Mrs. Mosley looks at him sourly. “Don’t you tell me what to do.”

Her hands are already busy filling a basket. A flask goes in, two cups, and a pair of bloomers so large, Livia will have to gird them with a belt.

“Where are they taking us?” she asks as she accepts the basket some hours later.

The woman gives her a long, solemn look. Perhaps she thinks her men are making a mistake. Or else that Livia and Charlie are.

“Where?” she repeats at long last. “Where we all go in the end. Underground.”

THORPE

The news reaches us at four thirty-three by the tall Comtoise clock in the front parlour. A group of riders bring it, from town, their leader a magistrate, the others good citizens who appear to have nothing better to do. A “posse,” as one of them is heard to say. Keeping the queen’s peace.

There is the news as it is presented to milady; and the news as it knocks on the kitchen door, carried there by a stable hand who talked to one of the townsmen’s valets while he rubbed down his horse. Same information, different words. We get the scenic version ’round the kitchen way: get the gore, the smells, words learned from penny dreadfuls. The horses “butch’red,” the coach “blown all to smithereens”; Mr. Price “slain,” his body “yawning,” belly open to the sun, its contents pilfered by crows. They left him there, this posse. Too heavy to carry; too bloody, too, no doubt, too smelly and messy to sling across one’s horse. A cart will be sent to pick him up.

There is no trace of either of the boys.

Milady, they say, takes it well. I am not there to see it: as luck will have it I am overseeing the annual cleaning of the silver, keeping the maids honest. Counting coffee spoons. I can picture her though, milady: pale and erect, making the man speak his thoughts in order. She has a serving girl carry refreshments out into the yard. I approve. We don’t want the men’s dust in our parlour, nor townsmen loitering in our halls.

Livia is sent for, to be appraised of the news. It is thus that it emerges that she is missing. Her maid says she rose before dawn and put on her travelling clothes. She, the maid, thought nothing of it. Now she is in tears. I shall dismiss her in the morning.

A search ensues. It transpires that a stable boy saw her leave the gate when it was still dark. He was relieving himself by the side of the shed. Did he wonder at her departure? The boy only shrugs. The ways of the gentry are a mystery to him. When I order him to be caned, he blanches and smokes. Ten licks of the rod will do him a world of good.