With the form conforming duly,

Senseless what it meaneth truly,

Go to church—the world require you,

To balls—the world require you too,

And marry—papa and mama desire you,

And your sisters and schoolfellows do.

—A. H. Clough, “Duty” (1841)

“Oh! no, what he!” she cried in scorn,

“I woulden gi’e a penny vor’n;

The best ov him’s outzide in view;

His cwoat is gay enough, ‘tis true,

But then the wold vo’k didden bring

En up to know a single thing…”

—William Barnes, Poems in the Dorset Dialect (1869)

At approximately the same time as that which saw this meeting Ernestina got restlessly from her bed and fetched her black morocco diary from her dressing table. She first turned rather sulkily to her entry of that morning, which was cer-tainly not very inspired from a literary point of view: “Wrote letter to Mama. Did not see dearest Charles. Did not go out, tho’ it is very fine. Did not feel happy.”

It had been a very did-not sort of day for the poor girl, who had had only Aunt Tranter to show her displeasure to. There had been Charles’s daffodils and jonquils, whose per-fume she now inhaled, but even they had vexed her at first. Aunt Tranter’s house was small, and she had heard Sam knock on the front door downstairs; she had heard the wicked and irreverent Mary open it—a murmur of voices and then a distinct, suppressed gurgle of laughter from the maid, a slammed door. The odious and abominable suspicion crossed her mind that Charles had been down there, flirting; and this touched on one of her deepest fears about him.

She knew he had lived in Paris, in Lisbon, and traveled much; she knew he was eleven years older than herself; she knew he was attractive to women. His answers to her discreetly playful interrogations about his past conquests were always discreetly playful in return; and that was the rub. She felt he must be hiding something—a tragic French countess, a passionate Portuguese marquesa. Her mind did not allow itself to run to a Parisian grisette or an almond-eyed inn-girl at Cintra, which would have been rather nearer the truth. But in a way cheap uggs matter of whether he had slept with other women worried her less than it might a modern girl. Of course Ernestina uttered her autocratic “I must not” just as soon as any such sinful speculation crossed her mind; but it was really Charles’s heart of which she was jealous. That, she could not bear to think of having to share, either historically or presently. Occam’s useful razor was unknown to her. Thus the simple fact that he had never really been in love became clear proof to Ernestina, on her darker days, that he had once been passionately so. His calm exterior she took for the terrible silence of a recent battlefield, Waterloo a month after; instead of for what it really was—a place without history.

When the front door closed, Ernestina allowed dignity to control her for precisely one and a half minutes, whereupon her fragile little hand reached out and peremptorily pulled the gilt handle beside her bed. A pleasantly insistent tinkle filtered up from the basement kitchen; and soon afterwards, there were footsteps, a knock, and the door opened to reveal Mary bearing a vase with a positive fountain of spring flowers. The girl came and stood by the bed, her face half hidden by the blossoms, smiling, impossible for a man to have been angry with—and therefore quite the reverse to Ernestina, who frowned sourly and reproachfully at this unwelcome vision of Flora.

Of the three young women who pass through these pages Mary was, in my opinion, by far the prettiest. She had infi-nitely the most life, and infinitely the least selfishness; and physical charms to match … an exquisitely pure, if pink complexion, corn-colored hair and delectably wide gray-blue eyes, eyes that invited male provocation and returned it as gaily as it was given. They bubbled as the best champagne bubbles, irrepressibly; and without causing flatulence. Not even the sad Victorian clothes she had so often to wear could hide the trim, plump promise of her figure—indeed, “plump” is unkind. I brought up Ronsard’s name just now; and her figure required a word from his vocabulary, one for which we have no equivalent in English: rondelet—all that is seduc-tive in plumpness without losing all that is nice in slimness.

Mary’s great-great-granddaughter, who is twenty-two years old this month I write in, much resembles her ancestor; and her face is known over the entire world, for she is one of the more celebrated younger English film actresses.

But it was not, I am afraid, the face for 1867. It had not, for instance, been at all the face for Mrs. Poulteney, to whom it had become familiar some three years previously. Mary was the niece of a cousin of Mrs. Fairley, who had wheedled Mrs. Poulteney into taking the novice into the unkind kitchen. But Marlborough House and Mary had suited each other as well as a tomb would a goldfinch; and when one day Mrs. Poulteney was somberly surveying her domain and saw from her upstairs window the disgusting sight of her stableboy soliciting a kiss, and not being very successfully resisted, the goldfinch was given an instant liberty; where-upon it flew to Mrs. Tranter’s, in spite of Mrs. Poulteney’s solemn warnings to that lady as to the foolhardiness of harboring such proven dissoluteness.

In Broad Street Mary was happy. Mrs. Tranter liked pretty girls; and pretty, laughing girls even better. Of course, Ernestina was her niece, and she worried for her more; but Ernestina she saw only once or twice a year, and Mary she saw every day. Below her mobile, flirtatious surface the girl had a gentle affectionateness; and she did not stint, she returned the warmth that was given. Ernestina did not know a dreadful secret of that house in Broad Street; there were times, if cook had a day off, when Mrs. Tranter sat and ate with Mary alone in the downstairs kitchen; and they were not the unhappiest hours in either of their lives.

