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to find him: his mother and father and Francis’s predecessor, a man named Thom O’Connor, all traipsing around the gardens and up into the hills, before finally tracking him down here, at the lip of the tarn, cold, but not much wet, and happy. He knew that by the time they got him ready to go, he’d miss at least the first day, which he did. As did his brother, who, always more intrepid than John, didn’t hide his scorn that his younger sibling resorted to such tricks. The similarity between that day and this isn’t lost on him now.
    Hours later he walks on towards home, trying to calculate the movers’ progress. They might have left the house and gone down to the cottage—or they might have finished altogether. He can’t see Marianne and the children like this, disheveled and a little bloody. When he opens the gate to the gardens, the moving men have indeed disappeared. Crunching across the gravel, he tries to open Dulough’s front door. It’s locked. It takes him a few moments to absorb that he must go around to the back.
    The kitchen looks as it always has, saucepans hanging from hooks above the range, the row of porcelain hot water bottles on a shelf by the door, the battery of servants’ bells labeled “Drawing Room,” “Dining Room,” “Bedroom One,” “Bedroom Two,” all the way up to “Ten.” Grateful that the kitchen hasn’t changed, he moves through the passage into the house proper. The hall has always been a bare room, if one can call a hall a room, but now it is utterly empty. Even the tapestry of the hunt has been taken, leaving a long, dark stain on the wall. The drawing room and dining room are empty too, but for their gold mirrors, still hanging over the fireplaces, too big to go anywhere but there. They reflect the rooms back twice their size and so, like the hall, they seem much bigger than before. Now that the furniture is gone, he can see the colors the wallpaper used to be, a deep burgundy in the dining room, and in the drawing room, a silvery moss green.
    He has almost grown used to the empty spaces but when he finally goes upstairs, his own bedroom shocks him. Where he left his sleeping wife that morning, there is a spool of twine on the carpet. In that strange duality that can exist in the mind, the one that allows us to make two appointments at three o’clock on the same day, John, knowing that the furniture would be gone, has come up here to get a clean shirt and a pair of socks from his wardrobe. He looks out the bay window, glad that the view is the same as always when what is behind him has changed so completely. Because the bed was the last place he saw Marianne, he half believes that she has disappeared and he feels the need to find her, to see if she is all right.
    He goes into the bathroom adjoining their bedroom; if he is honest, he looks better than expected. The walk has done him good. His cheeks are pink, like his daughter’s, and he looks somewhat rested. But that doesn’t solve the problem of not having a shirt; without it, he looks strange, not himself at all. When he puts his nose in his jumper to see whether it smells very bad, he realizes that a V-shape has been tattooed into his chest by the sun and the wind. He splashes water on his face and puts some in his hair, running his fingers through it as best he can; there is no comb and no towel. Really, he needs a bath. The bottom of his right trouser leg still has some blood on it, but he hopes not noticeably so. Fortunately, downstairs, no one has thought to remove the old coats that hang above a line of boots by the back door. He rummages in the coats and comes up with a scarf, which he ties neatly around his neck as he makes his way down the avenue to his new home.
    In the cottage, he finds Marianne in Philip’s room, pulling the wet bedclothes off his bed.
    “Darling.” Marianne brushes her hair out of her eyes. “Where have you been? ”
    He quiets her by putting his hands over her ears and kissing