I swear I used to write short chapters. This is not one. I blame the fact that starting a story is a bit like moving house. Let me get all the narrative furniture in place and we should be back to averaging normal-for-me chapters. In the meantime, enjoy this one, and thanks to all of you reading and/or reviewing.


There was no sun when the little bedside clock declared it to be six in the morning. That was the worst part of the shortened days, Faith thought, sticking a tentative foot out of bed. Dusk at four o'clock she could bear. Somehow it wasn't nearly so demoralising to finish up the day's lectures and emerge into all-enveloping darkness. But first light, or rather the absence of it….The floor was freezing. Of course it was. The calendar was still proclaiming October, and neither she nor Jem had the nerve to fire up the radiators earlier than November. Gooseflesh crept up her leg, prickling it like the skin of a plucked chicken and she hastily tucked the aggrieved limb back under the Country Fair quilt. Cold floors were perhaps the second worst thing about autumn mornings. But at least if they asked for a carpet for Christmas –the small braid kind that could flank the bed, it would lessen the menace a bit.

'At winter I get up at night,' she murmured groggily, willing herself out of the nest of blankets, 'and dress by yellow candlelight indeed.' Beside her, Jem had rolled onto his side and pulled the quilt up over his head.

'You too,' said Faith with a tug at the place where she suspected his feet were. There was a groan from the depths of the Country Fair quilt. Make that a burrow, he was that submerged.

'Isn't the department discussing next term's placement with you this morning?'

'Hm,' said Jem, agreeably enough. He was still under the quilt though. Faith, by then perched on the edge of the bed and hunting stockings from the basket at her feet, paused to throw back the quilt sufficiently to expose the mattress. That got a yelp from Jem, as he sat up and tried to gather them back into a haven.

'It's freezing!' in tones of horror.

'Not quite,' said Faith. 'Anyway, if I've got to bear it, so have you.'

It was better downstairs. Jem coaxed a temperamental fire into existence while Faith trimmed the lamps, and brought the hob to life with a hiss and a splutter. If nothing else there would be tea and toast. There might even be sunlight by the time she got out the door, or at least the promise of it.

'I thought,' she said, measuring out healthy teaspoons of Assam, 'you were looking forward to settling next term, anyway.'

Never much given to talking in the mornings, especially on dark, chill mornings that smelt of hoar frost and mulching leaves, Jem made a noncommittal noise, and something nebulous pricked at Faith's conscience. By the rose glow of the lamplight she considered following the question up with another. But her brain was still fogged with sleep, the toast was beginning to singe in the grate, the smell of it gently permeating the room and registering in her soft palate. On the stove, the kettle came suddenly to full-throttled life, and it was only as she seized it that it belatedly dawned on Faith that she ought to have warmed the teapot. She toyed briefly with the thought of emptying out the Assam leaves and making up the difference, but Jem was by then plucking toast from the teeth of the grill and there hardly seemed time. Let the tea leaves be shocked just this once.

'Our next house,' said Jem as emphatically as was possible as he sucked at a scaled thumb, 'is going to have electricity. And that, as good old Susan would say, you may tie to.'

'No argument here,' said Faith. She took his thumb in hand and gave it a critical look.

'You'll do.'

'I could have told you that,' said Jem, suddenly beaming at her. Now he was fully awake he was his usual self again. That the spiced smell of the Assam was dissipating the lingering smell of the burnt toast crusts helped not a little, Faith suspected.

'Katy Conover was worse,' said Jem, accepting a cup of imperfectly poured out tea. He made a show of studying the contents of his saucer critically before tipping them back into his teacup.

'This was that family that summoned you out at the eleventh hour yesterday?'

'Mm,' around a mouthful of toast. 'Mother had gone to town and left Katy in charge. If it hadn't all been chaos I might have had a thing or two to say about that. Dad certainly would. She'd left a casserole or something bubbling on the stove, and given Katy specific instructions to watch it. Dad would have had something to say about that, too. Right, well, obviously, I'm not Dad, and there wasn't really the time. The casserole-thing had begun to boil over so Miss Katy took it into her head to just lift it off the stove and –'

Faith, with a sudden vivid recollection of her own childhood escapades, winced.

