from the personal voice to one of an objective narrator.

But as I say, it's anyone's guess.

I have preserved Miss Russell's third-person material as it appears in the original, although attempting to duplicate her crude day-by-day interleaving of the two viewpoints made me a bit dizzy. Instead, I have allowed the material to accumulate, following several days' story before resuming the alternative account.

Laurie R. King

Freedom, California

Prologue

Prologue

The dreams began when we left Bombay.

Three dreams, over and over, rode the ship with me as we churned south around Cape Comorin and up India's eastern coast, lending their peculiar chill to the steamy nights. Three companions, at my back all the way around the coastline of Asia and across the mis-named Pacific to California.

In the first dream, objects flew.