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Leveret’s note on the table. Reverend Chubb’s address was the parish rectory, John Maypole’s seemed nearby, the widow Mary Jaxon’s was in Shaw’s Court, Rose Molyneux’s was in Candle Court. There was no address for Miss Charlotte Hannay.
    The widow Jaxon sounded like the best choice, more likely to be home, readier to gossip. As he picked up the paper he caught sight through the open bedroom door of a man in a mirror. Someone in a slouch hat, bad beard and eyes staring back like two dim candles.
    Blair was not quite as ready for an excursion as he’d imagined. He had no sooner climbed into a cab before he passed out. Between black spells he was vaguely aware of shopping streets giving way to foundries, the sharp fumes of dye works, a bridge, and then row upon row of brick houses. He revived as the carriage pulled up.
    The driver said, “This is Candle Court.”
    Blair said, “I wanted Shaw’s Court.”
    “You told me Candle Court.”
    If Blair had made a mistake, he didn’t have the strength to correct it. He got out and told the driver to wait.
    “Not here. I’ll be on the other side of the bridge.” The driver turned his cab around briskly in retreat.
    The street was a paved trench between row houses built for miners by mineowners, two stories side to side, under a single roofline of Welsh slate so that it was impossible to tell one house from another except by their doors. It was a maze of shadow and brick. The gas jets of streetlights were far apart, and most illumination came from the paraffin lamps of beerhouses and pubs, or open windows where sausages, oysters or hams were for sale. Everyone else seemed to be at the evening meal; he heard a sea sound of voices within.
    According to Leveret the Molyneux girl lived at no. 21. When he knocked on the door it swung open.
    “Rose Molyneux? Miss Molyneux?”
    As he stepped into a parlor the door closed behind him. Enough of the street’s faint light entered for him to see chairs, table and a cabinet filling the tight space. He had anticipated worse. Miners’ houses usually had families of ten or more, plus lodgers stepping over and on top of each other. This was as quiet as a sanctuary. Relatively prosperous, too. The cabinet displayed ornamental pots: a ceramic Duke of Wellington, with his hooknose, was the only one Blair could identify.
    The next room was lit by a rear window. Heat and the aroma of milk and sugar emanated from a kitchen range. A large pan of hot water sat on top. Blair opened the oven and raised the lid of the pot inside. Rice pudding. Two plates for it lay on a table. Washtubs crowded in the corner and, curiously, a full-length mirror. A hooked rug softened the boards of the floor. On the wall opposite the range a flight of stairs rose to a quiet bedroom floor.
    Feet shuffled outside. Blair looked through the window at a miniature yard with a washboiler, slopstonefor washing and a pig rubbing against the slats of its pen. The pig raised its eyes yearningly. Someone was expected home.
    Blair knew that to wait outside would be self-defeating because any loitering stranger was, until proven otherwise, a bill collector to be avoided. He went into the parlor to sit, but neighbors were passing by the front window and he couldn’t lower the curtain without drawing attention: a lowered curtain was a public notice of death among miners. Odd he remembered that, he thought.
    He retreated to the kitchen and sank into a chair set in the shadow of the stairs. The fever was between swings, leaving him limp. He told himself that when he heard the front door open he could return to the parlor. As he tipped back into shadow the wall pushed his hat forward over his face. He closed his eyes—just for a second, he told himself. The sweetness of the pudding scented the dark.
    He opened his eyes as she stepped into the bath. She had lit a lamp but turned the wick low. She was black with silvery glints of mica, and her hair was twisted up and pinned. She