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course; the name Rachel Wade meant nothing to her. She'd known a Rachel Crenshaw years ago, but that girl could never be the strange, furtive, haggard woman who couldn't even look her in"the eye when she asked for a room.
    She ought to try to sleep; tomorrow she'd have to be sharp and clever if she were to have any chance at all of keeping her new job. If Sebastian Verlaine had any notion of how profoundly unfit she was for the position he had inexplicably given her, he would . . . what? How could he not know? He must know. Then why had he hired her? Lord D'Aubrey was an enigma, as alien to her as a creature of another species; she understood nothing about him, could predict nothing he would say or do.
    Except for one thing. But that was the strangest mystery of all. Why would he want her? A man like that, handsome and rich, powerful, a refined man with sophisticated tastes—why would he want her in his bed? Even for one night—one hour? Why?
    Her head began to ache. She took the candle back into the bedroom, set it on the bedside table. She opened the shallow drawer, inside of which everything she owned fit easily, with room to spare: a hairbrush, a piece of flannel toweling, a few items of underclothing, a packet of hairpins, a spool of black thread and a needle. She'd bought them in a shop in Princetown before boarding the train. They had depleted her finances alarmingly, but she hadn't seen any way to avoid making the purchases, since all that had been given to her on her release was the gray dress.
    No, not quite all: they'd given back the one thing she had taken with her to prison ten years ago, in the naive belief that they would let her keep it with her in her cell. But they'd confiscated it, and over the years she'd forgotten it existed. She slipped her hand beneath the clothes in the drawer and drew out a small"" silver picture frame. The photograph in the frame had become, in the last few days, an object of grim fascination to her. It was a family portrait, taken only a few months before she'd met Randolph. Her parents sat side by side, stiff as staves in their straight-backed chairs, while she and her brother stood at attention behind them, Tom with his hand on his mother's shoulder. Mother had on her best dress, the one she stored away in the cedar chest except for special occasions; looking at it, Rachel could almost smell the camphor rising from the heavy black folds. Her father had on his new spectacles—"Maybe I won't go blind yet after all," he said when he got them, always surprised and a little irritated when life didn't go as badly as he expected. He looked like a schoolmaster in the photograph, which was what he was. She remembered standing behind him, wondering if she should put her hand on his shoulder, too. But she hadn't, because she didn't think he would like it.
    And Tom—she'd forgotten how handsome he was, how much he looked like their mother. Everyone in the family had blue eyes, but Tom's were the bluest, his hair the blackest. She'd been tall at eighteen, but he towered over her, and he looked down his nose at the camera with all the arrogance of a healthy, handsome, twenty-year-old man with his future ahead of him.
    Once, in the first year, they'd come to see her in prison. But it was too hard, the conditions for visiting too painful and barbaric; none of them could bear it. She'd asked them not to come again, and they hadn't argued with her.
    Now they were all gone. Her parents had died eight years ago, first her father and then her mother, within four months of each other. Tom had emigrated to Canada, to escape the scandal and start a new life. She'd gotten prison-censored Christmas notes from him for the first few years, then nothing. The message that he wanted to forget her couldn't have been clearer.
    Sometimes she put her finger over her own face when she looked at the photograph, so she could see the others without being' distracted. Distressed. Tonight, though, she wanted to look