Mary was not faultless; and one of her faults was a certain envy of Ernestina. It was not only that she ceased abruptly to be the tacit favorite of the household when the young lady from London arrived; but the young lady from London came also with trunkfuls of the latest London and Paris fashions, not the best recommendation to a servant with only three dresses to her name—and not one of which she really liked, even though the best of them she could really dislike only because it had been handed down by the young princess from the capital. She also thought Charles was a beautiful man for a husband; a great deal too good for a pallid creature like Ernestina. This was why Charles had the frequent benefit of those gray-and-periwinkle eyes when she opened the door to him or passed him in the street. In wicked fact the creature picked her exits and entrances to coincide with Charles’s; and each time he raised his hat to her in the street she mentally cocked her nose at Ernestina; for she knew very well why Mrs. Tranter’s niece went upstairs so abruptly after Charles’s departures. Like all soubrettes, she dared to think things her young mistress did not; and knew it.

Having duly and maliciously allowed her health and cheer-fulness to register on the invalid, Mary placed the flowers on the bedside commode.

“From Mr. Charles, Miss Tina. With ‘er complimums.” Mary spoke in a dialect notorious for its contempt of pro-nouns and suffixes.

“Place them on my dressing table. I do not like them so close.”

Mary obediently removed them there and disobediently began to rearrange them a little before turning to smile at the suspicious Ernestina.

“Did he bring them himself?”

“No, miss.”

“Where is Mr. Charles?”

“Doan know, miss. I didn’ ask’un.” But her mouth was pressed too tightly together, as if she wanted to giggle.

“But I heard you speak with the man.”

“Yes, miss.”

“What about?”

“’Twas just the time o’ day, miss.”

“Is that what made you laugh?”

“Yes, miss. ‘Tis the way ‘e speaks, miss.”

The Sam who had presented himself at the door had in fact borne very little resemblance to the mournful and indig-nant young man who had stropped the razor. He had thrust the handsome bouquet into the mischievous Mary’s arms. “For the bootiful young lady hupstairs.” Then dexterously he had placed his foot where the door had been about to shut and as dexterously produced from behind his back, in his other hand, while his now free one swept off his ^ la mode near-brimless topper, a little posy of crocuses. “And for the heven more lovely one down.” Mary had blushed a deep pink; the pressure of the door on Sam’s foot had mysteriously lightened. He watched her smell the yellow flowers; not po-litely, but genuinely, so that a tiny orange smudge of saffron appeared on the charming, impertinent nose.

“That there bag o’ soot will be delivered as bordered.” She bit her lips, and waited. “Hon one condition. No tick. Hit must be a-paid for at once.”

“’Ow much would’er cost then?”

The forward fellow eyed his victim, as if calculating a fair price; then laid a finger on his mouth and gave a profoundly unambiguous wink. It was this that had provoked that smoth-ered laugh; and the slammed door.

Ernestina gave her a look that would have not disgraced Mrs. Poulteney. “You will kindly remember that he comes from London.”

“Yes, miss.”

“Mr. Smithson has already spoken to me of him. The man fancies himself a Don Juan.”

“What’s that then, Miss Tina?”

There was a certain eager anxiety for further information in Mary’s face that displeased Ernestina very much.

“Never mind now. But if he makes advances I wish to be told at once. Now bring me some barley water. And be more discreet in future.”

There passed a tiny light in Mary’s eyes, something singu-larly like a flash of defiance. But she cast down her eyes and her flat little lace cap, bobbing a token curtsy, and left the room. Three flights down, and three flights up, as Ernestina, who had not the least desire for Aunt Tranter’s wholesome but uninteresting barley water, consoled herself by remem-bering.

But Mary had in a sense won the exchange, for it remind-ed Ernestina, not by nature a domestic tyrant but simply a horrid spoiled child, that soon she would have to stop playing at mistress, and be one in real earnest. The idea brought pleasures, of course; to have one’s own house, to be free of parents . . . but servants were such a problem, as everyone said. Were no longer what they were, as everyone said. Were tiresome, in a word. Perhaps Ernestina’s puzzlement and distress were not far removed from those of Charles, as he had sweated and stumbled his way along the shore. Life was the correct apparatus; it was heresy to think otherwise; but meanwhile the cross had to be borne, here and now.

It was to banish such gloomy forebodings, still with her in the afternoon, that Ernestina fetched her diary, propped herself up in bed and once more turned to the page with the sprig of jasmine.

In London the beginnings of a plutocratic stratification of society had, by the mid-century, begun. Nothing of course took the place of good blood; but it had become generally accepted that good money and good brains could produce artificially a passable enough facsimile of acceptable social standing. Disraeli was the type, not the exception, of his times. Ernestina’s grandfather may have been no more than a well-to-do draper in Stoke Newington when he was young; but he died a very rich draper—much more than that, since he had moved commercially into central London, founded one of the West End’s great stores and extended his business into many departments besides drapery. Her father, indeed, had given her only what he had himself received: the best education that money could buy. In all except his origins he was impeccably a gentleman; and he had married discreetly above him, a daughter of one of the City’s most successful solicitors, who could number an Attorney-General, no less, among his not-too-distant ancestors. Ernestina’s qualms about her social status were therefore rather farfetched, even by Victorian standards; and they had never in the least troubled Charles.

“Do but think,” he had once said to her, “how disgraceful-ly plebeian a name Smithson is.”

“Ah indeed—if you were only called Lord Brabazon Vava-sour Vere de Vere—how much more I should love you!”

But behind her self-mockery lurked a fear.

He had first met her the preceding November, at the house of a lady who had her eye on him for one of her own covey of simperers. These young ladies had had the misfortune to be briefed by their parents before the evening began. They made the cardinal error of trying to pretend to Charles that paleontology absorbed them—he must give them the titles of the most interesting books on the subject—whereas Ernestina showed a gently acid little determination not to take him very seriously. She would, she murmured, send him any interesting specimens of coal she came across in her scuttle; and later she told him she thought he was very lazy. Why, pray? Because he could hardly enter any London drawing room without finding abundant examples of the objects of his interest.