'How bad was it?'

'Not very. The bulk of it got on her smock. She would have been fine if she'd thought to take off the smock, which she didn't. She got distracted fetching her brother –the youngest one, Edwin, I think he's called? –out of the kitchen and away from the mess on the floor. Sensible, but tomato sauce being what it is –all thick and heavy –she had boiling sauce seeping through the smock onto her legs. So there was that. Then of course her mother was hysterical –'

'Understandable,' said Faith, 'considering all Margaret Conover knows about medicine comes from Rilla's Morgan or equivalent if it comes from anywhere.' Opposite her Jem choked violently on his tea.

'I'd nearly forgotten Morgan. Even he's got to be against hysterics though. Katy got off with a mild scalding, baby Edwin was fine, bar the odd smudge of tomato, and quite a lot of carbolic and yarrow salve got an airing.'

'Well that sounds all right,' said Faith, nodding over her tea, not quite sure what it was that still niggled at her conscience.

Jem didn't give her time to puzzle it out in any case. She was sipping her tea when came hurtling across the table Jem's pleasantly curious, 'Did I lose a letter of yours telling me Shirley had married Mara?'

It was Faith's turn to choke. Surprised, she inhaled rather than swallowed the mouthful of tea she had taken. It went straight to her lungs, from whence it attempted civilly to choke her.

'No,' she said, pink-cheeked and breathless, as soon as she was able. She brought her teacup halfway to her lips, then thought better of it. Jem still looked like a cat with its paw in the fishbowl, and she didn't trust him not to ambush her with another thunderbolt of a question.

'You mean it happened after you had left?'

'No-o,' with great slowness and deliberateness, 'I mean no one wrote and told you because it hasn't happened.'

Opposite her Jem blinked dazedly and Faith essayed a cautious sip of tea. It was infinitely better when it wasn't searing the inside of her nose.

'But,' said an unbelieving Jem, 'they act as if they're married.'

'Well that avails you nothing. Jerry used to make that complaint of us –or didn't he make it to you?'

'No. Yes. I don't remember. It was worlds ago, and that isn't the same thing at all.'

'Why not?'

Unhelpfully the mantel clock chose that moment to chime seven, and Faith never got an answer. Jem bolted what was left of his tea, kissed the top of her head and declared himself to be running late.

'I promised to call in on Agnes Blackburn,' he said, hovering at the door. 'She has pneumonia or thinks she does. It's much more likely a nasty cold. She's much too hale for pneumonia.'

Then he was gone, a whirl of red curls and brown wool coat, the only evidence that he had been there the leaves that had breached the threshold, the echo of the door as it banged shut, and that lingering disquiet at the back of Faith's mind.


It was later in the evening the root of it came home to her. The fire had burned low, throwing the thrushes on the wall into a strange indoor twilight, punctured at intervals by the rose-glow of the lamps. They were still reaching for their strawberries, and Faith, who had had the kind of day that was refusing to end, had renamed them according to doomed and aggrieved women to vent some of her frustration. She missed Jem coming in, she afterwards said, because she was bent double over a brick of a textbook that so soundly treated its readers like idiots that it took all her concentration not to roll her eyes into the back of her head. Add to which the house was so full of noises and creaks that the general clamour of his ingress, the thunk of his satchel, the stumble over the umbrella stand and felling by a stray footstool in the gloom, hardly registered.

'What's that then?' said Jem, coming to hover at her shoulder and startling out of her study-induced cocoon. Then, seeing the sprawl of shaded bones and muscles, 'I'd have thought you knew all that stuff by now.'

'So did I,' said Faith, not looking up, 'after about the third or fourth surgery. I found it helped to know the kidneys from the spleen hunting bullets. I did think about telling them,' with an indignant toss of her head that missed bashing Jem's nose by mere inches, 'but they were so convinced I'd wandered into the theatre by mistake I thought it best not to argue. Better still not to get lax about knowing things and give them a weak point to exploit.'

