She sets aside the book and walks to the window. Not the one with the lamp, the dark one, though her mind craves something light, something coppery and joyful. Craves Wilfred. His absurd figure. Big, plain, bony, ginger head atop long, spindly, freckled limbs. Laugh like sunshine. She’s drawn to the thought of him like birds are drawn to the sky. But no. No sky for her. No sunshine. The hateful gazes of her sisters-in-law, blaming her for this catastrophe, for all catastrophes: that’s what she deserves.

Elfriede lifts the curtain and stares through the glass. The peculiar darkness before dawn, the coldest time of day. Naturally the master’s bedroom occupies a favored position at the back of Schloss Kleist, overlooking the formal gardens and the lake beyond, on which Gerhard used to take her rowing. A deep, pure lake, stocked with fish. On the opposite shore begins the woods, thickening eventually into acres of untouched forest, where Gerhard sometimes went hunting for boar. Altogether the estate is from another age, a feudal age. You might be gazing five hundred years into the past, gazing out this window. Except, at this hour, you can’t see anything at all.

And yet. And yet.

There it is again. A tiny flash of white. On the ground below, the terrace, reflecting the light from the paraffin lamp in the other window.

A strange fear grips Elfriede’s heart. Now her eyes adjust. The flash becomes an object, bobbing against the shadows. Elfriede turns and runs out of the room and down the corridor, down the back staircase, out the French door to the terrace. (Noting that the door was ajar.)