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But the more these conscious illusions of the ruling classes are shown to be false and the less they satisfy common sense, the more dogmatically they are as-serted and the more deceitful, moralizing and spiritual becomes the language of established society.

—Marx, German Ideology (1845-1846)

Sarah had, of course, ugg home—though “home” is a sarcasm in the circumstances—before Mrs. Fairley. She had played her usual part in Mrs. Poulteney’s evening devotions; and she had then retired to her own room for a few minutes. Mrs. Fairley seized her chance; and the few minutes were all she needed. She came herself and knocked on the door of Sarah’s bedroom. Sarah opened it. She had her usual mask of resigned sadness, but Mrs. Fairley was brimming with triumph.

“The mistress is waiting. At once, if you please.”

Sarah looked down and nodded faintly. Mrs. Fairley thrust a look, sardonic and as sour as verjuice, at that meek head, and rustled venomously away. She did not go downstairs however, but waited around a corner until she heard the door of Mrs. Poulteney’s drawing room open and close on the secretary-companion. Then she stole silently to the door and listened.

Mrs. Poulteney was not, for once, established on her throne; but stood at the window, placing all her eloquence in her back.

“You wish to speak to me?”

But Mrs. Poulteney apparently did not, for she neither moved nor uttered a sound. Perhaps it was the omission of her customary title of “madam” that silenced her; there was a something in Sarah’s tone that made it clear the omission was deliberate. Sarah looked from the black back to an occasional table that lay between the two women. An enve-lope lay conspicuously on it. The minutest tightening of her lips—into a determination or a resentment, it was hard to say which—was her only reaction to this freezing majesty, who if the truth be known was slightly at a loss for the best way of crushing this serpent she had so regrettably taken to her bosom. Mrs. Poulteney elected at last for one blow of the axe.

“A month’s wages are in that packet. You will take it in lieu of notice. You will depart this house at your earliest convenience tomorrow morning.”

Sarah now had the effrontery to use ugg Poulteney’s weapon in return. She neither moved nor answered; until that lady, outraged, deigned to turn and show her white face, upon which burnt two pink spots of repressed emotion.

“Did you not hear me, miss?”

“Am I not to be told why?”

“Do you dare to be impertinent!”

“I dare to ask to know why I am dismissed.”

“I shall write to Mr. Forsyth. I shall see that you are locked away. You are a public scandal.”

This impetuous discharge had some effect. Two spots be-gan to burn in Sarah’s cheeks as well. There was a silence, a visible swelling of the already swollen bosom of Mrs. Poulteney.

“I command you to leave this room at once.”

“Very well. Since all I have ever experienced in it is hypocrisy, I shall do so with the greatest pleasure.”

With this Parthian shaft Sarah turned to go. But Mrs. Poulteney was one of those actresses who cannot bear not to have the last line of the scene; or perhaps I do her an injustice, and she was attempting, however unlikely it might seem from her tone of voice, to do a charity.

“Take your wages!”

Sarah turned on her, and shook her head. “You may keep them. And if it is possible with so small a sum of money, I suggest you purchase some instrument of torture. I am sure Mrs. Fairley will be pleased cheap uggs for sale help you use it upon all those wretched enough to come under your power.”

For an absurd moment Mrs. Poulteney looked like Sam: that is, she stood with her grim purse of a mouth wide open.

“You … shall… answer … for … that.”

“Before God? Are you so sure you will have His ear in the world to come?”

For the first tune in their relationship, Sarah smiled at Mrs. Poulteney: a very small but a knowing, and a telling, smile. For a few moments the mistress stared incredulously at her—indeed almost pathetically at her, as if Sarah was Satan himself come to claim his own. Then with a crablike clutching and motion she found her way to her chair and collapsed into it in a not altogether simulated swoon. Sarah stared at her a few moments, then very unfairly—to one named Fairley—took three or four swift steps to the door and opened it. The hastily erect housekeeper stood there with alarm, as if she thought Sarah might spring at her. But Sarah stood aside and indicated the gasping, throat-clutching Mrs. Poulteney, which gave Mrs. Fairley her chance to go to her aid.

“You wicked Jezebel—you have murdered her!”

Sarah did not answer. She watched a few more moments as Mrs. Fairley administered sal volatile to her mistress, then turned and went to her room. She went to her mirror, but did not look at herself; she slowly covered her face with her hands, and then very slowly raised her eyes from the fingers. What she saw she could not bear. Two moments later she was kneeling by her bed and weeping silently into the worn cover.

She should rather have prayed? But she believed she was praying.

For a breeze of morning moves,

And the planet of Love is on high . . .

—Tennyson, Maud (1855)

It is a part of special prudence never to do anything because one has an inclination to do it; but because it is one’s duty, or is reasonable.

—Matthew Arnold, Notebooks (1868)

The sun was just redly leaving the insubstantial dove-gray waves of the hills behind the Chesil Bank when Charles, not dressed in the clothes but with all the facial expression of an ugg boots mute, left the doors of the White Lion. The sky was without cloud, washed pure by the previous night’s storm and of a deliciously tender and ethereal blue; the air as sharp as lemon-juice, yet as clean and cleansing. If you get up at such an hour in Lyme today you will have the town to yourself. Charles, in that earlier-rising age, was not quite so fortunate; but the people who were about had that pleasant lack of social pretension, that primeval classlessness of dawn population: simple people setting about their day’s work. One or two bade Charles a cheery greeting; and got very peremp-tory nods and curt raisings of the ashplant in return. He would rather have seen a few symbolic corpses littering the streets than those bright faces; and he was glad when he left the town behind him and entered the lane to the Undercliff.

But his gloom (and a self-suspicion I have concealed, that his decision was really based more on the old sheepstealer’s adage, on a dangerous despair, than on the nobler movings of his conscience) had an even poorer time of it there; the quick walking sent a flood of warmth through him, a warmth from inside complemented by the warmth from without brought by the sun’s rays. It seemed strangely distinct, this undefiled dawn sun. It had almost a smell, as of warm stone, a sharp dust of photons streaming down through space. Each grass-blade was pearled with vapor. On the slopes above his path the trunks of the ashes and sycamores, a honey gold in the oblique sunlight, erected their dewy green vaults of young leaves; there was something mysteriously religious about them, but of a religion before religion; a druid balm, a green sweetness over all … and such an infinity of greens, some almost black in the further recesses of the foliage; from the most intense emerald to the palest pomona. A fox crossed his path and strangely for a moment stared, as if Charles was the intruder; and then a little later, with an uncanny similarity, with the same divine assumption of possession, a roe deer looked up from its browsing; and stared in its small majesty before quietly turning tail and slipping away into the thickets. There is a painting by Pisanello in the National Gallery that catches exactly such a moment: St. Hubert in an early Renaissance forest, confronted by birds and beasts. The saint is shocked, almost as if the victim of a practical joke, all his arrogance dowsed by a sudden drench of Nature’s profound-est secret: the universal parity of existence.