'Ah,' said Jem, understanding dawning, his breath warm against Faith's head. She turned away from the book, intending to ask how the day had gone, if any decision had been reached by the department about where to place him in the Candlemas semester, when he dropped a kiss onto her forehead, and then lightly trailed them down the crown of her head, lingering over her ear, until he'd found the arch of her neck.

'What are you doing?' said Faith, almost laughing, because the sensation was ticklish, his breath warm and sweet against her skin. Jem was undeterred.

'I can tell all your bones,' he murmured, hardly pausing and with a kiss to Faith's shoulder. He did to, clavicle, with a kiss, acromion, warranting another, murmuring now, greater tuberosity…he was as far as the humurus before he registered Faith's question, 'What's that from then?'

'And you a minister's daughter. It's in the Bible,' said Jem, and for all his conviction, Faith laughed. She couldn't help it. 'You didn't give Sunday School much attention, did you?' she said, and Jem, bestowing kisses along the myriad bones of her wrist, brought his head up sharply. 'I did so,' in wounded tones. 'It's in Psalms.'

'Well you've misremembered that one. I,' with emphasis, 'can tell all my bones. Psalm 22:17. Anyway, we can do better than that for relevance.'

'Oh?'

Faith hummed consideration, and reconciling herself to making no further progress with anatomy texts that evening, wound her arms around Jem, laid her gold head on his shoulder and said, 'Thy navel is like a round goblet which wanteth not liquor. They belly is like a heap of wheat set about with lilies. Thy breasts are like two young roes that are twins…Thy stature is like that of a palm tree and thy breasts like clusters of grapes. I will go up the palm tree and take hold of its fruits…that's in the Bible too.'*

'Is it?' said Jem, breathless.

'Not really Golden Verse material, is it?' said Faith, laughing at last.

'Hardly,' said Jem, and stopped her laugh with a kiss. He had got fitted one hand to the small of her back and laced his fingers through the fine curls of her hair when there was a knock at the door.

'I'll get it,' said Faith, slipping out of his arms as she said it. It was dark in the hall; she understood as soon as she stepped into it why the umbrella stand had all but felled Jem earlier. Open, the door admitted of not much additional light, but it didn't matter. Years of sharing a house meant Faith would have known the check of Mara's coat, never mind the blue eyes that squinted at her through the dark, anywhere. It was raining –a new development –and Faith shepherded Mara into the hall with a mind for the evils of the umbrella stand.

'There's nowhere to put a lamp,' she said apologetically. 'It's enough to almost make me wish for the Swallowgate end tables.'

'Those end tables were the least of it,' said Mara. They were laughing as they regained the sitting room. Jem was still standing much as Faith had left him, even to his arms akimbo around the space Faith had so lately filled.

'Thought it might be you,' said Jem, as he stood to attention. 'Shall I make tea then? Leave you two to put the universe to rights in my absence? Or whatever it is girls who pin hopes do left unattended? I sort of think it must be something like a gathering of witches only I haven't worked out the collective noun…'He darted into the kitchen chased by the cushion Faith threw after him.

'We'll pretend it was your efforts with that,' said Mara, nodding in the direction of the much-neglected textbook, 'I've intruded upon, shall we?'

'What else?' said Faith, but without much success at keeping her face straight. She never had been good at untruths, even the gentle, teasing ones.

'I'm sorry,' said mildly. 'You can blame it on the weather. The flood Noah forgot has struck up out there and you're on the way home.'

'No matter,' said Faith. 'I'll put it down in writing somewhere to expect you often this side of spring, shall I?'

'It might not be a bad idea,' said Jem, reappearing with the tea things. He considered a moment, then set them down on the floor, apparently not feeling up to the task of relocating the others to the sofa, or else loathe to disrupt the vast quantity of revision notes that occupied the coffee table. At this late juncture Faith wasn't sure whose they were, and baulked at moving them without at least a look-over herself. 'Shirley says according to Highland Sandy we're due a wet winter, and he's never been wrong before –hang on, you'll know all this, won't you, Ariel?'