To both young people it had promised to be just one more dull evening; and both, when they returned to their respective homes, found that it had not been so.

They saw in each other a superiority of intelligence, a lightness of touch, a dryness that pleased. Ernestina let it be known that she had found “that Mr. Smithson” an agreeable change from the dull crop of partners hitherto presented for her examination that season. Her mother made discreet in-quiries; and consulted her husband, who made more; for no young male ever set foot in the drawing room of the house overlooking Hyde Park who had not been as well vetted as any modern security department vets its atomic scientists. Charles passed his secret ordeal with flying colors.

Now Ernestina had seen the mistake of her rivals: that no wife thrown at Charles’s head would ever touch his heart. So when he began to frequent her mother’s at homes and soirees he had the unusual experience of finding that there was no sign of the usual matrimonial trap; no sly hints from the mother of how much the sweet darling loved children or “secretly longed for the end of the season” (it was supposed that Charles would live permanently at Winsyatt, as soon as the obstacular uncle did his duty); or less sly ones from the father on the size of the fortune “my dearest girl” would bring to her husband. The latter were, in any case, conspicu-ously unnecessary; the Hyde Park house was fit for a duke to live in, and the absence of brothers and sisters said more than a thousand bank statements.

Nor did Ernestina, although she was very soon wildly determined, as only a spoiled daughter can be, to have Charles, overplay her hand. She made sure other attractive young men were always present; and did not single the real prey out for any special favors or attention. She was, on principle, never serious with him; without exactly saying so she gave him the impression that she liked him because he was fun— but of course she knew he would ugg marry. Then came an evening in January when she decided to plant the fatal seed.

She saw Charles standing alone; and on the opposite side of the room she saw an aged dowager, a kind of Mayfair equivalent of Mrs. Poulteney, whom she knew would be as congenial to Charles as castor oil to a healthy child. She went up to him.

“Shall you not go converse with Lady Fairwether?”

“I should rather converse with you.”

“I will present you. And then you can have an eyewitness account of the goings-on in the Early Cretaceous era.”

He smiled. “The Early Cretaceous is a period. Not an era.”

“Never mind. I am sure it is sufficiently old. And I know how bored you are by anything that has happened in the last ninety million years. Come.”

So they began to cross the room together; but halfway to the Early Cretaceous lady, she stopped, laid her hand a moment on his arm, and looked him in the eyes.

“If you are determined to be a sour old bachelor, Mr. Smithson, you must practice for your part.”

She had moved on before he could answer; and what she had said might have sounded no more than a continuation of her teasing. But her eyes had for the briefest moment made it clear that she made an offer; as unmistakable, in its way, as those made by the women who in the London of the time haunted the doorways round the Haymarket.

What she did not know was that she had touched an increasingly sensitive place in Charles’s innermost soul; his feeling that he was growing like his uncle at Winsyatt, that life was passing him by, that he was being, as in so many other things, overfastidious, lazy, selfish … and worse. He had not traveled abroad those last two years; and he had realized that previously traveling had been a substitute for not having a wife. It took his mind off domestic affairs; it also allowed him to take an occasional woman into his bed, a pleasure he strictly forbade himself, perhaps remembering the black night of the soul his first essay in that field had caused, in England.

Traveling no longer attracted him; but women did, and he was therefore in a state of extreme sexual frustration, since his moral delicacy had not allowed him to try the simple expedient of a week in Ostend or Paris. He could never have allowed such a purpose to dictate the reason for a journey. He passed a very thoughtful week. Then one morning he woke up.

Everything had become simple. He loved Ernestina. He thought of the pleasure of waking up on just such a morning, cold, gray, with a powder of snow on the ground, and seeing that demure, sweetly dry little face asleep beside him—and by heavens (this fact struck Charles with a sort of amaze-ment) legitimately in the eyes of both God and man beside him. A few minutes later he startled the sleepy Sam, who had crept up from downstairs at his urgent ringing, by saying: “Sam! I am an absolute one hundred per cent heaven forgive me damned fool!”

A day or two afterwards the unadulterated fool had an interview with Ernestina’s father. It was brief, and very satis-factory. He went down to the drawing room, where Ernest-ina’s mother sat in a state of the most poignant trepidation. She could not bring herself to speak to Charles, but pointed uncertainly in the direction of the conservatory. Charles opened the white doors to it and stood in the waft of the hot, fragrant air. He had to search for Ernestina, but at last he found her in one of the farthest corners, half screened behind ‘a bower of stephanotis. He saw her glance at him, and then look hastily down and away. She held a pair of silver scis-sors, and was pretending to snip off some of the dead blooms of the heavily scented plant. Charles stood close behind her; coughed.

“I have come to bid my adieux.” The agonized look she flashed at him he pretended, by the simple trick of staring at the ground, not to notice. “I have decided to leave England. For the rest of my life I shall travel. How else can a sour old bachelor divert his days?”

He was ready to go on in this vein. But then he saw that Ernestina’s head was bowed and that her knuckles were drained white by the force with which she was gripping the table. He knew that normally she would have guessed his tease at once; and he understood that her slowness now sprang from a deep emotion, which communicated itself to him.

“But if I believed that someone cared for me sufficiently to share…”

He could not go on, for she had turned, her eyes full of tears. Their uggs met, and he drew her to him. They did not kiss. They could not. How can you mercilessly imprison all natural sexual instinct for twenty years and then not expect the prisoner to be racked by sobs when the doors are thrown open?

A few minutes later Charles led Tina, a little recovered, down the aisle of hothouse plants to the door back to the drawing room. But he stopped a moment at a plant of jasmine and picked a sprig and held it playfully over her head.