It was not only these two animals that seemed fraught with significance. The trees were dense with singing birds-blackcaps, whitethroats, thrushes, blackbirds, the cooing of woodpigeons, filling that windless dawn with the serenity of evening; yet without any of its sadness, its elegaic quality. Charles felt himself walking through the pages of a bestiary, and one of such beauty, such minute distinctness, that every leaf in it, each small bird, each song it uttered, came from a perfect world. He stopped a moment, so struck was he by this sense of an exquisitely particular universe, in which each was appointed, each unique. A tiny wren perched on top of a bramble not ten feet from him and trilled its ugg song. He saw its glittering black eyes, the red and yellow of its song-gaped throat—a midget ball of feathers that yet managed to make itself the Announcing Angel of evolution: I am what I am, thou shall not pass my being now. He stood as Pisanel-lo’s saint stood, astonished perhaps more at his own astonish-ment at this world’s existing so close, so within reach of all that suffocating banality of ordinary day. In those few mo-ments of defiant song, any ordinary hour or place—and therefore the vast infinity of all Charles’s previous hours and places—seemed vulgarized, coarsened, made garish. The ap-palling ennui of human reality lay cleft to the core; and the heart of all life pulsed there in the wren’s triumphant throat.

It seemed to announce a far deeper and stranger reality than the pseudo-Linnaean one that Charles had sensed on the beach that earlier morning—perhaps nothing more original than a priority of existence over death, of the individual over the species, of ecology over classification. We take such priorities for granted today; and we cannot imagine the hostile implications to Charles of the obscure message the wren was announcing. For it was less a profounder reality he seemed to see than universal chaos, looming behind the fragile structure of human order.

There was a more immediate bitterness in this natural eucharist, since Charles felt in all ways excommunicated. He was shut out, all paradise lost. Again, he was like Sarah—he could stand here in Eden, but not enjoy it, and only envy the wren its ecstasy.

He took the path formerly used by Sarah, which kept him out of sight of the Dairy. It was well that he did, since the sound of a pail being clattered warned him that the dairyman or his wife was up and about. So he came into the woods and went on his way with due earnestness. Some paranoiac trans-ference of guilt now made him feel that the trees, the flowers, even the inanimate things around him were watching him. Flowers became eyes, stones had ears, the trunks of the reproving trees were a numberless Greek chorus.

He came to where the path forked, and took the left branch. It ran down through dense undergrowth and over increasingly broken terrain, for here the ugg was beginning to erode. The sea came closer, a milky blue and infinitely calm. But the land leveled out a little over it, where a chain of small meadows had been won from the wilderness; a hundred yards or so to the west of the last of these meadows, in a small gulley that eventually ran down to the cliff-edge, Charles saw the thatched roof of a barn. The thatch was mossy and derelict, which added to the already forlorn ap-pearance of the little stone building, nearer a hut than its name would suggest. Originally it had been some grazier’s summer dwelling; now it was used by the dairyman for storing hay; today it is gone without trace, so badly has this land deteriorated during the last hundred years.

Charles stood and stared down at it. He had expected to see the figure of a woman there, and it made him even more nervous that the place seemed so deserted. He walked down towards it, but rather like a man going through a jungle renowned for its tigers. He expected to be pounced on; and he was far from sure of his skill with his gun.

There was an old door, closed. Charles walked round the little building. To the east, a small square window; he peered through it into the shadows, and the faint musty-sweet smell of old hay crept up his nostrils. He could see the beginning of a pile of it at the end of the barn opposite the door. He walked round the other walls. She was not there. He stared back the way he had come, thinking that he must have preceded her. But the rough land lay still in the early morning peace. He hesitated, took out his watch, and waited two or three minutes more, at a loss what to do. Finally he pushed open the door of the barn.

He made out a rough stone floor, and at the far end two or three broken stalls, filled with the hay that was still to be used. But it was difficult to see that far end, since sunlight lanced brilliantly in through the small window. Charles ad-vanced to the slanting bar of light; and then stopped with a sudden dread. Beyond the light he could make out something hanging from a nail in an old stallpost: a black bonnet. Perhaps because of his reading the previous night he had an icy premonition that some ghastly sight lay below the parti-tion of worm-eaten planks beyond the bonnet, which hung like an ominously slaked vampire over what he could not yet see. I do not know what he expected: some atrocious mutila-tion, a corpse … he nearly turned and ran out of the barn and back to Lyme. But the ghost of a sound drew him forward. He craned fearfully over the partition.

Assumptions, hasty, crude, and vain,

Full oft to use will Science deign;

The corks the novice plies today

The swimmer soon shall cast away.

—A. H. Clough, Poem (1840)

Again I spring to make my choice;

Again in tones of ire

I hear a God’s tremendous voice—

“Be counsel’d, and retire!”

—Matthew Arnold, “The Lake” (1853)

The trial of Lieutenant Emile de La Ronciere in 1835 is psychiatrically one of the most interesting of early nine-teenth-century cases. The son of the martinet Count de La Ronciere, Emile was evidently a rather frivolous—he had a mistress and got badly into debt—yet not unusual young man for his country, period and profession. In 1834 he was attached to the famous cavalry school at Saumur in the Loire valley. His commanding officer was the Baron de Morell, who had a highly strung daughter of sixteen, named Marie. In those days commanding officers’ houses served in garrison as a kind of mess for their subordinates. One evening the Baron, as stiffnecked as Emile’s father, but a ugg boots deal more influential, called the lieutenant up to him and, in the presence of his brother officers and several ladies, furiously ordered him to leave the house. The next day La Ronciere was presented with a vicious series of poison-pen letters threatening the Morell family. All displayed an uncanny knowledge of the most intimate details of the life of the household, and all—the first absurd flaw in the prosecution case—were signed with the lieutenant’s initials.

Worse was to come. On the night of September 24th, 1834, Marie’s English governess, a Miss Allen, was woken by her sixteen-year-old charge, who told in tears how La Ronci-ere, in full uniform, had just forced his way through the window into her adjacent bedroom, bolted the door, made obscene threats, struck her across the breasts and bitten her hand, then forced her to raise her night-chemise and wound-ed her in the upper thigh. He had then escaped by the way he had come.

The very next morning another lieutenant supposedly fa-vored by Marie de Morell received a highly insulting letter, again apparently from La Ronciere. A duel was fought. La Ronciere won, but the severely wounded adversary and his second refused to concede the falsity of the poison-pen charge. They threatened La Ronciere that his father would be told if he did not sign a confession of guilt; once that was done, the matter would be buried. After a night of agonized indecision, La Ronciere foolishly agreed to sign.

He then asked for leave and went to Paris, in the belief that the affair would be hushed up. But signed letters contin-ued to appear in the Morells’ house. Some claimed that Marie was pregnant, others that her parents would soon both be murdered, and so on. The Baron had had enough. La Ronciere was arrested.

