'Do you want light, mistress?' he asked me, hopefully, but I shook my head and hurried on.
A little farther down the street, I stopped at one of the huddled houses and knocked urgently at the door. It seemed a long time before my summons was finally answered by a small, middle-aged woman with kindly blue eyes and a plain face. She was in her bedclothes, and wore a shawl wrapped round her head and shoulders to ward off the night chill.
Seeing me, her eyes widened in astonishment. 'My child! What are you doing abroad at this hour of the night? Come inside ... come inside and warm yourself!'
I was practically dragged from the threshold and deposited in front of a sputtering fire. I stared at the flames, feeling a hollow cold that the fire's warmth could not touch.
'My mother is ill,' I said.
The woman's eyes met mine, and there passed between us an anguished understanding more eloquent than words.
'When?' she asked.
'She was struck suddenly.' My voice was wooden. 'At dinner. Already she is fevered and knows me not. The servants sent me from the house.'
'They did wisely. You cannot return there.' She sat down, heavily, beside me. 'Nor can you stay here. My neighbors fear the sickness too much. They would make trouble.' She was silent a long moment, thinking. 'You will go to the country,' she said, at last. 'To your mother's elder brother.'
'My Uncle Jabez?" I bit my lip. She knew the cause of my misgivings. 'He is not like your uncle John, God rest his gentle soul. But he is highly thought of, and an honest man. I will arrange a coach in the morning. Have you brought nothing away with you?'
I shook my head, and she frowned. 'You will need clothes. My girl Ellen is very like you in size. She may have something suitable.'
She rose from her stool and bustled toward the narrow stairway. I moved in feeble protest.
'Aunt Mary ..."
'Mariana.' Her voice was firm. 'This is the Lord's will. It is decided.'
The dancing fire flickered, dimmed, and disappeared.
I blinked. I was standing in Blackfriars Lane, among the rubble of construction, in a dark and empty lot. It had begun to rain, a cold, relentless spring rain, and a passing car spat up a freezing spray that sent a chill through my entire body and set my teeth chattering. A short block above me, yellow light and laughter mixed with music poured out onto the street through the open door of the local pub, and I turned my stumbling steps in that direction.
The cab company was quick to respond to my telephone call. Settling myself in the backseat for the short ride up to Islington, I shrank into a shadowed corner, well out of the light of the swiftly passing streetlamps.
Inside the cab, out of the rain, it wasn't cold at all; but I went on shivering and shivering, as if I would never get warm.
Six
‘Mariana’. Vivien Wells rolled the name I around on her tongue like a wine of questionable vintage, tilting her fair head back with a frown. 'No, I don't remember hearing about anyone by that name. Do you, Ned?'
Without looking up from his newspaper, the barman shook his head, and Vivien carried on balancing the cash register.
"It's rather an unusual name, isn't it?' she said. 'Old-fashioned.'
'Funny you should put it like that.' I smiled into my glass of orange juice, and she looked up from her work with interest.
'Been finding old love letters tucked beneath the floorboards, have you?' she asked.
'Something like that. It's really not important.' I set my glass down on the bar and glanced toward the empty table in the corner.
‘I see the lads aren't in today.'
Vivien followed my gaze and smiled. 'It's early yet.'
I looked at my watch and saw, with some surprise, that it was only half-twelve. Admittedly a little too early for the good people of Exbury to be heading off to the pub, especially on a Sunday. To me, though, it felt as if it were already the middle of the afternoon.
I had slept badly the night before. 'Slept,' perhaps, was not the right word, since I had spent most of the night staring wide-eyed into the darkness, watching the glowing digital display on the bedside clock count off the minutes, one by one.
I had relived those strange and frightening moments in Blackfriars Lane, turning them over and over in my mind until I felt I must be going mad. It was not the sort of experience I could talk to anyone about, really. Tom might have listened, but this was Sunday, and Tom was unobtainable on a Sunday. Over the breakfast table in the lonely London flat, Cheryl's cat had stared blankly back at me.
'What do you think?' I had asked it. 'Am I losing my mind?' The cat merely went on staring. No answers to be had from that quarter, I decided. And so I had come home.
Strange, I thought, how this little sleepy village had so quickly come to feel like home. Stranger still how London, where I had spent so many years, now seemed oddly foreign and remote.
'Nice to get back to town for a bit?' Vivien was asking me, tapping into my thoughts with uncanny accuracy.
'Do you know,' I said slowly, 'I was just thinking how nice it is to be out of London. To be home.'
She nodded her understanding. 'Live here long enough, and London starts to seem pretty unreal. People are so tense there. I often wonder how anyone can sustain that kind of tension, day after day. What do you think, Iain?'
I started in my seat, and turned. As always, I had not heard his approach.
'Me? I've no fondness for London,' Iain Sumner said, leaning an elbow on the bar and crossing one heavily booted foot over the other.