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at my head,” Anna said. “That must be where the blood came from.”
    “I guess that would do it,” Jane mused, “but I would have used a brick, considering the thickness of your skull.”
    Anna smiled, “Yes, you probably would have.” She almost added, I’m going to miss you , but thought better of it. Jane continued heckling, and Anna, whose toes restlessly curled and uncurled around the key in her shoe, continued ignoring her.
    After dinner, Anna walked down the back stairs and into the Great Round Room, struggling not to limp on the lump in her shoe. Her girls followed her through an oak door into the dormitory wing. A corridor stretched out before them, lined with doors on either side. Between the doors, ragged tapestries hung, depicting unicorns and dragons, martyrs in gruesome passion, saints with crooked heads, witches burning at stakes. A single bookcase stood lonely and forgotten half way up the hall.
     
    The bookcase once held secret treasure, back when Anna was a little girl, back when Rebecca had been the head girl and both of them had ten fingers each. Now, only encyclopedias and massive theology tomes burdened its shelves, including several well-worn copies of Malleus Maleficarum. Rebecca had told Anna that Malleus Maleficarum was German for The Witch Hammer. She said it was pretty funny, but Anna refused to touch any of the proper books, just on general principle.
    Anna looked back over her shoulder. Two long tapestries hung on either side of the door through which they had just walked. These tapestries covered the wall from the floor to the vaulted ceiling of the twenty-five foot high corridor. Between them, near the ceiling, a circular window opened into Abbess McCain’s private office. The Abbess’s silhouette darkened the stained glass, her arms folded, her keen eyes peering through the small bit of clear glass at the window’s center.
    One of the girls bumped into Anna. She realized she had stopped in the middle of the hall. Mary One and Mary Two each took one of Anna’s elbows and pulled her into their dormitory. Behind her, Lizzy whispered to Jane, “What’s the matter with her, do you think?”
    “That trowel must have knocked the sense out of her,” Jane said, adding loudly, “not that she had much to begin with.”
    All the girls stared at Anna. She thought back over dinner, Jane’s rhetorical onslaught had been much more intense than usual, and the girls had been staring at her then as well.
    “What?” she asked, after Sister Eustace had counted the girls and locked the arched door behind them. “What is it? Have I grown a tail?”
    The little ones giggled.
    Jane said, “A tail would suit you, to go along with your pitchfork and horns.”
    More laughter mixed with gasps.
    “Anna!” Lizzy said, “You haven’t asked us about the quota!”
    Anna looked around the room. The piles of gray blankets were gone. Her cot was bare, no blanket, no pillow, not even the waffle-thin mattress remained. Laundry day , she remembered. Is it still laundry day?
    “Well,” she asked, “did you make it?”
    “We made it!” Lizzy threw her arms in the air. “We did have to, ‘call out the reserves.’” She added, with a ridiculously overt wink. “But we made it, with two pairs to spare.” She held two fingers out to Anna.
    “Sister Eustace promised to run our radiators tonight,” Jane said. “We’ll see if it does any good.”
    The girls heaped all the straw into great nests around the two radiators. Anna put her smallest girls closest to the heat, then snuggled all the rest up to them. We really do look like a litter of rats , she thought as she curled around Lizzy.
    The radiator banged, as if someone had hit it with a mallet. It hummed, then banged again. It hissed, then vibrated, then rattled. It banged five or six more times in quick succession, before settling in to a routine of random clanks and hisses. That’s going to keep me up all night. I just hope Mary Two doesn’t