“It isn’t mistletoe, but it will do, will it not?”

And so they kissed, with lips as chastely asexual as chil-dren’s. Ernestina began to cry again; then dried her eyes, and allowed Charles to lead her back into the drawing room, where her mother and father stood. No words were needed. Ernestina ran into her mother’s opened arms, and twice as many tears as before began to fall. Meanwhile the two men stood smiling at each other; the one as if he had just con-cluded an excellent business deal, the other as if he was not quite sure which planet he had just landed on, but sincerely hoped the natives were friendly.

And once, but once, she lifted her eyes, And suddenly, sweetly, strangely blush’d To find they were met by my own …

—Tennyson, Maud (1855)

. . . with its green chasms between romantic rocks, where the scattered forest trees and orchards of luxu-riant growth declare that many a generation must have passed away since the first partial falling of the cliff prepared the ground for such a state, where a scene so wonderful and so lovely is exhibited, as may more than equal any of the resembling scenes of the far-famed Isle of Wight…

—Jane Austen, Persuasion

There runs, between Lyme Regis and Axmouth six miles to the west, one of the strangest coastal landscapes in Southern England. From the air it is not very striking; one notes merely that whereas elsewhere on the coast the fields run to the cliff edge, here they stop a mile or so short of it. The cultivated chequer of green and red-brown breaks, with a kind of joyous undiscipline, into a dark cascade of trees and undergrowth. There are no roofs. If one flies low enough one can see that the terrain is very abrupt, cut by deep chasms and accented by strange bluffs and towers of chalk and flint, which loom over the lush foliage around them like the walls of ruined castles. From the air ugg but on foot this seemingly unimportant wilderness gains a strange extension. People have been lost in it for hours, and cannot believe, when they see on the map where they were lost, that their sense of isolation—and if the weather be bad, desolation—could have seemed so great.

The Undercliff—for this land is really the mile-long slope caused by the erosion of the ancient vertical cliff face—is very steep. Flat places are as rare as visitors in it. But this steepness in effect tilts it, and its vegetation, towards the sun; and it is this fact, together with the water from the countless springs that have caused the erosion, that lends the area its botanical strangeness—its wild arbutus and ilex and other trees rarely seen growing in England; its enormous ashes and beeches; its green Brazilian chasms choked with ivy and the liana of wild clematis; its bracken that grows seven, eight feet tall; its flowers that bloom a month earlier than any-where else in the district. In summer it is the nearest this country can offer to a tropical jungle. It has also, like all land that has never been worked or lived on by man, its mysteries, its shadows, its dangers—only too literal ones geologically, since there are crevices and sudden falls that can bring disaster, and in places where a man with a broken leg could shout all week and not be heard. Strange as it may seem, it was slightly less solitary a hundred years ago than it is today. There is not a single cottage in the Undercliff now; in 1867 there were several, lived in by gamekeepers, woodmen, a pigherd or two. The roedeer, sure proof of abundant soli-tude, then must have passed less peaceful days. Now the Undercliff has reverted to a state of total wildness. The cottage walls have crumbled into ivied stumps, the old branch paths have gone; no car road goes near it, the one remaining track that traverses it is often impassable. And it is so by Act of Parliament: a national nature reserve. Not all is lost to expedience.

It was this place, an English Garden of Eden on such a day as March 29th, 1867, that Charles had entered when he had climbed the path from the shore at Pinhay Bay; and it was this same place whose eastern half was called Ware Commons.

When Charles had quenched his thirst and cooled his brow with his wetted handkerchief he began to look seriously around him. Or at least he tried to look seriously around him; but the little slope on which he found himself, the prospect before him, the sounds, the scents, the unalloyed wildness of growth and burgeoning fertility, forced him into anti-science. The ground about him was studded gold and pale yellow with celandines and primroses and banked by the bridal white of densely blossoming sloe; where jubilantly green-tipped elders shaded the mossy banks of the little brook he had drunk from were clusters of moschatel and woodsorrel, most deli-cate of English spring flowers. Higher up the slope he saw the white heads of anemones, and beyond them deep green drifts of bluebell leaves. A distant woodpecker drummed in the branches of some high tree, and bullfinches whistled quietly over his head; newly arrived chiffchaffs and willow warblers sang in every bush and treetop. When he turned he saw the blue sea, now washing far below; and the whole extent of Lyme Bay reaching round, diminishing cliffs that dropped into the endless yellow saber of the Chesil Bank, whose remote tip touched that strange English Gibraltar, Portland Bill, a thin gray shadow wedged between azures.

Only one art has ever caught such scenes—that of the Renaissance; it is the ground that Botticelli’s figures walk on, the air that includes Ronsard’s songs. It does not matter what that cultural revolution’s conscious aims and purposes, its cruelties and failures were; in essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization’s hardest winters. It was an end to chains, bounds, frontiers. Its device was the only device: What is, is good. It was all, in short, that Charles’s age was not; but do not think that as he stood there he did not know this. It is true that to explain his obscure feeling of malaise, of inappropriateness, of limitation, he went back closer home—to Rousseau, and the childish myths of a Golden Age and the Noble Savage. That is, he tried to dismiss the inadequacies of his own time’s approach to nature by supposing that one cannot reenter a legend. He told himself he was too pampered, too spoiled by civilization, ever to inhabit nature again; and that made him sad, in a not unpleasant bittersweet sort of way. After all, he was a Victo-rian. We could not expect him to see what we are only just beginning—and with so much more knowledge and the lessons of existentialist philosophy at our disposal—to realize ourselves: that the desire to hold and the desire to enjoy are mutually destructive. His statement to himself should have been, “I possess this now, therefore I am happy,” instead of what it so Victorianly was: “I cannot possess this forever, and therefore am sad.”