The number of circumstances in the accused’s favor was so large that we can hardly believe today that he should have been brought to trial, let alone convicted. To begin with, it was common knowledge in Saumur that Marie had been piqued by La Ronciere’s obvious admiration for her hand-some mother, of whom the daughter was extremely envious. Then the Morell mansion was surrounded by sentries on the night of the attempted rape; not one had noticed anything untoward, even though the bedroom concerned was on the top floor and reachable only by a ladder it would have required at least three men to carry and “mount”—therefore a ladder that would have left traces in the soft soil beneath the window … and the defense established that there had been none. Furthermore, the glazier brought in to mend the pane broken by the intruder testified that all the broken glass had fallen outside the house and that it was in any case impossible to reach the window catch through the small aperture made. Then the defense asked why during the as-sault Marie had never once cried for help; why the light-sleeping Miss Allen had not been woken by the scuffling; why she and Marie then went back to sleep without waking Madame de Morell, who slept through the whole incident on the floor below; why the thigh wound was not examined until months after the incident (and was then pronounced to be a light scratch, now fully healed); why Marie went to a ball only two evenings later and led a perfectly normal life until the arrest was finally made—when she promptly had a ner-vous breakdown (again, the defense showed that it was far from the first in her young life); how the letters could still appear in the house, even when the penniless La Ronciere was in jail awaiting trial; why any poison-pen letter-writer in his senses should not only not disguise his writing (which was easily copiable) but sign his name; why the letters showed an accuracy of spelling and grammar (students of French will be pleased to know that La Ronciere invariably forgot to make his past participles agree) conspicuously absent from genuine correspondence produced for comparison; why twice he even failed to spell his own name correctly; why the incriminating letters appeared to be written on paper—the greatest contemporary authority witnessed as much— identical to a sheaf found in Marie’s escritoire. Why and why and why, in short. As a final doubt, the defense also pointed out that a similar series of letters had been found previously in the Morells’ Paris house, and at a time when La Ronciere was on the other side of the world, doing service in Cayenne.

But the ultimate injustice at the trial (attended by Hugo, Balzac and George Sand among many other celebrities) was the court’s refusal to allow any cross-examination of the prosecution’s principal witness: Marie de Morell. She gave her evidence in a cool and composed manner; but the pres-ident of the court, under the cannon-muzzle eyes of the Baron and an imposing phalanx of distinguished relations, decided that her “modesty” and her “weak nervous state” forbade further interrogation.

La Ronciere was found guilty and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. Almost every eminent jurist in Europe pro-tested, but in vain. We can see why he was condemned, or rather, by what he was condemned: by social prestige, by the myth of the pure-minded virgin, by psychological ignorance, by a society in full reaction from the pernicious notions of freedom disseminated by the French Revolution.

But now let me translate the pages that the doctor had marked. They come from the Observations Medico-psychologiques of a Dr. Karl Matthaei, a well-known Ger-man physician of his time, written in support of an abortive appeal against the La Ronciere verdict. Matthaei had al-ready had the intelligence to write down the dates on which the more obscene letters, culminating in the attempted rape, had occurred. They fell into a clear monthly—or menstrual— pattern. After analyzing the evidence brought before the court, the Herr Doktor proceeds, in a somewhat moralistic tone, to explain the mental illness we today call hysteria—the assumption, that is, of symptoms of disease or disability in order to gain the attention and sympathy of others: a neuro-sis or psychosis almost invariably caused, as we now know, by sexual repression.

If I glance back over my long career as a doctor, I recall many incidents of which girls have been the heroines, although their par-ticipation seemed for long impossible . . .

Some forty years ago, I had among my patients the family of a lieutenant-general of cavalry. He had a small property some six miles from the town where he was in garrison, and he lived there, riding into town when his duties called. He had an exceptionally pretty daughter of sixteen years’ age. She wished fervently that her father lived in the town. Her exact reasons were never discov-ered, but no doubt she wished to have the company of the officers and the pleasures of ugg there. To get her way, she chose a highly criminal procedure: she set fire to the country home. A wing of it was burned to the ground. It was rebuilt. New attempts at arson were made: and one day once again part of the house went up in flames. No less than thirty attempts at arson were committed subsequently. However nearly one came upon the arsonist, his identity was never discovered. Many people were apprehended and interrogated. The one person who was never suspected was that beautiful young innocent daughter. Several years passed; and then finally she was caught in the act; and condemned to life im-prisonment in a house of correction.

In a large German city, a charming young girl of a distinguished family found her pleasure in sending anonymous letters whose purpose was to break up a recent happy marriage. She also spread vicious scandals concerning another young lady, widely admired for her talents and therefore an object of envy. These letters continued for several years. No shadow of suspicion fell on the authoress, though many other people were accused. At last she gave herself away, and was accused, and confessed to her crime … She served a long sentence in prison for her evil.

Again, at the very time and in this very place where I write,* the police are investigating a similar affair . . .

[* Hanover, 1836.]

It may be objected that Marie de Morell would not have in-flicted pain on herself to attain her ends. But her suffering was very slight compared to that in other cases from the annals of medicine. Here are some very remarkable instances.

Professor Herholdt of Copenhagen knew an attractive young woman of excellent education and well-to-do parents. He, like many of his colleagues, was completely deceived by her. She ap-plied the greatest skill and perseverance to her deceits, and over a course of several years. She even tortured herself in the most atrocious manner. She plunged some hundreds of needles into the flesh of various parts of her body: and when inflammation or suppuration had set in she had them removed by incision. She refused to urinate and had her urine removed each morning by means of a catheter. She herself introduced air into her bladder, which escaped when the instrument was inserted. For a year and a half she rested dumb and without movement, refused food, pretended spasms, fainting fits, and so on. Before her tricks were discovered, several famous doctors, some from abroad, examined her and were horror-struck to see such suffering. Her unhappy story was in all the news-papers, and no one doubted the authenticity of her case. Finally, in 1826, the truth was discovered. The sole motives of this clever fraud (cette adroite trompeuse) were to become an object of ad-miration and astonishment to men, and to make a fool of the most learned, famous and perceptive of them. The history of this case, so important from the psychological point of view, may be found in Herholdt: Notes on the illness of Rachel Hertz between 1807 and 1826.

At Luneburg, a mother and daughter hit on a scheme whose aim was to draw a lucrative sympathy upon themselves—a scheme they pursued to the end with an appalling determination. The daughter complained of unbearable pain in one breast, lamented and wept, sought the help of the professions, tried all their remedies. The pain continued; a cancer was suspected. She herself elected without hesitation to have the breast extirpated; it was found to be per-fectly healthy. Some years later, when sympathy for her had less-ened, she took up her old role. The other breast was removed, and was found to be as healthy as the first. When once again sympathy began to dry up, she complained of pain in the hand. She wanted that too to be amputated. But suspicion was aroused. She was sent to hospital, accused of false pretenses, and finally dispatched to prison.

Lentin, in his Supplement to a practical knowledge of medicine (Hanover, 1798) tells this story, of which he was a witness. From a girl of no great age were drawn, by the medium of forceps after previous incision of the bladder and its neck, no less than one hundred and four stones in ten months. The girl herself introduced the stones into her bladder, even though the subsequent operations caused her great loss of blood and atrocious pain. Before this, she had had vomiting, convulsions and violent symptoms of many kinds. She showed a rare skill in her deceptions.

After such examples, which it would be easy to extend, who would say that it is impossible for a girl, in order to attain louis vuitton de-sired end, to inflict pain upon herself?*

[* I cannot leave the story of La Ronciere—which I have taken from the same 1835 account that Dr. Grogan handed Charles—without add-ing that in 1848, some years after the lieutenant had finished his time, one of the original prosecuting counsel had the belated honesty to sus-pect that he had helped procure a gross miscarriage of justice. He was by then in a position to have the case reopened. La Roncifere was com-pletely exonerated and rehabilitated. He resumed his military career and might, at that very hour Charles was reading the black climax of his life, have been found leading a pleasant enough existence as mili-tary governor of Tahiti. But his story has an extraordinary final twist. Only quite recently has it become known that he at least partly deserved the hysterical Mile de Morell’s revenge on him. He had indeed entered her bedroom on that September night of 1834; but not through the window. Having earlier seduced the governess Miss Allen (perfide Albion!), he made a much simpler entry from her adjoining bedroom. The purpose of his visit was not amatory, but in fulfillment of a bet he had made with some brother officers, to whom he had boasted of hav-ing slept with Marie. He was challenged to produce proof in the form of a lock of hair—but not from the girl’s head. The wound in Marie’s thigh was caused by a pair of scissors; and the wound to her self-esteem becomes a good deal more explicable. An excellent discussion of this bizarre case may be found in Rene Floriot, Les Erreurs Judic-iaires, Paris, 1968.]

