Such a house it was. There couldn’t be more screeching and shouting in hell. Miller tried to sort out all the children for him. The four older girls were his daughters, busy as could be at half a dozen jobs, each one carrying on separate arguments with each of her sisters, at the top of her voice, passing from quarrel to quarrel as her work took her from room to room. The screaming baby was a grandchild, as were the five toddlers playing Roundheads and Cavaliers on and under the dining table. The mother, Faith, seemed oblivious to it all as she labored in the kitchen. Occasionally she’d reach out to cuff a nearby child, but otherwise she didn’t let them interrupt her work—or her steady stream of orders, rebukes, threats, and complaints.

“How do you keep your wits together, in all this?” Taleswapper asked her.

“Wits?” she asked him sharply. “Do you think anyone with wits would put up with this?”

Miller showed him to his room. That’s what he called it, “your room, as long as you care to stay.” It had a large bed and a feather pillow, and blankets, too, and half of one wall was the back of the chimney, so it was warm. Taleswapper hadn’t been offered a bed like this in all his wandering. “Promise me that your name isn’t really Procrustes,” he said.

Miller didn’t understand the allusion, but it didn’t matter, he knew the look on Taleswapper’s face. No doubt he’d seen it before. “We don’t put our guests in the worst room, Taleswapper, we put them in the best. And no more talk about that.”

“You have to let me work for you tomorrow, then.”

“Oh, there’s jobs to do, if you’re good with your hands. And if you ain’t ashamed of women’s work, my wife could use a help or two. We’ll see what happens.” At that, Miller left the room and closed the door behind him.

The noise of the house was only partly dampened by the closed door, but it was a music that Taleswapper didn’t mind hearing. It was only afternoon, but he couldn’t help himself. He swung off his pack and pried off his boots and eased himself down on the mattress. It rustled like a straw tick, but there was a feather mattress on top of that, so it was deep and soft. And the straw was fresh, and dried herbs hung by the hearthstones to give it the smell of thyme and rosemary. Did I ever lie upon so soft a bed in Philadelphia? Or before that, in England? Not since I left my mother’s womb, he thought.