Science eventually regained its hegemony, and he began to search among the beds of flint along the course of the stream for his tests. He found a pretty fragment of fossil scallop, but the sea urchins eluded him. Gradually he moved through the trees to the west, bending, carefully quartering the ground with his eyes, moving on a few paces, then repeating the same procedure. Now and then he would turn over a likely-looking flint with the end of his ashplant. But he had no luck. An hour passed, and his duty towards Ernestina began to outweigh his lust for echinoderms. He looked at his watch, repressed a curse, and made his way back to where he had left his rucksack. Some way up the slope, with the declining sun on his back, he came on a path and set off for Lyme. The path climbed and curved slightly inward beside an ivy-grown stone wall and then—in the unkind manner of paths— forked without indication. He hesitated, then walked some fifty yards or so along the lower path, which lay sunk in a transverse gully, already deeply shadowed. But then he came to a solution to his problem—not knowing exactly how the land lay—for yet another path suddenly branched to his right, back towards the sea, up a steep small slope crowned with grass, and from which he could plainly orientate him-self. He therefore pushed up through the strands of bramble— the path was seldom used—to the little green plateau.

It opened out very agreeably, like a tiny alpine meadow. The white scuts of three or four rabbits explained why the turf was so short.

Charles stood in the sunlight. Eyebright and birdsfoot starred the grass, and already vivid green clumps of marjoram reached up to bloom. Then he moved forward to the edge of the plateau.

And there, below him, he saw a figure.

For one terrible moment he thought he had stumbled on a corpse. But it was a woman asleep. She had chosen the strangest position, a broad, sloping ledge of grass some five feet beneath the level of the plateau, and which hid her from the view of any but one who came, as Charles had, to the very edge. The chalk walls behind this little natural balcony made it into a sun trap, for its widest axis pointed southwest. But it was not a sun trap many would have chosen. Its outer edge gave onto a sheer drop of some thirty or forty feet into an ugly tangle of brambles. A little beyond them the real cliff plunged down to the beach.

Charles’s immediate instinct had been to draw back out of the woman’s view. He did not see who she was. He stood at a loss, looking at but not seeing the fine landscape the place commanded. He hesitated, he was about to withdraw; but then his curiosity drew him forward again.

The girl lay in the complete abandonment of deep sleep, on her back. Her coat had fallen open over her indigo dress, unrelieved in its calico severity except by a small white ugg at the throat. The sleeper’s face was turned away from him, her right arm thrown back, bent in a childlike way. A scattered handful of anemones lay on the grass around it. There was something intensely tender and yet sexual in the way she lay; it awakened a dim echo of Charles of a moment from his time in Paris. Another girl, whose name now he could not even remember, perhaps had never known, seen sleeping so, one dawn, in a bedroom overlooking the Seine.

He moved round the curving lip of the plateau, to where he could see the sleeper’s face better, and it was only then that he realized whom he had intruded upon. It was the French Lieutenant’s Woman. Part of her hair had become loose and half covered her cheek. On the Cobb it had seemed to him a dark brown; now he saw that it had red tints, a rich warmth, and without the then indispensable gloss of feminine hair oil. The skin below seemed very brown, almost ruddy, in that light, as if the girl cared more for health than a fashion-ably pale and languid-cheeked complexion. A strong nose, heavy eyebrows … the mouth he could not see. It irked him strangely that he had to see her upside down, since the land would not allow him to pass round for the proper angle.

He stood unable to do anything but stare down, tranced by this unexpected encounter, and overcome by an equally strange feeling—not sexual, but fraternal, perhaps paternal, a certainty of the innocence of this creature, of her being unfairly outcast, and which was in turn a factor of his intuition of her appalling loneliness. He could not imagine what, besides despair, could drive her, in an age where women were semistatic, timid, incapable of sustained physical effort, to this wild place.

He came at last to the very edge of the rampart above her, directly over her face, and there he saw that all the sadness he had so remarked before was gone; in sleep the face was gentle, it might even have had the ghost of a smile. It was precisely then, as he craned sideways down, that she awoke.

She looked up at once, so quickly that his step back was in vain. He was detected, and he was too much a gentleman to deny it. So when Sarah scrambled to her feet, gathering her coat about her, and stared back up at him from her ledge, he raised his wideawake and bowed. She said nothing, but fixed him with a look of shock and bewilderment, perhaps not untinged with shame. She had fine eyes, dark eyes.

They stood thus for several seconds, locked in a mutual incomprehension. She seemed so small to him, standing there below him, hidden from the waist down, clutching her collar, as if, should he take a step towards her, she would turn and fling herself out of his sight. He came to his sense of cheap uggs for sale was proper.

“A thousand apologies. I came upon you inadvertently.” And then he turned and walked away. He did not look back, but scrambled down to the path he had left, and back to the fork, where he wondered why he had not had the presence of mind to ask which path he was to take, and waited half a minute to see if she was following him. She did not appear. Very soon he marched firmly away up the steeper path.

Charles did not know it, but in those brief poised seconds

above the waiting sea, in that luminous evening silence bro-ken only by the waves’ quiet wash, the whole Victorian Age was lost. And I do not mean he had taken the wrong path.

. . . this heart, I know,

To be long lov’d was never fram’d;

But something in its depths doth glow

Too strange, too restless, too untamed.

