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asked.
    Simon shrugged. "Safe enough. The wood shores up the grave. And it's clay, so it's not likely to cave in. Holds itself up. It's sand you got to watch out for. Sand's easier to dig but it don't hold. Sand's deadly."
    "Oh, do stop talking about such tedious things!" Lavinia cried. "We want you to show us some angels."
    "Leave him alone, Lavinia," I said. "Can't you see he's working?" While I love Lavinia--she is my best friend, after all--she is rarely interested in what I am. She never wants to look through the telescope Daddy sets up in the garden, for instance, or dig about in the Encyclopaedia Britannica at the library. I wanted to ask Simon more about the graves and the digging but Lavinia wouldn't let me.
    "Maybe later, when this is done," Simon said.
    "We only have half an hour," I explained. "Jenny said."
    "Who's Jenny?"
    "Our maid."
    "Where's she now?"
    "Up in the village. We left her by the gate."
    "She met a man," Ivy May said.
    Simon looked at her. "Who's this, then?"
    "Ivy May. My little sister," Lavinia said. "But she's wrong. You didn't see any man, did you, Maude?"
    I shook my head, but I wasn't sure.
    "He had a wheelbarrow and she followed him into the cemetery," Ivy May insisted.
    "Did he have red hair?" Simon asked.
    Ivy May nodded.
    "Oh, him. He'll be knocking her, then."
    "What, someone's hitting Jenny?" I cried. "Then we must go and rescue her!"
    "Nah, not hitting," Simon said. "It's--" He looked at me and Lavinia and stopped. "Never mind. 'Tis nothing."
    Simon's pa laughed from down the hole. "Got yourself all tangled up there, boy! Forgot who you was talking to. Got to be careful what you say if you're going to mix with them girls!"
    "Hush, our Pa."
    "We'd best go," I said, uneasy now about Jenny. "I'm sure half an hour's gone now. Which is the quickest path back to the main gate?"
    Simon pointed at a statue of a horse a little way away. "Take the path by the horse and follow it down."
    "Not that way!" Lavinia cried. "That's straight through the Dissenters!"
    "So?" Simon said. "They won't bite you. They're dead."
    The Dissenters' section is where all the people who are not Church of England are buried--Catholics, mostly, as well as Baptists and Methodists and other sorts. I've heard suicides are buried back there, though I didn't say that to Lavinia. I've only walked through it twice. It wasn't so different from the rest of the cemetery, but I did feel peculiar, as if I were in a foreign country. "Come, Lavinia," I said, not wanting Simon to think we were judging the Dissenters, "it doesn't matter. Besides, wasn't your mother Catholic before she married your father?" I'd found a rosary tucked under a cushion at Lavinia's house recently and their char Elizabeth had told me.
    Lavinia flushed. "No! And what would it matter if she were?"
    "It doesn't matter--that's just what I'm saying."
    "I know," Simon interrupted. "If you want you can go back by the sleeping angel. Have you seen it? It's on the main path, not in the Dissenters."
    We shook our heads.
    "I'll show you--it's not far. I'm just off for a tick, our Pa," he called down into the hole.
    Simon's pa grunted.
    "C'mon, quick." Simon ran down the path and we hurried after him. This time even Ivy May ran.
    We had never seen the angel he showed us. All the other angels in the cemetery are walking or flying or pointing or at least standing and bowing their heads. This one was lying on its side, wings tucked under it, fast asleep. I didn't know angels needed sleep as humans do.
    Lavinia adored it, of course. I preferred to talk more about grave digging, but when I turned to ask Simon something about the Lamb's box, he was gone. He had run back to his grave without saying good-bye.
    At last I managed to drag Lavinia away from the angel, but when we got back to the main gate, Jenny wasn't there. I still didn't understand what Simon had meant about her and the man, and was a little worried. Lavinia wasn't bothered, though. "Let's go to the mason's yard