Mara shrugged, and Faith said, 'Well I don't, and I hope he's wrong. Wet means ice which means signal failure and being held at God-knows-where trying to get home for Christmas.' Jem having given the tea a considered jab before leaving it well alone, Faith took over the teapot. Red Rose, she noticed as she poured out. It was a rich amber colour and as staunch and round an antidote to the weather now rattling the windows as anyone could hope for. She handed Mara a mug and asked as she had used to do in Swallowgate days, 'What did your day look like then?'

It was as Mara was recounting the politics of the little reparatory that it came to Faith what had niggled her so much about the retelling of Katy Conover's misadventure. In spite of the politics and the fact that to hear Mara tell it the upcoming performance was three weeks away and nowhere near where it should be, she still managed to look as if someone had struck a match to her soul in the telling. Spirit and fire and dew, Faith had heard Mother Anne call it in a poetic burst. She had been talking of Dr. Blythe and his work, and Faith had known almost instinctively what she had meant. Spirit and fire and dew. Years and she had caught glimpses of it in the people around her. It was there in Nan when she told one of her economies, in her father as he declaimed his sermons from the height of the pulpit, even Una had it as she sat unassuming at the piano, playing not so much with her hands as with the whole of her body, from delicate fingers to slight shoulders to the swaying stalk of her spine as it shifted with the notes. It was there in Mara now, notwithstanding the fact that actors were apparently about as herdable as cats and harder dictated to. Where it hadn't been was anywhere discernible in Jem as he recounted the story of little Katy and the casserole. A little thing, but an unsettling one, because it had always used to be there. Before the war. A lifetime ago. She would have asked about it, doctoring and the scheme for someday taking over the Glen so long adhered to, waived as a banner of what would come, but it was hardly the time. They had a guest, and were, judging from the knocking at the door, due another.

'Shirley's knock,' said Mara, rising to go, belatedly remembering Larkrise wasn't Swallowgate. Faith laughed, so did Jem.

'We're never on his way back to the boarding house,' said Jem, incredulous, when he could speak again.

'You are if he's come from Fox Corner, out behind the wood,' said Mara. 'He did say he was wanted out that way –the dogs I think.'

The knock came again, and Faith waved Mara towards the door.

'You go,' she said. 'He'd far rather your company to ours, I'm sure.'

Mara went and alone with the thrushes and their strawberries Jem turned to Faith and said, 'You're absolutely sure you didn't miss –'

'Certain. You might be the sort to lose track of weddings, I wouldn't. Not that one anyway.'

'Besides,' said Shirley, dropping down onto the floor opposite his brother, and from the look of him, trying hard not to laugh, 'there's an order to these things. Houses, money, all the dull things that need to be in place first.'

'Right,' said Faith now, hauling herself to her feet, 'You two convince him where I can't, I'll fetch another mug.'

She went, and returned to find Shirley sitting with his hand clasped around the slip of Mara's ankle, which considering Mara's hems had preserved their old-world length in spite of the shift in fashion, was a feat which should have taken considerably more effort than it had. Jem was studiously observing the thrushes on the walls, who had progressed not a bit towards the capture of their assorted strawberries.

'My favourite,' said Faith as she rejoined them, startling Jem and the courting couple to attentiveness, 'is Medea. Just there,' she nodded in the direction of a cluster of birds next to the mantle.

'I'm glad you can tell them apart,' said Jem. 'They're much the same to me.' He allowed Faith to replenish his tea. Shirley, who had after all come from Fox Corner, launched into a detailed account of the resident hound whose leg had wanted setting. Hard to believe, Faith thought as she listened, that he'd only followed them back to Kingsport a matter of weeks ago, and that on a whim to see if a long-standing arrangement with Dr. Findley the veterinarian would hold. It had, and now here he was talking Fox Corner, its dogs and their assorted injuries.

Somehow it fell out that their guests didn't stay long after that, though Faith offered to replenish the hot water.

'Hardly weather for going out,' she said to no one in particular as she fished for an umbrella to send them on their way. The rain was still beating a relentless tattoo on the windows and in the hallway the cold had begun to creep under the gap between door and floor, nipping viciously at the ankles of anyone who chose to tarry there.

'We'll do,' said Mara.

'Go by the woods and I expect you'll notice it less,' said Jem, for which he received a well-aimed jab to the shins from his brother, who had by then claimed the umbrella.