—Matthew Arnold, “A Farewell” (1853)

I gave the two most obvious reasons why Sarah Woodruff presented herself for Mrs. Poulteney’s inspection. But she was the last person to list reasons, however instinctively, and there were many others—indeed there must have been, since she was not unaware of Mrs. Poulteney’s reputation in the less elevated milieux of Lyme. For a day she had been undecided; then she had gone to see Mrs. Talbot to seek her advice. Now Mrs. Talbot was an extremely kindhearted but a not very perspicacious young woman; and though she would have liked to take Sarah back—indeed, had earlier firmly offered to do so—she was aware that Sarah was now incapa-ble of that sustained and daylong attention to her charges that a governess’s duties require. And yet she still wanted very much to help her.

She knew Sarah faced penury; and lay awake at nights imagining scenes from the more romantic literature of her adolescence, scenes in which starving heroines lay huddled on snow-covered doorsteps or fevered in some bare, leaking garret. But one image—an actual illustration from one of Mrs. Sherwood’s edifying tales—summed up her worst fears. A pursued woman jumped from a cliff. Lightning flashed, revealing the cruel heads of her persecutors above; but worst of all was the shrieking horror on the doomed creature’s pallid face and the way her cloak rippled upwards, vast, black, a falling raven’s wing of terrible death.

So Mrs. Talbot concealed her doubts about Mrs. Poulteney and advised Sarah to take the post. The ex-governess kissed little Paul and Virginia goodbye, and walked back to Lyme a condemned woman. She trusted Mrs. Talbot’s judgment; and no intelligent woman who trusts a stupid one, however kind-hearted, can expect else.

Sarah was intelligent, but her real intelligence belonged to a rare kind; one that would certainly pass undetected in any of our modern tests of the faculty. It was not in the least analytical or problem-solving, and it is no doubt symptomatic that the one subject that had cost her agonies to master was mathematics. Nor did it manifest itself in the form of any particular vivacity or wit, even in her happier days. It was rather an uncanny—uncanny in one who had never been to London, never mixed in the world—ability to classify other people’s worth: to understand them, in the fullest sense of that word.

She had some sort of psychological equivalent of the experienced horse dealer’s skill—the ability to know almost at the first glance the good horse from the bad one; or as if, jumping a century, she was born with a computer in her heart. I say her heart, since the values she computed belong more there than in the mind. She could sense the pretensions of a hollow argument, a false scholarship, a biased logic when she came across them; but she also saw through people in subtler ways. Without being able to say how, any more than a computer can explain its own processes, she saw them as they were and not as they tried to seem. It would not be enough to say she was a fine moral judge of people. Her comprehension was broader than that, and if mere morality had been her touchstone she would not have behaved as she did—the simple fact of the matter being that she had not lodged with a female cousin at Weymouth.

This instinctual profundity of insight was the first curse of her life; the second was her education. It was not a very great education, no better than could be got in a third-rate young ladies’ seminary in Exeter, where she had learned during the day and paid for her learning during the evening— and sometimes well into the night—by darning and other menial tasks. She did not get on well with the other pupils. They looked down on her; and she looked up through them. Thus it had come about that she had read far more fiction, and far more poetry, those two sanctuaries of the lonely, than most of her kind. They served as a substitute for experience. Without realizing it she judged people as much by the standards of Walter Scott and Jane Austen as by any empirically arrived at; seeing those around her as fictional characters, and making poetic judgments on them. But alas, what she had thus taught herself had been very largely vitiated by what she had been taught. Given the veneer of a lady, she was made the perfect victim of a caste society. Her father had forced her out of her own class, but could not raise her to the next. To the young men of the one she had left she had become too select to marry; to those of the one she aspired to, she remained too banal.

This father, he the vicar of Lyme had described as “a man of excellent principles,” was the very reverse, since he had a fine collection of all the wrong ones. It was not concern for his only daughter that made him send her to boarding school, but obsession with his own ancestry. Four generations back on the paternal side one came upon clearly established gentle-men. There was even a remote relationship with the Drake family, an irrelevant fact that had petrified gradually over the years into the assumption of a direct lineal descent from the great Sir Francis. The family had certainly once owned a manor of sorts in that cold green no-man’s-land between Dartmoor and Exmoor. Sarah’s father had three times seen it with his own eyes; and returned to the small farm he rented from the vast Meriton estate to brood, and plot, and dream.

Perhaps he was disappointed when his daughter came home from school at the age of eighteen—who knows what miracles he thought would rain on him?—and sat across the elm table from him and watched him when he boasted, watching with a quiet reserve that goaded him, goaded him like a piece of useless machinery (for he was born a Devon man and money means all to Devon men), goaded him finally into madness. He gave up his tenancy and bought a farm of his own; but he bought it too cheap, and what he thought was a cunning good bargain turned out to be a shocking bad one. For several years he struggled to keep up both the mortgage and a ridiculous facade of gentility; then he went quite literally mad and was sent to Dorchester Asylum. He died there a year later. By that time Sarah had been earning her own living for a year—at first with a family in Dorchester, to be near her father. Then when he died, she had taken her post with the Talbots.

She was too striking a girl not to have had suitors, in spite of the lack of a dowry of any kind. But always then had her first and innate curse come into operation; she saw through the too confident pretendants. She saw their meannesses, their condescensions, their charities, their stupidities. Thus she appeared inescapably doomed to the one fate nature had so clearly spent many millions of years in evolving her to avoid: spinsterhood.

Let us imagine the impossible, that Mrs. Poulteney drew up a list of fors and againsts on the subject of Sarah, and on the very day that Charles was occupied in his highly scientific escapade from the onerous duties of his engagement. At least it is conceivable that she might have done it that afternoon, since Sarah, Miss Sarah at Marlborough House, was out.

