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Usually this table beckons those that come in via the Church Walk. Two came in tonight, a different two will come in tomorrow night. They can tell it’s a table for hiding, it’s a table where a glass can leave a stain from not being lifted and toasted of an evening. Back here it’s dark enough for those that have just buried a loved one to cry a little more, or to hide dry eyes if not crying is what they feel bad about. With the Church Walk only two narrow alleys away, the Labour in Vain sees its share of burying customers. John Robinson got the chills the night Gustine sat down with the wild-looking, mud-spattered doctor. He always thought it foreboded something ill if an unbereaved couple picked that table to sit at; it was like courting certain death in the family, or at best a crippling accident, and he didn’t like it. Of course, John Robinson couldn’t know that that night they’d had a right to the burying table.
    But back to work.
    He turns over the chair that held an eager, animated Gustine. Sweeps beneath it. He lifts the chair upon which sat Henry, whose heart that night raced with fear and laudanum. John Robinson remembers serving him gin after gin, with sugar cubes for Gustine. He can still see them clearly: Gustine leaning in, her small pink tongue playing around the edges of the sugar cube clamped between her teeth; Henry taking suicidal gulps of gin, talking crazier and crazier, looking over his shoulder as if pursued by the Devil. John Robinson remembers glancing around for the Eyeball, waiting to see if she would step in and steer Gustine toward more profitable customers; but the Eye merely watched from the corner, patient and implacable.
    The proprietor sets Henry’s chair and sweeps out a few stray frogs before heading downstairs to perform his nightly transubstantiation of vinegar and lead into wine.
    And now, dear readers, the Labour in Vain is quiet. We have it all to ourselves until John Robinson comes back to lock up and blow out the last light. Perhaps since we are finally alone, we should take this opportunity to make an apology. When the body of a story is stretched out before us, we who are new to the telling of tales sometimes don’t know where to make the first cut. Which is the best way to enter? Shall we plunge deep into the heart of the matter or begin systematically with the extremities? It is clear to us now that we have opened this particular story in the wrong place. We realize now that it would have been better to have begun a month earlier, not among the jostling wicker baskets of the marketplace, nor picking our way through an explosion of river frogs that provides the ribbiting backdrop to our narrative, nor even beneath the great Wearmouth Bridge where Gustine found the means of returning to Henry. No. How much wiser to have begun a month ago with their first encounter, on a night Henry wishes to push aside forever, but one Gustine cherishes like a pressed flower. Since it is impossible to take back a cut once given, let us then trick time. Let us use this back corner table that has absorbed so many sad cemetery tales as a talisman, and learn of it the story Henry told Gustine the night of his failure, the night he brought her here and changed both their lives irrevocably. Readers, touch your hands to it like a seance table and allow it to lead us back to a dark night in September. Slowly back. Go slowly back. Do you see yourself strolling along the Church Walk, through the acclivitous shadows of orphanage on our left and workhouse on our right, down to the inevitable caesar of this grim triumvirate, the Trinity graveyard? Are you prepared to begin again with the story our table has to tell?
    The moon shines eerily on a false chemical winter, the alternate night of our beginning. Emaciated box shrubs stand stiff and defiant against the white sky, the lead roof of Trinity Church gleams like quicksilver. All is cold and silent and dusted white. With the cholera scare, by order