Those latter pages were the first Charles read. They came as a brutal shock to him, for he had no idea that such perversions existed—and in the pure and sacred sex. Nor, of course, could he see mental illness of the hysteric kind for what it is: a pitiable striving for love and security. He turned to the beginning of the account of the trial and soon found himself drawn fatally on into that. I need hardly say that he identified himself almost at once with the miserable Emile de La Ronciere; and towards the end of the trial he came upon a date that sent a shiver down his spine. The day that other French lieutenant was condemned was the very same day that Charles had come into the world. For a moment, in that silent Dorset night, reason and science dissolved; life was a dark machine, a sinister astrology, a verdict at birth and without appeal, a zero over all.

He had never felt less free.

And he had never felt less sleepy. He looked at his watch. It lacked ten minutes of four o’clock. All was peace now outside. The storm had passed. Charles opened a window and breathed in the cold but clean spring air. Stars twinkled faintly overhead, innocently, disclaiming influence, either sin-ister or beneficent. And where was she? Awake also, a mile or two away, in some dark woodland darkness.

The effects of the cobbler and Grogan’s brandy had long worn off, leaving Charles only with a profound sense of guilt. He thought he recalled a malice in the Irish doctor’s eyes, a storing-up of this fatuous London gentleman’s troubles that would soon be whispered and retailed all over Lyme. Was it not notorious that his race could not keep a secret?

How puerile, how undignified his behavior had been! He had lost not only Winsyatt that previous day, but all his self-respect. Even that last phrase was a tautology; he had, quite simply, lost respect for everything he knew. Life was a pit in Bedlam. Behind the most innocent faces lurked the vilest iniquities. He was Sir Galahad shown Guinevere to be a whore.

To stop the futile brooding—if only he could act!—he picked up the fatal book and read again some of the passages in Matthaei’s paper on hysteria. He saw fewer parallels now with Sarah’s conduct. His guilt began to attach itself to its proper object. He tried to recollect her face, things she had said, the expression in her eyes as she had said them; but he could not grasp her. Yet it came to him that he knew her better, perhaps, than any other human being did. That ac-count of their meetings he had given Grogan . . . that he could remember, and almost word for word. Had he not, in his anxiety to hide his own real feelings, misled Grogan? Exaggerated her strangeness? Not honestly passed on what she had actually said?

Had he not condemned her to avoid condemning himself?

Endlessly he paced his sitting room, searching his soul and his hurt pride. Suppose she was what she had represented herself to be—a sinner, certainly, but also a woman of exceptional courage, refusing to turn her back on her sin? And now finally weakened in her terrible battle with her past and crying for help?

Why had he allowed Grogan to judge her for him?

Because he was more concerned to save appearances than his own soul. Because he had no more free will than an ammonite. Because he was a Pontius Pilate, a worse than he, not only condoning the crucifixion but encouraging, nay, even causing—did not all spring from that second meeting, when she had wanted to leave, but had had discussion of her situation forced upon her?—the events that now led to its execution.

He opened the window again. Two hours had passed since he had first done so. Now a faint light spread from the east. He stared up at the paling stars.

Destiny.

Those eyes.

Abruptly he turned.

If he met Grogan, he met him. His conscience must explain his disobedience. He went into his bedroom. And there, with an outward sour gravity reflecting the inward, self-awed and indecipherable determination he had come to, he began to change his clothes.

How often I sit, poring o’er

My strange distorted youth,

Seeking in vain, in all my store,

One feeling based on truth; . . .

So constant as my heart would be,

So fickle as it must,

‘Twere well for others and for me

‘Twere dry as summer dust.

Excitements come, and act and speech

Flow freely forth:—but no,

Nor they, nor aught beside can reach

The buried world below.

—A. H. Clough, Poem (1840)

The door was opened by the housekeeper. The doctor, it seemed, was in his dispensary; but if Charles would like to wait upstairs … so, divested of his hat and his Inverness cape he soon found himself in that same room where he had drunk the grog and declared himself for Darwin. A fire burned in the grate; and evidence of the doctor’s solitary supper, which the housekeeper hastened to clear, lay on the round table in the bay window overlooking the sea. Charles very soon heard feet on the stairs. Grogan came warmly into the room, hand extended.

“This is a uggs on sale uk Smithson. That stupid woman now— has she not given you something to counteract the rain?”

“Thank you …” he was going to refuse the brandy decan-ter, but changed his mind. And when he had the glass in his hand, he came straight out with his purpose. “I have some-thing private and very personal to discuss. I need your advice.”

A little glint showed in the doctor’s eyes then. He had had other well-bred young men come to him shortly before their marriage. Sometimes it was gonorrhea, less often syphilis; sometimes it was mere fear, masturbation phobia; a wide-spread theory of the time maintained that the wages of self-abuse was impotence. But usually it was ignorance; only a year before a miserable and childless young husband had come to see Dr. Grogan, who had had gravely to explain that new life is neither begotten nor born through the navel.

“Do you now? Well I’m not sure I have any left—I’ve given a vast amount of it away today. Mainly concerning what should be executed upon that damned old bigot up in Marlborough House. You’ve heard what she’s done?”

“That is precisely what I wish to talk to you about.”

The doctor breathed a little inward sigh of relief; and he once again jumped to the wrong conclusion.

“Ah, of course—Mrs. Tranter is worried? Tell her from me that all is being done that can be done. A party is out searching. I have offered five pounds to the man who brings her back …” his voice went bitter “… or finds the poor creature’s body.”

“She is alive. I’ve just received a note from her.”

Charles looked down before the doctor’s amazed look. And then, at first addressing his brandy glass, he began to tell the truth of his encounters with Sarah—that is, almost all the truth, for he left undescribed his own more secret feelings, He managed, or tried, to pass some of the blame off on Dr. Grogan and their previous conversation; giving himself a sort of scientific status that the shrewd little man opposite did not fail to note. Old doctors and old priests share one thing in common: they get a long nose for deceit, whether it is overt or, as in Charles’s case, committed out of embarrassment. As he went on with his confession, the end of Dr. Grogan’s nose began metaphorically to twitch; and this invisible twitching signified very much the same as Sam’s pursing of his lips. The doctor let no sign of his suspicions appear. Now and then he asked questions, but in general he let Charles talk his increas-ingly lame way to the end of his story. Then he stood up.

“Well, first things first. We must get those poor devils back.” The thunder was now much closer and though the curtains had been drawn, the white shiver of lightning trem-bled often in their weave behind Charles’s back.

“I came as soon as I could.”