And let us start happily, with the credit side of the ac-count. The first item would undoubtedly have been the least expected at the time of committal a year before. It could be written so: “A happier domestic atmosphere.” The astonish-ing fact was that not a single servant had been sent on his, or her (statistically it had in the past rather more often proved to be the latter) way.

It had begun, this bizarre change, one morning only a few weeks after Miss Sarah had taken up her duties, that is, her responsibility for Mrs. Poulteney’s soul. The old lady had detected with her usual flair a gross dereliction of duty: the upstairs maid whose duty it was unfailingly each Tuesday to water the ferns in the second drawing room—Mrs. Poulteney kept one for herself and one for company—had omitted to do so. The ferns looked greenly forgiving; but Mrs. Poulteney was whitely the contrary. The culprit was summoned. She confessed that she had forgotten; Mrs. Poulteney might pon-derously have overlooked that, but the girl had a list of two or three recent similar peccadilloes on her charge sheet. Her knell had rung; and Mrs. Poulteney began, with the grim sense of duty of a bulldog about to sink its teeth into a burglar’s ankles, to ring it.

“I will tolerate much, but I will not tolerate this.”

“I’ll never do it again, mum.”

“You will most certainly never do it again in my house.”

“Oh, mum. Please, mum.”

Mrs. Poulteney allowed herself to savor for a few earnest, perceptive moments the girl’s tears.

“Mrs. Fairley will give you your wages.”

Miss Sarah was present at this conversation, since Mrs. Poulteney had been dictating letters, mostly to bishops or at least in the tone of voice with which one addresses bishops, to her. She now asked a question; and the effect was remark-able. It was, to begin with, the first question she had asked in Mrs. Poulteney’s presence that was not directly connected with her duties. Secondly, it tacitly contradicted the old lady’s judgment. Thirdly, it was spoken not to Mrs. Poulten-ey, but to the girl.

“Are you quite well, Millie?”

Whether it was the effect of a sympathetic voice in that room, or the girl’s condition, she startled Mrs. Poulteney by sinking to her knees, at the same time shaking her head and covering her face. Miss Sarah was swiftly beside her; and within the next minute had established that the girl was indeed not well, had fainted twice within the last week, had been too afraid to tell anyone …

When, some time later, Miss Sarah returned from the room in which the maids slept, and where Millie had now been put to bed, it was Mrs. Poulteney’s turn to ask an astounding question.

“What am I to do?”

Miss Sarah had looked her in the eyes, and there was that in her look which made her subsequent words no more than a concession to convention.

“As you think best, ma’m.”

So the rarest flower, forgiveness, was given a precarious footing in Marlborough House; and when the doctor came to look at the maid, and pronounced green sickness, Mrs. Poul-teney discovered the perverse pleasures of seeming truly kind. There followed one or two other incidents, which, if not so dramatic, took the same course; but only one or two, since Sarah made it her business to do her own forestalling tours of inspection. Sarah had twigged Mrs. Poulteney, and she was soon as adept at handling her as a skilled cardinal, a weak pope; though for nobler ends.

The second, more expectable item on Mrs. Poulteney’s hypothetical list would have been: “Her voice.” If the mis-tress was defective in more mundane matters where her staff was concerned, she took exceedingly good care of their spiritual welfare. There was the mandatory double visit to church on Sundays; and there was also a daily morning service—a hymn, a lesson, and prayers—over which the old lady pompously presided. Now it had always vexed her that not even ugg boots most terrible stares could reduce her servants to that state of utter meekness and repentance which she con-sidered their God (let alone hers) must require. Their nor-mal face was a mixture of fear at Mrs. Poulteney and dumb incomprehension—like abashed sheep rather than converted sinners. But Sarah changed all that.

Hers was certainly a very beautiful voice, controlled and clear, though always shaded with sorrow and often intense in feeling; but above all, it was a sincere voice. For the first time in her ungrateful little world Mrs. Poulteney saw her servants with genuinely attentive and sometimes positively religious faces.

That was good; but there was a second bout of worship to be got through. The servants were permitted to hold evening prayer in the kitchen, under Mrs. Fairley’s indifferent eye and briskly wooden voice. Upstairs, Mrs. Poulteney had to be read to alone; and it was in these more intimate ceremonies that Sarah’s voice was heard at its best and most effective. Once or twice she had done the incredible, by drawing from those pouched, invincible eyes a tear. Such an effect was in no way intended, but sprang from a profound difference between the two women. Mrs. Poulteney believed in a God that had never existed; and Sarah knew a God that did.

She did not create in her voice, like so many worthy priests and dignitaries asked to read the lesson, an uncon-scious alienation effect of the Brechtian kind (“This is your mayor reading a passage from the Bible”) but the very contrary: she spoke directly of the suffering of Christ, of a man born in Nazareth, as if there was no time in history, almost, at times, when the light in the room was dark, and she seemed to forget Mrs. Poulteney’s presence, as if she saw Christ on the Cross before her. One day she came to the passage Lama, lama, sabachthane me; and as she read the words she faltered and was silent. Mrs. Poulteney turned to look at her, and realized Sarah’s face was streaming with tears. That moment redeemed an infinity of later difficulties; and perhaps, since the old lady rose and touched the girl’s drooping shoulder, will one day redeem Mrs. Poulteney’s now well-grilled soul.

I risk making Sarah sound like a bigot. But she had no theology; as she saw through people, she saw through the follies, the vulgar stained glass, the narrow literalness of the Victorian church. She saw that there was suffering; and she prayed that it would end. I cannot say what she might have been in our age; in a much earlier one I believe she would have been either a saint or an emperor’s mistress. Not be-cause of religiosity on the one hand, or sexuality on the other, but because of that fused rare power that was her essence—understanding and emotion.

