"If needs be."

"Aye. If needs be."

"And so it was settled," Miss Winter said. "I stayed."

"What was your name?"

"The Missus tried to call me Mary, but it didn't stick. John called me Shadow, because I stuck to him like a shadow. He taught me to read, you know, with seed catalogs in the shed, but I soon discovered the library. Emmeline didn't call me anything. She didn't need to, for I was always there. You only need names for the absent."

I thought about it all for a while in silence. The ghost child. No mother. No name. The child whose very existence was a secret. It was impossible not to feel compassion. And yet…

"What about Aurelius? You knew what it was like to grow up without a mother! Why did he have to be abandoned? The bones they found at Angelfield… I know it must have been Adeline who killed John-the-dig, but what happened to her afterward? Tell me, what happened the night of the fire?"

We were talking in the dark, and I couldn't see the expression on Miss Winter's face, but she seemed to shiver as she glanced at the figure in the bed.

"Pull the sheet over her face, would you? I will tell you about the baby. I will tell you about the fire. But first, perhaps you could call Judith? She does not know yet. She will need to call Dr. Clifton. There are things that need to be done."

When she came, Judith's first care was for the living. She took one look at Miss Winter's pallor and insisted on putting her to bed and seeing to her medication before anything. Together we wheeled her to her rooms; Judith helped her into her nightgown; I made a hot-water bottle and folded the bed down.

"I'll telephone Dr. Clifton now," Judith said. "Will you stay with Miss Winter?" But it was only a few minutes later that she reappeared in the bedroom doorway and beckoned me into the anteroom.

"I couldn't speak to him," she told me in a whisper. "It's the telephone. The snow has brought the line down."

We were cut off.

I thought of the policeman's telephone number on the piece of paper in my bag and was relieved.

We arranged that I would stay with Miss Winter for the first shift, so that Judith could go to Emmeline's room and do what needed to be done there. She would relieve me later, when Miss Winter's next medication was due.

It was going to be a long night.

BABY

On Miss Winter's narrow bed, her frame was marked by only the smallest rise and fall in the bedclothes. Warily she stole each breath, as though she expected to be ambushed at any minute. The light from the lamp sought out her skeleton: It caught her pale cheekbone and illuminated the white arc of her brow; it sank her eye in a deep pool of shadow.

Over the back of my chair lay a gold silk shawl. I draped it over the shade so that it might diffuse the light, warm it, make it fall less brutally upon Miss Winter's face.

Quietly I sat, quietly I watched, and when she spoke I barely heard her whisper.

"The truth? Let me see… "

The words drifted from her lips into the air; they hung there trembling, then found their way and began their journey.

I was not kind to Ambrose. I could have been. In another world, I might have been. It wouldn't have been so very hard: He was tall and strong and his hair was gold in the sun. I knew he liked me and I was not indifferent. But I hardened my heart. I was bound to Emmeline.

"Am I not good enough for you?" he asked me one day. He came straight out with it, like that.

I pretended not to hear, but he insisted.

"If I'm not good enough, you tell me so to my face!"

"You can't read," I said, "and you can't write!"

He smiled. Took my pencil from the kitchen windowsill and began to scratch letters onto a piece of paper. He was slow. The letters were uneven. But it was clear enough. Ambrose. He wrote his name and when he had done it, he took the paper and held it out to show me.

I snatched it out of his hand, screwed it into a ball and tossed it to the floor.

He stopped coming into the kitchen for his tea break. I drank my tea in the Missus's chair, missing my cigarette, while I listened for the sound of his step or the ring of his spade. When he came to the house with the meat, he passed the bag without a word, eyes averted, face frozen. He had given up. Later, cleaning the kitchen, I came across the piece of paper with his name on it. I felt ashamed of myself and put the paper in his game bag hanging behind the kitchen door, so it would be out of sight.

When did I realize Emmeline was pregnant? A few months after the boy stopped coming for tea. I knew it before she knew herself; she was hardly one to notice the changes in her body, or to realize the consequences. I questioned her about Ambrose. It was hard to make her understand the sense of my questions, and she quite failed to see why I was angry. "He was so sad" was all she would tell me. "You were too unkind." She spoke very gently, full of compassion for the boy, velveting her reproach for me.

I could have shaken her.

"You do realize that you're going to have a baby now, don't you?"

Mild astonishment passed across her face, then left it tranquil as before. Nothing, it seemed, could disturb her serenity. I dismissed Ambrose. I gave him his pay till the end of the week and sent him away. I didn't look at him while I spoke to him. I didn't give him any reasons. He didn't ask any questions. "You may as well go immediately," I told him, but that wasn't his way. He finished the row of planting I had interrupted, cleaned the tools scrupulously, the way John had taught him, and put them back in the garden shed, leaving everything neat and tidy. Then he knocked at the kitchen door.

"What will you do for meat? Do you know how to kill a chicken at least?"

I shook my head.

"Come on."

He jerked his head in the direction of the pen, and I followed him.

"Don't waste any time," he instructed me. "Clean and quick is the way. No second thoughts."

He swooped on one of the copper-feathered birds pecking about our feet and held its body firmly. He mimed the action that would break its neck. "See?"

I nodded.

"Go on then."

He released the bird and it flurried to the ground where its round back was soon indistinguishable from its neighbors. "Now?" "What else are you going to eat tonight?" The sun was gleaming on the feathers of the hens as they pecked for seeds. I reached for a bird, but it scuttled away. The second one slipped through my fingers in the same way. Grabbing for a third, this time, clumsily, I held on to it. It squawked and tried to beat its wings in its panic to escape, and I wondered how the boy had held his so easily. As I struggled to keep it still under my arm and get my hands around its neck at the same time, I felt the boy's severe eye upon me.

"Clean and quick," he reminded me. He doubted me, I could tell from his voice.

I was going to kill the bird. I had decided to kill the bird. So, gripping the bird's neck, I squeezed. But my hands would only half obey me. A strangled cry of alarm flew from the bird's throat, and for a second I hesitated. With a muscular twist and a flap, the bird slipped from under my arm. It was only because I was struck by the paralysis of panic that I still had it by the neck. Wings beating, claws flailing wildly at the air, almost it lurched away from me.

Swiftly, powerfully, the boy took the bird out of my grasp and in a single movement he had done it. He held the body out to me; I forced myself to take it. Warm, heavy, still.

The sun shone on his hair as he looked at me. His look was worse than the claws, worse than the beating wings. Worse than the limp body in my hands.