“Yes, you are not to blame for that. Now let me see …” The doctor was already seated at a small desk in the rear of the room. For a few moments there was no sound in it but the rapid scratch of his pen. Then he read what he had written to Charles.

“’Dear Forsyth, News has this minute reached me that Miss Woodruff is safe. She does not wish her whereabouts disclosed, but you may set your mind at rest. I hope to have further news of her tomorrow. Please offer the enclosed to the party of searchers when they return. ‘Will that do?”

“Excellently. Except that the enclosure must be mine.” Charles produced a small embroidered purse, Ernestina’s work, and set three sovereigns on the green cloth desk beside Grogan, who pushed two away. He looked up with a smile.

“Mr. Forsyth is trying to abolish the demon alcohol. I think one piece of gold is enough.” He placed the note and the coin in an envelope, sealed it, and then went to arrange for the letter’s speedy delivery.

He came back, talking. “Now the girl—what’s to be done about her? You have no notion where she is at the moment?”

“None at all. Though I am sure she will be where she indicated tomorrow morning.”

“But of course you cannot be there. In your situation you cannot risk any further compromise.”

Charles looked at him, then down at the carpet.

“I am in your hands.”

The doctor stared thoughtfully at Charles. He had just set a little test to probe his guest’s mind. And it had revealed what he had expected. He turned and went to the book-shelves by his desk and then came back with the same volume he had shown Charles before: Darwin’s great work. He sat before him across the fire; then with a small smile and a look at Charles over his glasses, he laid his hand, as if swearing on a Bible on The Origin of Species.

“Nothing that has been said in this room or that remains to be said shall go beyond its walls.” Then he put the book aside.

“My dear Doctor, that was not necessary.”

“Confidence in the practitioner is half of medicine.”

Charles smiled wanly. “And the other half?”

“Confidence in the patient.” But he stood before Charles could speak. “Well now—you came for my advice, did you not?” He eyed Charles almost as if he was going to box with him; no longer the bantering, but the fighting Irishman. Then he began to pace his “cabin,” his hands tucked under his frock coat.

“I am a young woman of superior intelligence and some education. I think the world has done badly by me. I am not in full command of my emotions. I do foolish things, such as throwing myself at the head of the first handsome rascal who is put in my path. What is worse, I have fallen in love with being a victim of fate. I put out a very professional line in the way of looking melancholy. I have tragic eyes. I weep without explanation. Et cetera. Et cetera. And now…” the little doctor waved his hand at the door, as if invoking magic “…enter a young god. Intelligent. Good-looking. A perfect specimen of that class my education has taught me to ad-mire. I see he is interested in me. The sadder I seem, the more interested he appears to be. I kneel before him, he raises me to my feet. He treats me like a lady. Nay, more than that. In a spirit of Christian brotherhood he offers to help me escape from my unhappy lot.”

Charles made to interrupt, but the doctor silenced him.

“Now I am very poor. I can use none of the wiles the more fortunate of my sex employ to lure mankind into their power.” He raised his forefinger. “I have but one weapon. The pity I inspire in this kindhearted man. Now pity is a thing that takes a devil of a lot of feeding. I have fed this Good Samaritan my past and he has devoured it. So what can I do? I must make him pity my present. One day, when I am walking where I ugg boots sale uk been forbidden to walk, I seize my chance. I show myself to someone I know will report my crime to the one person who will not condone it. I get myself dismissed from my position. I disappear, under the strong presumption that it is in order to throw myself off the nearest clifftop. And then, in extremis and de profundis—or rather de altis—I cry to my savior for help.” He left a long pause then, and Charles’s eyes slowly met his. The doctor smiled, “I present what is partly hypothesis, of course.”

“But your specific accusation—that she invited her own…”

The doctor sat and poked the fire into life. “I was called early this morning to Marlborough House. I did not know why—merely that Mrs. P. was severely indisposed. Mrs. Fairley—the housekeeper, you know—told me the gist of what had happened.” He paused and fixed Charles’s unhappy eyes. “Mrs. Fairley was yesterday at the dairy out there on Ware Cleeves. The girl walked flagrantly out of the woods under her nose. Now that woman is a very fair match to her mistress, and I’m sure she did her subsequent duty with all the mean appetite of her kind. But I am convinced, my dear Smithson, that she was deliberately invited to do it.”

“You mean …” The doctor nodded. Charles gave him a terrible look, then revolted. “I cannot believe it. It is not possible she should—“

He did not finish the sentence. The doctor murmured, “It is possible. Alas.”

“But only a person of …” he was going to say “warped mind,” but he stood abruptly and went to the window, parted the curtains, stared a blind moment out into the teeming

night. A livid flash of sheet lightning lit the Cobb, the beach, the torpid sea. He turned.

“In other words, I have been led by the nose.”

“Yes, I think you have. But it required a generous nose. And you must remember that a deranged mind is not a criminal mind. In this case you must think of despair as a disease, no more or less. That girl, Smithson, has a cholera, a typhus of the intellectual faculties. You must think of her like that. Not as some malicious schemer.”

Charles came back into the room. “And what do you suppose her final intention to be?”

“I very much doubt if she knows. She lives from day to day. Indeed she must. No one of foresight could have be-haved as she has.”

“But she cannot seriously have supposed that someone in my position …”

“As a man who is betrothed?” The doctor smiled grimly. “I have known many prostitutes. I hasten to add: in pursu-ance of my own profession, not theirs. And I wish I had a guinea for every one I have heard gloat over the fact that a majority of their victims are husbands and fathers.” He stared into the fire, into his past. “ ‘I am cast out. But I shall be revenged.’”

“You make her sound like a fiend—she is not so.” He had spoken too vehemently, and turned quickly away. “I cannot believe this of her.”

“That, if you will permit a man old enough to be your father to say so, is because you are half in love with her.”

Charles spun round and stared at the doctor’s bland face.

“I do not permit you to say that.” Grogan bowed his head. In the silence, Charles added, “It is highly insulting to Miss Freeman.”

“It is indeed. But who is making the insult?”

Charles swallowed. He could not bear these quizzical eyes, and he started down the long, narrow room as if to go. But before he could reach the door, Grogan had him by the arm and made him turn, and seized the other arm—and he was fierce, a terrier at Charles’s dignity.

“Man, man, are we not both believers in science? Do we not both hold that truth is the one great principle? What did Socrates die for? A keeping social face? A homage to de-corum? Do you think in my forty years as a doctor I have not learned to tell when a man is in distress? And because he is hiding the truth from himself? Know thyself, Smithson, know thyself!”

The mixture of ancient Greek and Gaelic fire in Grogan’s soul seared Charles. He stood staring down at the doctor, then looked aside, and returned to the fireside, his back to his tormentor. There was a long silence. Grogan watched him intently.

At last Charles spoke.

“I am not made for marriage. My misfortune is to have realized it too late.”

“Have you read Malthus?” Charles shook his head. “For him the tragedy of Homo sapiens is that the least fit to survive breed the most. So don’t say you aren’t made for marriage, my boy. And don’t blame yourself for falling for that girl. I think I know why that French sailor ran louis vuittin free shipping He knew she had eyes a man could drown in.”

Charles swiveled round in agony. “On my most sacred honor, nothing improper has passed between us. You must believe that.”

“I believe you. But let me put you through the old catechism. Do you wish to hear her? Do you wish to see her? Do you wish to touch her?”

