Ahead, situated behind a carriage house, I spotted a stable: dark, covered, with several haystacks forming a boulder that stood twice as tall as me. I aimed straight for it, still urging Nella along, but her grimace told me that she was in real pain. Her face, which a moment ago was a beating, angry red, had gone pale.

Nella and I passed by the carriage house and slithered through a wooden gate leading to the stables. There was a horse in the center stall and he exhaled nervously at our approach, as though sensing danger. We made our way to the stall at the far left, halfway hidden by the carriage house.

Here, at last, Nella and I crumbled to the ground, which was covered mostly in remnants of loose hay. It felt like being back in Swindon again, inside the stables where I used to fall asleep instead of doing my chores. I avoided a spot toward the center with a pile of horse dung, but Nella paid no attention to where she sat.

“You are well?” I asked between my own desperate breaths.

She nodded her head weakly.

Crouching down to seek out an opening in the wall where I could peek out, I found a penny-size hole so close to the ground that I had to kick aside a pile of soiled hay and lie on my belly. Peering through the hole, I was relieved to see nothing awry. No officers searched the area, no dogs sniffed the scent of a newcomer, there was not so much as a stable attendant doing chores.

But I was not so naive to believe we were out of harm’s way, so I held my position on the damp ground. For the next few minutes, I alternated between deeply inhaling in order to catch my breath, checking the peephole for any movement outside and glancing at Nella, who remained very still and had not spoken a word to me since we left the shop.

As I lay there and watched her slowing breath and the way she brushed an unruly curl from her face, I remembered the very moment that brought us to this one, the night we slept in another stable after beetle-hunting. That was the night that Nella had revealed so much to me: her love for Frederick, his betrayal of her and everything that led her to live a life as a poisoner of brothers, husbands, masters, sons.

Peeking out again, movement caught my eye. Given the tiny hole through which I looked, I tried to move my eye around the narrow field of vision, to little avail. I waited, my heart thundering in my chest.