They hovered at the door long enough to wave the others on their way, their faces growing spackled with rain for their trouble.

'Hardly a night for sweethearting,' said Jem with affection as he watched them go. 'Mind you,' as he shuttered the lamps for the night, 'I do miss that.'

'What? Walks in the pouring rain? Did we have so many?' said Faith, knowing full well that wasn't what he meant.

'Purpose,' Jem managed more lightly than Faith thought she might have under the same circumstance. 'They've both got it, wouldn't you say?'

'In spades. And so have you –just perhaps not for general practice. No harm in that.'

'Mm,' said Jem, burrowing under the Country Fair quilt. 'This though, this I can do.' He folded his arms tight around Faith, so that she could smell the residual traces of carbolic lotion still on him, mixed with the smell of the tea and the onion that had flavoured their supper. Pepper too, she thought, and the lavender pouches she tucked behind the pillows in the mornings…'Remind me though,' said Jem, voice whispering against her hair and interrupting her train of thought, 'How did it go? I will go up the palm tree…'

'And take hold of its fruits…'


Jem was writing up a prescription for Tilly Lyons when the man appeared. Tall, gaunt, silver-haired and with an air of bristly insistence about him that demanded not only attention but that the person giving it do so with straight shoulders and a back like an arch. Reflexively Jem stood up, the prescription half-written and extended a hand, even as the man said, 'Dr. Blythe?'

'Not quite yet,' said Jem, and smiling in spite of himself. Opposite him the man's eyebrows drew together momentarily. 'Jem, they call you, isn't it?'

Jem nodded, and the man's face cleared. 'Good,' he said. 'Geordie Carlisle, inspector. I want to borrow you. The university seems to think you might help.'

He was walking out of the little office that was Jem's in great, long strides that meant Jem had to half run to keep up.

'Heard of Caleb Williams?' asked Carlisle as they went. Jem's brow prickled in concentration, because the name did sound familiar. Where had he come across it?

'In the papers, wasn't it sir?'

Carlisle nodded. 'Unfortunate business.'

'Quite,' said Jem, breathless. 'But I don't see how I can –'

'You can tell us what happened to him,' Carlisle said, anticipating Jem's question. 'Dr. Greaves has had to retire and it turns out police surgeons are rare as hen's teeth. Would you have guessed?'

'No,' said Jem truthfully, for which he was dealt a disarming blow to the back, what he thought the other man had probably intended as an encouraging pat.

'Makes two of us then –oh and Teddy Lovall owes me a dollar. Remind him, won't you?'

Jem forbore to point out he had no idea who Teddy Lovall was and settled for making a noise deep in his throat to be interpreted as Carlisle saw fit. By then they were walking the cool halls of what Jem supposed must be the station house. They lacked the medicinal smell of carbolic and ether that he'd grown to know so well, and yet the general impression of regimented order was the same. Carlisle's doing, Jem thought, or pigs could fly.

Someone –Williams, Jem supposed –was laid out on a table, his skin, what Jem could see of it above the sheeting, mottled white, red and blue. The blue, he thought, would be the cold of the place. It was seeping into his bones even as he stood half a pace behind Carlisle, the iodized smell of it not miles from his father's surgery. Except that the Ingleside surgery had never hosted dead bodies in Jem's memory. As much to dissipate the chill as anything else, he began to make a circuit of the patient –body? –taking note of abnormalities as he went.

'Now,' said Jem, as he walked, 'what happened to you?'

'Are you…talking… to him, Doc?' asked the youth in the corner. From the way he handed a dollar unconcernedly over to the inspector Jem took him for Teddy Lovall.

'You should always talk to your patients, sergeant,' said Jem, with a nod to the badge affixed to Lovall's coat, and grinned at him before returning his attention to Williams. There was a half-formed bruise emerging along the left jaw. He'd be interested to see how it came up, of course, but in the meantime, Jem felt safe assuming it had come from someone's right hand. He found a half-moon birthmark under the left ear, though no sign of injury to the head.

'Someone's tried to strangle him,' said Jem to his audience, 'only it didn't take. You see? Just here.' He shaped the area over the young man's throat for Carlisle with a hand. Lovall hung back, looking faintly green about the gills.