Charles turned away again and sank into the chair, his face in his hands. It was no answer, yet it said everything. After a moment, he raised his face and stared into the fire.

“Oh my dear Grogan, if you knew the mess my life was in … the waste of it … the uselessness of it. I have no moral purpose, no real sense of duty to anything. It seems only a few months ago that I was twenty-one—full of hopes…all disappointed. And now to get entangled in this miserable business…”

Grogan moved beside him and gripped his shoulder. “You are not the first man to doubt his choice of bride.” “She understands so little of what I really am.” “She is—what?—a dozen years younger than yourself? And she has known you not six months. How could she understand you as yet? She is hardly out of the schoolroom.”

Charles nodded gloomily. He could not tell the doctor his real conviction about Ernestina: that she would never under-stand him. He felt fatally disabused of his own intelligence. It had let him down in his choice of a life partner; for like so many Victorian, and perhaps more recent, men Charles was to live all his life under the influence of the ideal. There are some men who are consoled by the idea that there are women less attractive than their wives; and others who are haunted by the knowledge that there are more attractive. Charles now saw only too well which category he belonged to. He murmured, “It is not her fault. It cannot be.”

“I should think not. A pretty young innocent girl like that.”

“I shall honor my vows to her.”

“Of course.”

A silence.

“Tell me what to do.”

“First tell me your real sentiments as regards the other.”

Charles looked up in despair; then down to the fire, and tried at last to tell the truth.

“I cannot say, Grogan. In all that relates to her, I am an enigma to myself. I do not love her. How could I? A woman so compromised, a woman you tell me is mentally diseased. But … it is as if … I feel like a man possessed against his will—against all that is better in his character. Even now her face rises before me, denying all you say. There is something in her. A knowledge, an apprehension of nobler things than are compatible with either evil or madness. Beneath the dross … I cannot explain.”

“I did not lay evil at her door. But despair.”

No sound, but a floorboard or two that creaked as the doctor paced. At last Charles spoke again.

“What do you advise?”

“That you leave matters entirely in my hands.”

“You will go to see her?”

“I shall put on my walking boots. I shall tell her you have been unexpectedly called away. And you must go away, Smithson.”

“It so happens I have urgent business in London.”

“So much the better. And I suggest that before you go you lay the whole matter before Miss Freeman.”

“I had already decided upon that.” Charles got to his feet. But still that face rose before him. “And she—what will you do?”

“Much depends upon her state of mind. It may well be that all that keeps her sane at the present juncture is her belief that you feel sympathy—perhaps something sweeter— for her. The shock of your not appearing may, I fear, produce a graver melancholia. I am afraid we must antici-pate that.” Charles looked down. “You are not to blame that upon yourself. If it had not been you, it would have been some other. In a way, such a state of affairs will make things easier. I shall know what course to take.”

Charles stared at the carpet. “An asylum.”

“That colleague I mentioned—he shares my views on the treatment of such cases. We shall do our best. You would be prepared for a certain amount of expense?”

“Anything to be rid of her—without harm to her.”

“I know a private asylum in Exeter. My friend Spencer has patients there. It is conducted in an intelligent and enlight-ened manner. I should not recommend a public institution at this stage.”

“Heaven forbid. I have heard terrible accounts of them.”

“Rest assured. This place is a model of its kind.”

“We are not talking of committal?”

For there had arisen in Charles’s mind a little ghost of treachery: to discuss her so clinically, to think of her locked in some small room…

“Not at all. We are talking of a place where her spiritual wounds can heal, where she will be kindly treated, kept occupied—and will have the benefit of Spencer’s excellent experience and care. He has had similar cases. He knows what to do.”

Charles hesitated, then stood and held out his hand. In his present state he needed orders and prescriptions, and as soon as he had them, he felt better.

“I feel you have saved my life.”

“Nonsense, my dear fellow.”

“No, it is not nonsense. I shall be in debt to you for the rest of my days.”

“Then let me inscribe the name of your bride on the bill of credit.”

“I shall honor the debt.”

“And give the charming creature time. The best wines take the longest to mature, do they not?”

“I fear that in my own case the same is true of a very inferior vintage.”

“Bah. Poppycock.” The doctor clapped him on the shoul-der. “And by the bye, I think you read French?”

Charles gave a surprised assent. Grogan sought through his shelves, found a book, and then marked a passage in it with a pencil before passing it to his guest.

“You need not read the whole trial. But I should like you to read this medical evidence that was brought by the de-fense.”

Charles stared at the volume. “A purge?”

The little doctor had a gnomic smile.

“Something of the kind.”

MY HEART LURCHED when I saw the little girl. Her hair was singed to an inch of frizzed, black fuzz sticking out from her scalp. Her eyebrows and lashes were gone, and her skin looked painfully pink. We approached her bed, which seemed to float under a bower of shiny helium balloons.

Molly didn’t look at me or Conklin, but two Chinese women moved aside and a white-haired woman in her seventies with rounded features and sapphire blue eyes stood up and introduced herself as Molly’s psychiatrist, Dr. Olga Matlaga.

The shrink spoke to the little girl, saying, “Some police officers are here to see you, sweetheart.”

Molly turned toward me when I said her name, but her eyes were dull, as if the life had been sucked out of her, leaving only a stick-figure representation of a child.

“Have you found Graybeard?” she asked me, her voice whispery and slowed by painkillers.

I cast a questioning look at Dr. Matlaga, who explained, “Her dog, Graybeard, is missing.”

I told Molly that we would put out an APB for Graybeard and told her what that meant. She nodded soberly and I asked, “Can you tell us what happened in your house?”

The child turned her face toward the window.

“Molly?” Conklin said. He dragged over a chair, sat so that he was at the little girl’s eye level. “Have lots of people been asking you questions?”

Molly reached a hand toward the swinging arm of the table near her bed. Conklin lifted a glass of water, held it so the child could sip through the straw.

“We know you’re tired, honey, but if you could just tell the story one more time.”

Molly sighed, said, “I heard Graybeard barking. And then he stopped. I went back to my movie, and a little later I heard voices. My mom and dad always told me not to come downstairs when they had guests.”

“Guests?” Conklin ugg patiently. “More than one?”

Molly nodded.

“And they were friends of your parents?”

Molly shrugged, said, “I only know that one of them carried me out of the fire.”

“Can you tell us what he looked like?”

ugg boots had a nice face, and I think he had blond hair. And he was like Ruben’s age,” Molly said.

“Ruben?”

“My brother, Ruben. He’s in the cafeteria right now, but he goes to Cal Tech. He’s a sophomore.”

“Had you ever seen this boy before?” I asked.

I felt Dr. Matlaga’s hand at my elbow, signaling me that our time was over.

“I didn’t know him,” Molly said. “I could have been ugg sale she said, finally fixing her eyes on me. “But in my dream, whoever he was, I know he was an angel.”

She closed her eyes, and tears spilled from under those lashless crescents and rolled silently down her cheeks.

CHUCK HANNI’S CHAIR scraped the floor as he pushed back from Jacobi’s desk. He’d been caught off guard and was now indignant. “What? You think I’m like that Orr prick? Setting fires so I can be a hero? . . . Oh, and I planted that book to point suspicion at myself? Look! I gave the ATF a standing ovation when they brought John Orr down.”

Conklin smiled, shrugged.

