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concentrate on unstrapping his luggage.
    People were coming out of the house now. Crawford recognized the minister who had had him and Julia to tea at the local rectory a fortnight ago; and the man behind him was Julia's father; and the lady in the blue velvet stole—whose shuffling, undersea-creature gait was the result, he decided, of a reluctance to look down at the stepping stones for fear of disarranging her tall rose-studded coiffure—must have been Julia's aunt, though previously Crawford had only seen her in a housedress, with her hair pulled up in a tight bun.
    And the scowling girl hanging behind, he thought warily, must be Julia's twin sister Josephine. She's got Julia's coloring, I suppose, but she's far too thin—and why does she hunch her shoulders so? Maybe this is the defensive "mechanical" pose Julia told me she assumes in stressful situations—if so it's even less attractive, and far less funny, than Julia described it.
    Away from the leather-and-meat-pie smell of the carriage, he noticed for the first time the smells of rural East Sussex—clay and flowers and a whiff of a distant dairy. It was all a long way from the musks of sick people and the sharp reek of vinegar-washed hospital walls.
    He had got his bags free, and he set them down on the road's gravel verge just in time for the boy, rushing back again, to pick them up and wrestle them in a sort of running waddle back toward the house. Remembering that Josephine disapproved of her sister's marrying a physician—particularly one who currently specialized in an area of medicine that was by tradition the domain of unprofessional old women—Crawford pretended not to see her, and instead made a show of greeting her father and aunt.
    "Julia's upstairs," her father said as he led the new arrivals toward the house, "worrying about her hair and her clothes.
You
know how brides are." Crawford thought he heard Josephine mutter something behind him, and then the old man seemed to realize that he had said something awkward. "By which—uh—I mean merely—"
    Crawford forced a smile. "I'm sure she needn't worry about such things," he said. "I've never seen her looking less than splendid."
    Visibly relieved to have got past his apparent reference to Crawford's first wife, old Mr. Carmody nodded rapidly, blinking and smiling. "Oh, to be sure, to be sure. The very image of her departed mother, she is."
    Crawford was glancing back toward the road and the carriage as Mr. Carmody said this, and so he saw the expression on Josephine's narrow face change instantly from spite to vacuity; she kept walking, but her arms and legs were stiff now, and her head, when she looked away, moved in one abrupt jerk, like the instantaneous movement of a spider. Her nostrils were wide and white. Clearly
this
was her mechanical pose.
    He looked ahead at her father, expecting more apologetic mumbling for having brought up what was clearly another touchy subject, but the old man stumped on unaware, grinning and shaking his head at some comment Appleton had made.
    Crawford raised an eyebrow. The old man didn't seem unobservant or thoughtless—but surely, if the subject of his deceased wife was so evidently traumatic to one of his daughters, he ought sometime to have noticed? He'd have had twenty years to stumble across the fact, for the twins' mother had bled to death minutes after having given birth to Josephine, the second of them.
    Once inside the house, the travellers were given mugs of cider and plates of bread and cheese, and, as they worked their way through the snacks, they pretended to enjoy the efforts of the young man wringing doomful melodies out of the bagpipe. At last Mr. Carmody halted the recital and offered to show his guests to their rooms.
    Crawford obediently went to his room and washed his face in the basin on the dresser, but then he went back out into the hall and stole down to Julia's room. She answered his knock and proved to be alone in spite of the wedding