I do not sleep. There is another place, of not-sleep, that I can freely enter where one may dream but find no rest. It is like a room with a door that leans open. I try to resist it, but time and again am drawn there, poke open that door, slip my face (only my face!) around its frame. Inside sits another me, an iron ring around his neck, and the wallpaper stages a ball of a thousand grandes dames dancing. Gold leaf on mauve. As the Smoke pours out of me (the other me, the one I am watching), I burn my own silhouette into the wall. It discommodes the dancers. When dawn breaks through the open curtains, I am exhausted, my face still swollen like a pumpkin. Outside, the pheasant whose steady patrol was so much a part of our stay here is nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he is no longer with us. We had pheasant soup last night.

The morning does not go to plan. The coach is there, and Thorpe has sent servants to have our luggage loaded, but up on the box sits not Harrington, the coachman who drove us here, but Mr. Price, a heavy shotgun thrown across his thighs. When I ask him what he thinks he is doing up there, he spits some phrases into his muffler.

“Lady’s orders. A band of Gypsies. Sighted not ten leagues from here. Job calls for someone good with a gun. Just in case.”

He cuts himself a plug of tobacco, sets to chewing it. Thorpe opens the door for us, his face blank of emotion. Charlie climbs in first.

“In a few hours we’ll be on the express,” he says.

A jolt of envy runs through me. Charlie’s soul is knit for hope. Mine’s stuck in the mud of the things that may go wrong.

Nobody waves us off. The moment the door is closed, Thorpe turns away, climbs the stairs to the manor. The sun is coming out, chasing mist along the ground. The crunch of gravel as the wheels start turning. There is a window at the back of the carriage; both Charlie and I press a brow to it, watch us pull away. We leave a pile of horse dung in our wake. Some dogs bark, a rooster hails the morning. Then we pass the gate.

Within two hundred yards of the manor house we stop. Before we can open the door to see what is going on, we hear Price’s voice, remonstrating with someone.

“Impossible. I’m not instructed to—” and “Does your mother know?”

“Drive,” says Livia, entering the coach in a skirt and jacket made of dark wool. “I am seeing the gentlemen to the station. Quick now, or we will miss the train.”

Reluctantly, Price puts the coach in motion. Livia sits down across from us and stares at us in grim pallor.