I felt sweat beading up at my hairline. Hanni couldn’t be what Conklin was suggesting, but so many kind-faced seeming do-gooders had been convicted of mass murder, I had to know. I kept my mouth shut and let the scene play out.

“Why didn’t you tell us about the Christiansen fire?” Conklin said, calmly. “Two wealthy people died. Their stuff was stolen -”

“Christ,” Hanni interrupted. “I don’t sit around reminiscing about old cases – do you? Bad enough I see them in my dreams -”

“But the MO was the same,” Conklin insisted. “And so I’m wondering if the killer can’t kick the habit. Maybe he’s still at it, and now he’s leaving clues at the crime scene. Like a book inscribed with a few words of Latin.”

I watched Chuck’s expression, expecting him to bolt, or punch out at Rich, or break down.

Instead he frowned, said, “What do you mean, the killer can’t kick the habit? Matt Waters confessed to the Christiansen fire two years ago. He’s doing time at the Q. Check it out, Conklin, before you start slinging accusations around.”

My face got hot.

Had Cindy uggs this wrong? The Christiansen fire had happened far from San Francisco, but still, I should have double-checked Cindy’s research.

Jacobi’s intercom had buzzed a few times during this meeting, louis vuitton outlet he hadn’t picked up. Now Brenda Fregosi, our squad assistant, barged into the office, ripped a pink square of paper from a pad, handed it to Jacobi, saying, “What’s the matter, Lieutenant? You didn’t hear me ring?”

Brenda turned and, swinging her hips, walked back across the gray linoleum to her desk. Jacobi read the note.

“Molly Chu louis vuitton outlet responding to the hospital shrink,” he told us. “She might be ready to talk.”

Chuck got out of his chair, but Jacobi stopped him.

“Let’s talk, Chuck. Just you and me.”

CONKLIN AND I had never had a serious fight, but we bickered during the entire two-hour drive back to the Hall. Rich insisted it was significant that a pro like Hanni had missed “the only clue in the whole ugg crime scene.”

I liked Chuck Hanni. I admired him. Rich didn’t have the same history, the same attachment, so he could be more objective. I had to consider his point of view. Was Hanni a psychopath hiding in plain sight? Or was Conklin so desperate to close the Malone case that he was turning an oversight into a major deal?

I saw that Chuck Hanni was with Jacobi in the glass-walled corner office when Conklin and I entered the squad room. As we wove around the desks toward Jacobi’s office, Conklin said to me, cheap uggs cheap uggs for sale handle this, okay?”

Jacobi waved us into his small office, and Conklin leaned against the wall inside the door. I took a side chair next to Hanni, who squirmed in his seat in order to face me.

“I was telling Jacobi, the Chu fire looks like the work of the same sick asshole who set the others,” Hanni said. “Don’t you think?”

I was looking at Hanni’s familiar face and thinking of the time he’d told me about spontaneous human combustion.

“It’s like this, Lindsay,” he’d said over beer at MacBain’s. “Biggish guy is drinking beer and smoking cigarettes in his La-Z-Boy. Falls asleep. The cigarette drops between the cushions and catches fire. Biggish guy’s fat is saturated with alcohol. The chair catches fire and so does the guy, like a freakin’ torch.

“After they’ve been incinerated, the fire extinguishes itself. Nothing else catches, so all that’s left is the metal frame of the chair and the guy’s charred remains.

“There’s your so-called spontaneous human combustion.”

I had said “Ewwww,” laughed, and bought the next round.

Now Conklin said from behind me, “Chuck, you were at the Chu scene and you didn’t let us know about it. What’s up with that?”

“You think I was keeping something from you?” Hanni bristled. “I told Jimenez to notify you guys as soon as I saw the victims’ bodies.”

Conklin took the paperback book from his inside jacket pocket. He reached over me, placed the book, now enclosed in a plastic evidence bag, on top of the pile of junk on Jacobi’s desktop.

“This was inside the Chu house,” Conklin said, his voice matter-of-fact, but there was nothing innocent about it. “There’s block lettering on the first page, in Latin.”

Hanni looked at the book in silence for a moment, then muttered, “How did I miss this?”

Jacobi said, “Where’d you find it, Rich?”

“In a bathroom, Lieutenant. In plain sight.”

Jacobi looked at Hanni with the hard-boiled stare he’d perfected in twenty-five years of interrogating the worst people in the world. He said, “What about it, Chuck?”

A TELEPHONE RANG repeatedly in some corner of the second floor of George and Nancy Chu’s house. I waited out the sad, echoing bell tones before asking Jimenez the name and age of the Chus’ daughter.

“Molly Chu. She’s ten.”

I ugg boots in my notebook, stepped around a mound of water-soaked rubble, and headed for the stairs. I called out to Rich, who was already starting down. Before I could tell him about Molly Chu, he showed me a paperback book that he held by the charred edges.

Enough of the book cover remained so that I could read the title: Fire Lover, by Joseph Wambaugh.

I knew the book.

This was a nonfiction account of a serial arsonist who’d terrorized the state of California in the 1980s and ’90s. The blurb on the back cover cheap uggs a ugg of horror, a fire that had demolished a huge home improvement center, killing four people, including a little boy of two. While the fire burned, a man sat in his car, videotaping the images in his rearview mirror – the rigs pulling up, the firefighters boiling out, trying to do the dangerous and impossible, to knock down the inferno even as two other suspicious fires burned only blocks away.

The man in the car was an arson investigator, John Leonard Orr, a captain of the Glendale Fire Department.

Orr was well known and respected. He toured the state giving lectures to firefighters, helping law enforcement read the clues and understand the pathology of arsonists. And while he was traveling, John Orr set fires. He set the fire that had killed those four people. And because of his pattern of setting fires in towns where he was attending fire conferences, he was eventually caught.

He was tried, convicted, and stashed in a small cell at Lompoc for the rest of his life, without possibility of parole.

“Did you see this book?” Conklin asked Jimenez.

Jimenez shook his head no, said, “What? We’re looking for books?”

“I found it in the master bathroom between the sink and the toilet,” Conklin said to me.

The pages of the book were damp and warped, but it was intact. Incredibly, books rarely burn, because of their density and because the oxygen the fire needs for combustion can’t get between the pages. Still holding the book by the edges, Rich opened the cover and showed me the block letters printed with a ballpoint pen on the title page.

I sucked in my breath.

This was the link that tied the homicides together.

The Latin phrase was the killer’s signature, but why did he leave it? What was he trying to tell us?

“Hanni was here,” Conklin said quietly. “Why didn’t he find this book?”

I muttered, “Got me,” and focused on the handwritten words on the flyleaf, Sobria inebrietas. Even I could translate this one: “sober intoxication.”

But what the hell did it mean?

CONKLIN PARKED OUR CAR on the narrow, tree-lined road in Monterey, a small coastal town two hours south of San Francisco. On my right, one wing of the three-story, wood-frame house remained untouched, while the center of the house had burned out to the framing timbers, the roof open to the blue sky like a ugg scream.

Conklin and I pushed through the clumps of sidewalk gawkers, ducked under the barricade tape, and loped up the walk.

The arson investigator was waiting for us outside the front door. He was in his early thirties, over six feet tall, jangling the keys and change in his pocket. He introduced himself as Ramon Jimenez and gave me his card with his cell phone number printed on the back. Jimenez opened the fire department lock on the front door so we could enter the center of the house, and as the front door swung open we were hit with the smell of apples and cinnamon.

