Page 2

"You'll want to go back."

Audrey screamed. Her hip buckled and she caught herself on the wall and raised the cane and the lantern toward the voice, high and fast, the flame lurching behind the glass.

The light found him, or rather, the light found the edges of him. A man, broad enough to fill the passage, standing on the other side of the hole with his arms at his sides as though he'd been there for some time. Dark hair fell across his face, hiding his eyes. Shirtsleeves and trousers, nothing else. No coat, no cravat, no concession to propriety or cold. He stood like the house itself, planted, indifferent, half swallowed by the dark, and the lantern flame bent toward him and guttered.

"Stand back," she said. Her voice was shaking and so were her hands. "I have…" The lantern went higher, the light flickering rapidly. "Stand back or I will…" The cane went higher this time.

"Go out the way you came." His voice was low and unhurried. "Come round to the side door."

"You are trespassing. Get out."

He did not answer. He turned around.

"This is my house," she said to the back of his head. "Leave or I will send for the constable."

But he was already walking away, moving with the ease of a man who knew where every crack and gap and rotten board lay. He walked into the black and disappeared up the stairs.

"Stop!" Audrey shouted. "Come back here this instant! I demand you identify…"

A door clicked shut somewhere in the back of the house.

She stood in the silence of her own shaky breath, uncertain whether to enter where a stranger slept or walk back out into the unknown.

Shelter with a stranger proved preferable to the elements. This was a practical decision, she told herself.

She grabbed the trunk and dragged it round the side of the house. The path was mud, the trunk catching on every stone, her hip a white-hot blaze from her spine to her knee. But she would sleep in this house or die on its doorstep before she let her body decide for her.

The side door opened with the same key. She studied the floor carefully before stepping onto the flagstone, enraged by the fact that this man had been living in her house and had not cared enough about the front entrance to keep it from swallowing people.

The kitchen was large and cold. A heel of bread on the table. One plate. One knife. A dish of butter. A rind of cheese.

She picked up the bread and spread the butter thick. The bread was stale and the butter was on the edge, but hunger and exhaustion overruled both. Her husband had left her two hundred pounds upon his death, with all his fortune to be enjoyed by his heir, and she had held onto the sum, determined not to spend a penny of it on anything other than gaining her freedom.

Through the kitchen she could see a staircase, and above her she heard footsteps crossing a room.

Audrey dragged the trunk to the stairs. They were narrow and steep and her hip was finished, absolutely finished. One step at a time she pulled the trunk up, banging it against every riser. Good. Let him hear her coming.

"I don't know who you are," she said, loud, to the footsteps above. Bang. Another step. "And I do not care." Bang. "This is my house." Bang. "I have the deed." Bang. "And you are going to pack whatever you own." Bang. "And leave by tomorrow or I will fetch the magistrate and have you removed."

The landing opened onto a corridor with four doors, three open and one closed. She stood outside the closed one and knocked.

"Did you hear me?"

Silence.

"I will not sleep in a house with a stranger." She pounded on the door. "You may sleep in the shed. Or the stable."

Nothing.

"Answer me, you brute! Open this door or I…"

What? Break it down? Walk through the dark until she found a village and begged for help?

She pressed her forehead against the door and closed her eyes. The wood was cold. The familiar feeling of helplessness threatened to drown her.

"I am not leaving," she said, quieter now, not to him but to herself. "I am not."

She picked up her trunk and peered through the open doors. The closed one was presumably the brute's. The room across from it was the only one that smelled of lavender instead of dry dust. She looked at his door, then at the bed with its lavender counterpane.