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staircase down to the cellars. From there I ran to the stables and checked that the stranger’s horse was still tethered inside, then raced to the orchard, where I was safely hidden but would still hear him go. For two hours, I strode about or flung myself down in the shade with my ear to the ground. My pulse throbbed. I saw everything with startling clarity: the calyxes of the daisies, flecks on the peeling membrane of bark, and the bees on their aerial pathways to the hives by the hedge. But I was impatient with all this familiar detail and my body refused to behave, rolling itself over until my legs were tangled in my skirts.
    Of course, I had put up with uncertainty before. When my father bought me a prism and told me to repeat Sir Isaac’s experiment with white light, my stomach was full of butterflies. We closed the shutters except for a chink and turned the prism until the light shone directly through, and there on our screen of paper was a rainbow. But until that moment I had been afraid just in case it didn’t happen and Newton was proved fallible. And then there was the smallpox episode, when I’d woken each morning expecting to find myself ill or disfigured. In the end, on the tenth day I had felt hot, then cold, and rather sick, but only for a few hours. About twenty spots appeared, but they left no scars. I was relieved not just because I’d survived, but because my father was right as usual.
    This experience in the orchard was much worse, because it was quite possible that after the young man had gone my father wouldn’t mention his visit at all. The episode with Shales was still a sore point in my memory; relations with him had been so ruthlessly severed. But the arrival of the stranger had hooked me clean out of my old self and made me something else. Not even my father could keep me away from him. I must see him again. I couldn’t breathe for wanting it so much.
    Meanwhile, I branded the memory of him onto my inner eye. Again and again I opened the door and discovered him on the porch, his forehead dewy with sweat and his eyes a light blue. He was so broad-shouldered that I couldn’t see past him, though his stamping horse had been somewhere in the background.
    I gave up at last and went back inside. The kitchen was hot as a furnace with the oven lit. A village girl, one of the blacksmith’s daughters, was tossing peeled potatoes into a pot. A mess of gutted poultry was heaped on the table, and the air was filled with bloody vapors.
    “It’s a pity your father never made the stirring of soup part of your grand education,” said Mrs. Gill. “We’ve a guest to supper, and you’re to eat with them in the dining parlor.”
    I gawped at her while my heart did cartwheels. I saw him again with the sun on his curls, his silver buttons, his polished boots. And here was I with damp armpits, tangled hair, hands caked with clay. I flew back to the stable yard, loosened the neck of my dress, and plunged my head and shoulders under the pump. From the stables behind me, I heard a restless movement of hooves and the tossing of a bridled head. His horse. None of our old workhorses had the energy to stir on such a hot day. I scraped the dirt from under my fingernails, pulled up my skirts to wash my feet and calves, wrapped my hair in my apron, and ran up to my room, dripping along the passageways.
    Mrs. Gill had given me a better mirror for my eighteenth birthday, extracted from a stack of furniture in some distant room. I peered into its spotted glass and despaired. Black rats’ tails. Black eyes. Black brows. White skin. Too much contrast. Then I unhooked my best gown—pale-green calico and not one of Mrs. Gill’s most successful efforts. She’d copied a dress worn by the modish farmer’s wife, and unlike my other gowns it had an open bodice pinned to a quilted stomacher. The edges of the bodice were so uneven and the stomacher cut so low that I had to hold one shoulder higher than the other to keep myself