A gong at six the next morning announced breakfast. At eight Jonathan had a lesson in Helen’s study. At four he had another. After the first day he added twenty words to his vocabulary cards each time he saw her. Back in his room he studied the cards, drew circles and loops on the writing pad and wrote out letters until his fingers refused to open or shut around the pen. He worked late into the night, and during the third month his head began to buzz from the inside as though he were drunk. He had not slept easily or well since his emancipation nearly seven years before, but now sleep often escaped him entirely. He seemed to float through a furious haze of words, words in formation, words in chaos, words brilliantly colored, words formless. If he did manage sleep, he dreamed his tobacco-worm nightmare with such intensity that his hands tore at the delicate material of the sheets when he woke; so he tied his hands together – which made sleeping more difficult still. During the fourth month his back began to ache in ways it had never ached on the railroad or even at the Stoke homestead; his eyes smarted. He sat at his desk, picked up his Reader, and found himself five minutes later staring through the window, out over fields, over the splashy colors of October foliage to a bank of pines and the tidal land beyond, where sometimes there was ocean and sometimes a sodden mud waste.

On the last night of November, a cold hard sleet forced its way down through the snow. He undressed and blew out the candle. In the dark someone took hold of his wrist.

He jerked his arm back. Heart pounding, he relit the candle and squinted into the corners of the room. It had been a gentle touch, more of a caress than a grasp, but he had no doubt that it was real. He got out of bed, searched under his desk, behind the chest of drawers, in the closet; he couldn’t find even a small night animal sheltering from the weather. He leaned out the window. Nobody. Nothing. Only when the candle began to gutter did he get back into bed. He sat up the rest of the night, back firm against the wall behind him, staring into the dark until a grizzling, wintery gray moved in over the tidal land outside.

A few nights later as he lay under his embroidered coverlet watching, he felt the touch again, and this time, eyes open, searching the room, the window, the desk, the mirror, he knew there was nothing at all to be seen. He waited tensely for several nights more. When the third touch came it was lighter than before and accompanied by the sense – he swore to it in his diaries, though he too thought it insane by the time he wrote about it – accompanied by the sense of a spectral presence. This presence – the word is his, not mine – had shape, form, mass, integrity, and yet there was nothing to be seen and after that first night, nothing to be felt. The next time, a week or so later, he could not say what told him the presence was there. It moved toward him and stood beside him, no more than a foot away from his bed. He coiled his body against attack. But the presence was already gone.