'Didn't take, you say?' asked Carlisle, interested. 'How can you tell?'

'See here? That's the hyoid bone.' Jem ran a finger delicately along it in demonstration. 'It's not broken. And his mouth is wrong for strangulation –he was breathing fine, whatever did him in. Blood under his nails too. I'd guess at some point someone tried to strangle him and he fought back, so they abandoned the strangling and…'

'Doc?' prompted Lovall from the safe distance of the doorframe he was leaning against. Dimly Jem thought he ought to set Lovall straight about his medical status then decided the information would keep.

'Now that is odd,' he said, more to Williams than anyone else.

'His ribs?' asked Carlisle, obviously perplexed. 'What about them?'

'Nothing,' said Jem, 'which is the odd thing. I was going to say our attacker had opted to push him instead –stairs or something – but there's nothing to suggest that happened. Just this contusion over the liver…mind if I have more of a look at him?'

'Please,' said Carlisle. In the doorway Lovall shifted uneasily from one foot to another, and the detective laughed, which saved Jem the effort of trying not to.

'Off you go then, Teddy,' said Carlisle indulgently. 'Have a read over that statement we got, see if it yields anything that even hints of a lead.'

Lovall –or Teddy –it was getting increasingly hard, Jem found, to keep thinking of him as a disassociated last name –nodded smartly. He was halfway down the hall when he doubled back to inquire, 'What'll you do, sir?'

'Me?' asked Carlisle needlessly, 'I think I'll see how this goes. Mac would never let me. You don't mind?'

'No,' said Jem partly because he genuinely didn't mind, partly because even if he had, he could see no way of turning him down. He folded back the sheet that shrouded Williams and watched amused, as the older man picked up a scalpel, considered it, then handed it over to Jem before settling back against the sink basin and beginning to whistle something giddy and improbable sounding.

'Know any Gilbert and Sullivan?' asked Carlisle, abruptly curtailing whatever-it-was. The tune was catching, sort of a musical mosquito, Jem thought, and was now circling his head as he sifted through the contents of Williams' stomach.

'No,' said Jem. This was obviously the wrong answer, because it set Carlisle off on a brief history of operetta. Jem went on sorting through organs, nodding whenever it seemed appropriate.

'Aha,' said Jem, unthinking, as he looked over the liver. It was like tripping a switch; gone was the connoisseur of musical satire and back with a vengeance was the man that had plucked Jem out of his office at nine in the morning without so much as a by-your-leave.

'Found something, have you?'

'I may have. The liver's ruptured.'

'And that killed him, did it?'

'Yes, I should say so. See all the blood?'

Carlisle shook his head, and Jem waved a hand in the direction of the liver cavity.

'All internal, sorry, should have said.'

'Right,' said Carlisle. Unfolding a pair of spectacles, he peered closely in the direction Jem was pointing, looking for all the world like a parent humouring a child's pet fantasy.

'I'm afraid I'm going to have to take your word for it,' he said at length, folding away the spectacles. 'Now, what are we looking at? Could a person have done it?'

Jem gave the liver a judicious prod. 'It doesn't seem to have been in great nick to start with and if you look at the skin around the area, just here…'Sensing the other man's confusion, Jem gingerly tapped the area in question with a finger.

'It's bruised,' said Carlisle, nodding.

'Mostly superficial damage though,' said Jem, 'bar the liver obviously.'

Opposite him Carlisle was still nodding. Jem could all but hear him thinking in time to the clock on the wall. 'A punch,' he said now, 'if someone had punched him, could that have done it?'

'If they knew what they were about, I should say so, yes.'

'Good –ah, Teddy, just in time.' Carlisle raised a hand in greeting to the young man now jogging down the corridor. Jem followed suit, raising a blood-spattered hand in spite of himself. He couldn't help it. The boy –and he was a boy, Jem saw now, albeit a very tall one –was grinning as if Christmas had come early.

'Got something for you,' he panted as he came in sight, clutching at the doorframe for support. He began a garbled recitation of something and Jem found himself raising his hands again to stop him.

