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and did not add, Or the ridicule in your smile, though I thought it.
    “You must excuse me,” he said. “I do not have a gentleman’s manners. But I will get the stocking for you if you tell me where to find it.”
    “No. I will fetch it myself.” To have this stranger opening one of the drawers where my intimate clothes lay would be embarrassing. And I had no wish to remain in this room, on my own, with Lamb.
    He shrugged. “As you wish.”
    “May I ask why Lamb appears to fear you?” I asked.
    Eli moved across the room to where the dog lay, and petted him. He looked up at me. “He senses that I am more formidable than he is.”

CHAPTER SIX
    I STRUGGLED UP THE NARROW STAIRS. My stockings were in a drawer with my pantaloons and shifts and the stays that I hoped never to wear while I was here. I chose my only black stockings and found that I could, albeit with extreme discomfort, maneuver one of them over my right foot. My decision to go with Eli, however humiliating, was the correct one. It was strange how he described himself as formidable, though Lamb appeared to agree.
    I went back downstairs without my shoe, looking first at Lamb and then at Eli. The dog lay curled in a ball, his paws shielding his eyes.
    “What is it that ails him?” I asked. “He looks ill. He cannot still be fearful!”
    “He will recover,” Eli said.
    “I am ready now to go with you,” I told him.
    We left Raven’s Roost and walked side by side through the coarse grass. A nettle, tall and poisonous, stung my hand.
    I blew on my skin where a red rash was already beginning.
    “Here.” Eli pulled a leaf from the plant beside it, raised my hand, and rubbed the leaf on the blisters. I felt relief almost immediately.
    “Usually the dock leaf and the nettle grow together,” he said. “The harm one does, the other eases.”
    His face was close to mine. His gaze unnerved me. I forced myself to concentrate on the sting, though it was no longer troubling me.
    I seemed to be short of breath.
    He released his hold on me.
    “You are very pale,” he said. “I had wished my grandmother could come to you, but she told me she had to be by her own fire and have her own ingredients to hand.”
    “It is very kind of her to see me at all,” I said.
    I was having trouble walking. It was humpity underfoot, and the holes in the grass caught my shoe, jerking me enough one time to make me yelp.
    “May I carry you again?”
    I looked for that mockery and ridicule in his voice but did not hear it. I stopped, facing him, feeling the dampness of sweat on my forehead.
    “It would be easier on me,” I said. “But I fear the unseemliness of it would distress me. Think me foolish, if you will. But I will persevere.”
    He shrugged.
    “I will, however, hold on to your arm again,” I added.
    Without another word, he proffered his arm, his bare arm, sun-warmed and smooth, and I clasped it, wondering briefly what Mrs. Chandler would have to say if she could see me.
     
    We spoke little on the way to his grandmother’s house. I was busy with my thoughts and with my attempt not to show the pain that came with each step I took.
    Why had Lamb been afraid of Eli? I pondered this as we walked side by side across stubble and through the wild heather. Had Eli once ill-used the dog? Had he kicked him? Tormented him? Could that have been what he meant when he’d said he was “formidable”?
    None of this seemed in keeping with what I had seen of Eli.
    But who knew what could be hidden under a handsome exterior?
    There was something else bothering me. Why was I so discomfited by his presence? Why did I feel heat rise in me when I allowed myself to glance up at him? Was I just a silly female, dithery in the presence of a comely young man? I must work on suppressing that at once.
    “We are here,” he said.
    The house was small, much smaller than Raven’s Roost, with only one story. Roses climbed around the lintel. Seashells lined the path that led to the door,