“Air freshener explosion,” Jimenez said. “The crispy critters were found in the den.”

As we followed Jimenez into the fire-ravaged shell, I thought about how some ugg and ugg boots use jargon to show that they’re tough – when in fact they’re horrified. Others do it because they get off on it. What kind of guy was Jimenez?

“Was the front door locked?” I asked him.

“No, and a neighbor called the fire in. Lots of people don’t bother to set their alarms around here.”

Broken glass crunched under my shoes and water lapped over the tops of them as I slogged through the open space, trying to get a sense of the victims’ lives from the remains and residue of their home. But my knack for fitting puzzle pieces together was blunted by the extent of the destruction. First the fire, then the water and the mop-up, left the worst kind of crime scene.

If there had been fingerprints, they were gone. Hair, fiber, blood spatter, footprints, receipts, notes – forget all of that. Unless a bomb trigger or trace of an accelerant was found, we couldn’t even be sure that this fire and the others we were investigating had been set by the same person.

The most conclusive evidence we had was the similarity of the circumstances surrounding this fire and those at the Malones’ and Meachams’ homes.

“The vics were a married couple, George and Nancy Chu,” Jimenez told us. “She was a middle school teacher. He was some kind of financial planner. They paid their taxes, were law-abiding, good neighbors, and so forth. No known connections with any bad guys. I can fax you the detectives’ notes from the canvass of the neighborhood.”

“What about the ME’s report?” I asked.

Conklin was splashing through the ruins behind me. He started up the skeletal staircase that still clung to the rear wall.

“The ME wasn’t called. Uh, the chief ruled the fire accidental. Nancy Chu’s sister had the funeral home pick up the bodies, ASAP.”

“The chief didn’t see cause to call the ME?” I shouted. “We’re looking at a string of fire-related, probable homicides in San Francisco.”

“Like I told you,” Jimenez said, staring me down with his dark eyes. “I wasn’t called either. By the time I got here, the bodies were gone and the house was boarded up. Now everyone’s yelling at me.”

“Who else is yelling?”

“You know him. Chuck Hanni.”

“Chuck was here?”

“This morning. We called him in to consult. He said you were working a couple of similar cases. And before you say I didn’t tell you, we might have a witness.”

Had I heard Jimenez right? There was a witness? I stared up at Jimenez and pinned some hope on the thought of a break in the case.

“Firefighters found the Chus’ daughter unconscious out on the lawn. She’s at St. Anne’s Children’s Hospital with an admitting carbon monoxide of seventeen percent.”

“She’s going to make it?”

Jimenez nodded, said, “She’s conscious now, but pretty traumatized. So far she hasn’t said a word.”

1:45 AM

AS Craig slipped his hand under the hem of Sophie’s sweater, he heard steps. He broke the clinch and looked around.

His sister was coming down from the hayloft in her nightdress. « I feel a bit strange, » she said, and crossed the room to the bathroom.

Thwarted, Craig turned his attention to the film on TV. The old witch, transformed into a beautiful girl, was seducing a handsome knight.

Caroline emerged, saying, « That bathroom smells of puke. » She climbed the ladder and went back to bed.

« No privacy here, » Sophie said in a low voice.

« Like trying to make love in Glasgow Central Station, » Craig said, but he kissed her again. This time, she opened her lips and her tongue met his. He was so pleased that he moaned with delight.

He put his hand all the way up inside her sweater and felt her breast. It was small and warm. She was wearing a thin cotton bra. He squeezed gently, and she gave an involuntary groan of pleasure.

Tom’s voice piped: « Will you two stop grunting? I can’t sleep! »

They stopped kissing. Craig took his hand out ugg under her sweater. He was ready to explode with frustration. « I’m sorry about this, » he murmured.

Sophie said, « Why don’t we go somewhere else? »

« Like, where? »

« How about that attic you showed me earlier? »

Craig was thrilled. They would be completely alone, and no one would disturb them. « Brilliant, » he said, and he stood up.

They cheap uggs on coats and boots, and Sophie pulled on a pink woolly hat with a bobble. It made her look cute and innocent. « A bundle of joy, » Craig said.

« What is? »

« You are. »

She smiled. Earlier, she would have called him « so boring » for saying something like that. Their relationship had changed. Maybe it was the vodka. But Craig thought the turning point had come in the bathroom, when they had dealt with Tom together. Perhaps Tom, by being a helpless child, had forced them to act like adults. After that, it was hard to revert to being sulky and cool.

Craig would never have guessed that the way to a girl’s heart might be cleaning up puke.

He opened the barn door. A cold wind blew a flurry of snow over them like confetti. Craig stepped out quickly, held the door for Sophie, then closed it.

Steepfall looked impossibly romantic. Snow covered the steeply sloping roof, lay in great mounds on the windowsills, and filled the courtyard to the depth of a foot. The lanterns on the surrounding walls had halos of golden light filled with dancing snowflakes. Snow encrusted a wheelbarrow, a stack of firewood, and a garden hose, transforming them into ice sculptures.

Sophie’s eyes were wide. « It’s a Christmas card, » she said.

Craig took her hand. They crossed the courtyard with high steps, like wading birds. They rounded the corner of the house and came to the back door. Craig brushed a layer of snow off the top of a trash can. He stood on it and heaved himself up onto the low roof of the boot lobby.

He looked back. Sophie was hesitating. « Here! » he hissed. He held out his hand.

She grasped it and pulled herself up onto the can. With his other hand, Craig grabbed the edge of the sloping roof, to steady himself, then helped her up beside him. For a moment they lay side by side in the snow, like lovers in bed. Then Craig got to his feet.

He stepped onto the ledge that ran below the loft door, kicked off most of the snow, and opened the big door. Then he returned to Sophie.

She got to her hands and knees but, when she tried to stand, her rubber boots slipped and she fell. She looked scared.

« Hold on to me, » Craig said, and pulled her to her feet. What they were doing was not very dangerous, and she was making more of it than she should, but he did not mind, for it gave him a chance to be strong and protective.

Still holding her hand, Craig stood on the ledge. She stepped up beside him and grabbed him around the waist. He would have liked to linger there, with her clinging to him so hard; but he went on, walking sideways along the ledge to the open door, then helped her inside.

He closed the door behind them and turned on the light. This was perfect, Craig thought excitedly. They were alone, in the middle of the night, and nobody would come in to disturb them. They could do anything they liked.

He lay down and looked through the hole in the floor into the kitchen. A single light burned over the door to the boot room. Nellie lay in front of the Aga, head up, ears cocked, listening: she knew he was there. « Go back to sleep, » he murmured. Whether she heard him or not, the dog uggs her head down and closed her eyes.

Sophie was sitting on the old couch, shivering. « My feet are freezing. »

« You’ve got snow in your boots. » He knelt in front of her and pulled her Wellingtons off. Her socks were soaked. He took those off, too. Her small white feet felt as if they had been in the fridge. He tried to warm them with his hands. Then, inspired, he unbuttoned his coat, lifted his sweater, and pressed the soles of her feet to his bare chest.

She said, « Oh, my God, that feels so good. »

She had often said that to him in his fantasies, he reflected; but not in quite the same circumstances.