'Better get your breath back first,' he heard himself say. 'No good to the inspector if you collapse from over-exertion or something.'

Teddy did, pausing to gulp a hasty mouthful of breath before launching into the theory of the moment.

'Well,' said Carlisle impatiently when Teddy had rattled to a stop, 'Better get going, hadn't you? I've paperwork to do. Oh,' with a sudden burst of inspiration, 'take the Doc with you. Might need his bedside manner if you're calling on Williams' wife.'

Jem made another effort to protest his nebulous medical status, but no one appeared to be listening. He'd hardly finished when he found he was compelled to jog off after Teddy, who had bolted from the room at the first opportunity and was now running like a gazelle for the outdoors. Jem couldn't blame him; after the cool, compressed air of the station house, it was refreshing to be outside with the snap and crackle of the wind and the leaves rocketing around underfoot, sun streaming into their eyes. Here and there a stray crab apple made them stumble, but even that was a welcome relief after the solemn silence of Williams' icy entombment. They slowed to a brisk walk somewhere in the vicinity of St. John's graveyard, 'Because,' said Teddy, sounding as if he meant it, 'you can't run past a graveyard.'

'No,' said Jem, grinning, 'just whistle past.' When Teddy's face registered only confusion, Jem elaborated, 'You didn't do that as a kid? Whistle past the graveyard to keep the ghosts away?'

'No,' said Teddy. Then, 'Does it work?'

'No idea,' said Jem, and grinned. 'But we always did it, me and Walter and the others.' If he stumbled a bit over Walter's name, Teddy took no notice. Easily they shifted from graveyards to the morning, to Williams and what had happened to him, Jem doing his best to catch Teddy up up on the morning's findings in a way that wouldn't turn the lad green again. No good their turning up at Williams' home with the active sergeant looking ill.

'Er,' said Teddy as they nearer the house, 'do we tell her about the…rupture was it…you found in the liver?'

'Well don't look at me,' said Jem. 'All I do is name the cause. The rest is up to you.'

Somehow they managed. By the time they came away they were swapping impressions of Mrs Williams and the house, a modern affair with bay windows and a quantity of ivy that had been left to run riot in the garden. They were still talking when Jem looked up and found himself outside Larkrise.


Faith heard them even before they gained the hallway, talking animatedly about she had no idea what.

'…didn't feel right,' a tall, brackish lad was saying as he unburdened himself of his coat and draped it over the hall table.

'Here,' said Faith, 'I'll take that.'

'Sorry,' said Jem, 'I meant to warn you…He looked as if it was the first time this thought had crossed his mind and Faith wanted to laugh. Partly at the look of him, all light and –no other word –blithe, but also because he said it as if it were a great imposition he was visiting upon her, as if never in the course of all those Swallowgate days had they regularly ambushed one another with a guest or two or three at mealtimes.

'I didn't like that either,' he said next to the young man who had come in with him, 'She was very evasive when you tried to find out about the other evening.'

Faith paused in the hanging of coats and hats to look confusedly between them. She went to hunt out the crockery needed to augment the place settings and still they went on talking contusions, reactions and all sorts. She was tucking a napkin through a metal ring when the thought ambushed her, There it is, and she had to pause to watch them again. Spirit and fire and dew, she thought, feeling it somewhere in the region of her gut. She had no idea what they were talking about, only that they were both lighted up with enthusiasm for the subject at hand. That murder from the morning headlines, she realised as the conversation progressed. How had Jem become embroiled in it? It didn't matter. He looked like a tinder ignited by a stray bit of flint, and that was enough.

At length, seeing her starting to lay out the table, he detached himself from their guest to help transition food to the table, and it was then he dropped a kiss on her forehead and asked, half-apologetic, 'Do you mind?'

Faith braced a casserole dish against her side and shook her head. 'Not for worlds,' she said, finding she meant more than the unannounced company. 'Not for worlds.'


*Faith and Jem are quoting Song of Solomon chapter 7. If you're confused as to how that squeaked into the canon of the bible, don't look to me for an answer. The council in question rejected Judith, declined Susannah and somehow let this stray piece of a love poem through. If you can parse that one for me, by all means do.