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with a couple of charred chestnuts, ignoring the glares of the chestnut roaster.
    Little Bettys Tea Rooms — known, according to Peggy’s guidebook, for its bizarre Yorkshire specialties like fruitcake served with a slab of cheese — was housed in a small black-painted shop, the sign above the door shaped like a teapot. Its window was stacked with tea canisters, holiday chocolates wrapped in gold and red foil, and bowls of glazed buns. The line for the tearooms upstairs was long, so they got only as far as the tiny downstairs shop, buying a selection of fluffy scones and jam tarts to take back to the flat. Rob said he’d wait outside, until he spotted a pretty blond girl behind the counter. He loped over, asking inane and unnecessary questions about why their shortbread was so long and why they sold coffee when Bettys called itself a tearoom.
    “So much for the claustrophobia,” Miranda teased him on the way out. White Christmas lights sparkled above her head, strung across narrow, stone-paved Stonegate. Ahead of them, York Minster soared into the bleak winter sky. It was massive, built on a muchlarger scale than any of these twee shops and low-ceilinged pubs.
    “What do you mean?” Rob looked innocent.
    “I mean, that place is way smaller than Margaret Clitherow’s chapel.”
    “I’m just interested in the local cuisine,” he said breezily. “Unlike you, I’m intellectually curious.”
    “Curiouser and curiouser,” Miranda retorted. “And pathetically transparent.”
    “Stonegate, you know,” said Jeff, falling back to walk alongside them when Peggy paused outside another shop, “was once the Via Praetoria, a major Roman road that led to the river — and to the main entrance to the city.”
    “You should tell Rob all this,” Miranda said. “Apparently, he’s intellectually curious.”
    They made a few more stops in other stores, then returned to the flat. As Miranda was unwinding her scarf from around her neck, she realized that she didn’t have her gloves.
    “I remember taking them off in the National Trust shop,” she told her mother. “I must have left them on the counter or something.”
    She was annoyed with herself about doing something so stupid. The gloves were suede, a gift from her grandparents.
    “After we eat, we can walk back over,” Jeff suggested, but half an hour later it was obvious that nobody felt like doing much of anything. Rob had found a soccer matchto watch on TV, Jeff was falling asleep reading the newspaper, and Peggy had already dozed off on the sofa.
    “I’ll go,” Miranda whispered to Rob, who was slumped in an armchair. “I won’t be long.”
    “I’ll go with you,” Rob said. “You might have left them in Little Bettys.”
    “No — I know I had them when we walked out of there. They aren’t being held for ransom by the object of your affection, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
    He grinned, then looked back at the television. “Okay. Then you don’t mind going out by yourself?”
    Miranda shook her head. She hadn’t seen Margaret Clitherow on the Shambles today. But maybe — just maybe — she’d spot the guy from the attic. Though she’d wondered, on the way back today, how he’d managed to get in and out of what looked like a boarded-up house. Not to mention what he was doing living in an almost derelict building.
    All of yesterday’s snow had melted, yet it felt colder now — much colder. There seemed to be no ghosts (or guys) along the Shambles, so Miranda marched down Goodramgate, hoping it was the quickest way to get back to the shop. To her relief, the woman in the floral smock behind the counter remembered her, and handed over the gloves.
    Back on Goodramgate, Miranda almost collided with a group of people — laughing, swinging shopping bags — emerging from one of the many little lanes wending away from the street. Maybe this was a shortcut to the Shambles.A snickelway, as Lord Poole said. Without stopping to think, Miranda