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giant in a fairy book with his flaxen hair and heavy limbs, his genial face. His wife, Beth, bustles up to him with a mug. She is a bustler through and through, is plump and short with coppery curls and a cheery face. And why should she not be cheery? Her home is a fine one, even for the country. The chairs are upholstered, the floors laid with rugs, the walls papered, the candles all of beeswax. Davey must be profiting well from peppermint, Leah thinks, not for the first time. She adjusts her stance. Sees David conferring with the same three men she saw entering. They wear their coats still, their hats. The men look around, appraising, angered, then leave by the foredoor. The hazel nailed over the lintel trembles. Hazel, Leah recalls, is protection against evil spirits and must be her mother’s idea. It is surely not her father’s. And where is her father? She peers here and there, but he is nowhere in sight. Not that he ever has much to say to her or to anyone.
    A calm, obliging expression is best, Leah decides, and forms her features accordingly before she steps into the keeping room.

CHAPTER 3.
    O n my third visit, Mrs. Kane reached for the tumbler of laudanum even before I had finished pouring. “That is a scanty amount,” she complained.
    “It is sufficient. I have measured exactly for your size and level of habituation, which, I must say, is prodigiously high.”
    “Well, yes.”
    “I should add that you fell asleep whilst talking away.”
    “And did you watch over me while I slept? Is that part and parcel of your duty?”
    “No, duck. I have better ways to apply my time.” If her tone had held less challenge I might have told her the truth: that I
had
watched her, and for an hour or so, but only because she had a peaceful presence, unlike a good many of my patients, who tussle with fate until the last hours.
    “Well, Katie and I were watching, but then we were watchful girls for all our giggling.”
    “Watching who? Whom?”
    “Leah, of course, as she stood in the hallway of David’s house and spied out the keeping room. We were contriving a game out of eavesdropping, and out of discerning words from lips alone. Katie was already very good at the former, and both of us became, in time, crackerjacks at the latter.”

    “L EAH’S ARRIVED,” Maggie whispers to Katie. “But whatever is she doing? She’s just standing there in the hall like some statuary.”
    The girls are peering through the balustrades on the second-floor landing. They are supposed to be resting. “All this excitement will flay your poor nerves,” their mother warned Maggie. Maggie hadn’t argued, for now she and Katie can sleep till noon if they choose. Now they have attention galore. The run of brother David’s charming home.
    “Is Lizzie with her, Mag? I don’t see her.”
    Maggie cranes her neck but sees no sign of their niece. She shrugs.
    “Fuss-it-all. I’ll just die if I don’t see Lizzie soon.”
    “I doubt you’ll die of that.”
    “And what about Calvin? Is our Calvin here? I’m dying … oh, fine, not dying, I’m starving for his lemon drops.”
    “Nope, he’s not with Leah either.”
    “Then he can’t know about it all. He’d be here in a blink if he did.”
    Maggie agrees. Calvin Brown—aged twenty-three and gangly handsome as the dickens—is the orphaned son of a family friend. He stays with the Fox family so often on his holidays from military school that Maggie and Katie have come to think of him as a kind of brother. He is aiming to be a confectioner, of all things.
    “I’m going on down to Leah,” Katie announces. “She’ll understand.”
    “Understand what? No, no. Wait. Best we listen first. We can’t be willy nilly anymore. We agreed on that.”
    “Then what do we do? Pretend we’re not here at all?”
    “Well, yes.”
    “Fine. Wait, wait, but don’t be late. You hear that, Miss Nettie?” Miss Nettie wags her wooden head from under Katie’s arm. She has articulated limbs and a