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someone’s identity was obvious.
    When would the betrayal come? St. Ives wondered, watching the Tipper scuttle on ahead toward the stand of birch. Soon, surely. He felt for the bulge of the pistol tucked inside his waistcoat. Then he reached into his vest pocket and drew out a hastily written letter addressed to Alice. He hadn’t had time to write what he meant—couldn’t find the words to say it. But if it were necessary, and if the fates were willing, he could get the pitiful attempt into Alice’s hands even if he were captured, and she might at least win free and remember him for who he had always meant to be, paving his marriage with good intentions.
    He crumpled the letter into his vest again, where it would be within easy reach, and then hastened forward to where the Tipper stood a few steps back from the edge of the road. The two of them might be hazily visible through the fog when they crossed, although for the moment they were hidden from view. The Tipper mouthed something incomprehensible, but made his meaning clear with a gesture. They crept out into the open, looking carefully north, and for a moment they caught sight of the soldiers again, mere shadows in the murk, before slipping into the forest on the Heathfield side of the road.
    St. Ives experimentally tugged his cap away from his ear, and instantly, as if the space within his mind had been occupied by a ready-built dream, he had the strange notion that he was at a masquerade ball. He had never been a dancer, and he loathed costumes, but now he was elated at the idea of taking a turn about the floor. He saw Alice approaching, although she was a mere wraith, which didn’t strike him as at all odd. She carried a glass of punch, seeming to float toward him atop a shifting bed of leaves. He could see forest shrubbery through her, and an uncanny white mist roiling behind her like smoke. Something was happening to her face. It was melting, like a wax bust in a fire.
    He yanked the cap back down, pressing his hands tightly against his ears. Now there was no Alice, no masquerade. The madness had slipped in like an airborne poison as soon as the door had swung open, and then had evaporated when the door had slammed shut. And yet despite the cap there seemed to be some presence lurking at the edge of his mind, some creature just kept at bay, but straining to be loosed from its bonds. As they neared the village the capering presence in his head became more insistent. He began to hear small, murmuring voices that rose and fell like a freshening wind. Quite distinctly he heard the voice of his mother saying something about a piano. He imagined himself sitting happily on the parlor floor of his childhood home, dressed in knee breeches, watching a top careen around in a wobbly spin, its buzzing sound clear in his ears.
    It came into his mind that his cap might be inferior, that it might be compromised somehow. The Tipper seemed to be sober enough. St. Ives compelled himself to put up a mental struggle, recalling algebraic theorems, settling on Euclid’s lemma, picturing prime numbers falling away like dominoes. He added them together as they ran, tallying sums. A bell began to ring, in among the numbers, it seemed to him, but then ceased abruptly, replaced by the sound of a fiddler, the fiddling turning to laughter, the numbers in his mind blowing apart like dandelion fluff. He forced himself to think of Alice, of himself having gone away to Scotland on his fruitless mission while she journeyed south, possibly to her doom.
    The branch of a shrub along the path lashed at his face, sobering him further. He saw a cottage ahead through the thinning trees now, recognizing the blue shutters. On beyond the cottage lay the broad heath from whence the village got its name. The Tipper had taken St. Ives straight to the cottage, despite its remote location: clearly he knew the way well enough. He stood just ahead now, his finger to his lips.
    The fog had deepened, and not an