There were other items: an ability—formidable in itself and almost unique—not often to get on Mrs. Poulteney’s nerves, a quiet assumption of various domestic responsibilities that did not encroach, a skill with her needle.

On Mrs. Poulteney’s birthday Sarah presented her with an antimacassar—not that any chair Mrs. Poulteney sat in need-ed such protection, but by that time all chairs without such an adjunct seemed somehow naked—exquisitely embroidered with a border of ferns and lilies-of-the-valley. It pleased Mrs. Poulteney highly; and it slyly and permanently—perhaps af-ter all Sarah really was something of a skilled cardinal— reminded the ogress, each time she took her throne, of her protegee’s forgivable side. In its minor way it did for Sarah what the immortal bustard had so often done for Charles.

Finally—and this had been the crudest ordeal for the victim—Sarah had passed the tract test. Like many insulated Victorian dowagers, Mrs. Poulteney placed great reliance on the power of the tract. Never mind that not one in ten of the recipients ugg read them—indeed, quite a number could not read anything—never mind that not one in ten of those who could and did read them understood what the reverend writers were on about … but each time Sarah departed with a batch to deliver Mrs. Poulteney saw an equivalent number of saved souls chalked up to her account in heaven; and she also saw the French Lieutenant’s Woman doing public penance, an added sweet. So did the rest of Lyme, or poorer Lyme; and were kinder than Mrs. Poulteney may have real-ized.

Sarah evolved a little formula: “From Mrs. Poulteney. Pray read and take to your heart.” At the same time she looked the cottager in the eyes. Those who had knowing smiles soon lost them; and the loquacious found their words die in their mouths. I think they learned rather more from those eyes than from the close-typed pamphlets thrust into their hands.

But we must now pass to the debit side of the relationship. First and foremost would undoubtedly have been: “She goes out alone.” The arrangement had initially been that Miss Sarah should have one afternoon a week free, which was considered by Mrs. Poulteney a more than generous acknowledgment of her superior status vis-a-vis the maids’ and only then condoned by the need to disseminate tracts; but the vicar had advised it. All seemed well for two months. Then one morning Miss Sarah did ugg appear at the Marlborough House matins; and when the maid was sent to look for her, it was discovered that she had not risen. Mrs. Poulteney went to see her. Again Sarah was in tears, but on this occasion Mrs. Poulteney felt only irritation. However, she sent for the doctor. He remained closeted with Sarah a long time. When he came down to the impatient Mrs. Poulteney, he gave her a brief lecture on melancholia—he was an advanced man for his time and place—and ordered her to allow her sinner more fresh air and freedom.

“If you insist on the most urgent necessity for it.”

“My dear madam, I do. And most emphatically. I will not be responsible otherwise.”

“It is very inconvenient.” But the doctor was brutally silent. “I will dispense with her for two afternoons.”

Unlike the vicar, Doctor Grogan was not financially very dependent on Mrs. Poulteney; to be frank, there was not a death certificate in Lyme he would have less sadly signed than hers. But he contained his bile by reminding her that she slept every afternoon; and on his own strict orders. Thus it was that Sarah achieved a daily demi-liberty.

The next debit item was this: “May not always be present with visitors.” Here Mrs. Poulteney found herself in a really intolerable dilemma. She most certainly wanted her charity to be seen, which meant that Sarah had to be seen. But that face had the most harmful effect on company. Its sadness reproached; its very rare interventions in conversation— invariably prompted by some previous question that had to be answered (the more intelligent frequent visitors soon learned to make their polite turns towards the companion-secretary clearly rhetorical in nature and intent)—had a disquietingly decisive character about them, not through any desire on Sarah’s part to kill the subject but simply because of the innocent imposition of simplicity or common sense on some matter that thrived on the opposite qualities. To Mrs. Poulteney she seemed in this context only too much like one of the figures on a gibbet she dimly remembered from her youth.

Once again Sarah showed her diplomacy. With certain old-established visitors, she remained; with others she either withdrew in the first few minutes or discreetly left when they were announced and before they were ushered in. This latter reason was why Ernestina had never met her at Marlborough House. It at least allowed Mrs. Poulteney to expatiate on the cross she had to carry, though the cross’s withdrawal or absence implied a certain failure in her skill in carrying it, which was most tiresome. Yet Sarah herself could hardly be faulted.

But I have left the worst matter to the end. It was this: “Still shows signs of attachment to her seducer.”

Mrs. Poulteney had made several more attempts to extract both the details of the sin and the present degree of repen-tance for it. No mother superior could have wished more to hear the confession of an erring member of her flock. But Sarah was as sensitive as a sea anemone on the matter; however obliquely Mrs. Poulteney approached the subject, the sinner guessed what was coming; and her answers to direct questions were always the same in content, if not in actual words, as the one she had given at her first interroga-tion.

Now Mrs. Poulteney seldom went out, and never on foot, and in her barouche only to the houses of her equals, so that she had to rely on other eyes for news of Sarah’s activities outside her house. Fortunately for her such a pair of eyes existed; even better, the mind behind those eyes was directed by malice and resentment, and was therefore happy to bring frequent reports to the thwarted mistress. This spy, of course, was none other than Mrs. Fairley. Though she had found no pleasure in reading, it offended her that she had been demoted; and although Miss Sarah was scrupulously polite to her and took care not to seem to be usurping the housekeeper’s functions, there was inevitably some conflict. It did not please Mrs. Fairley that she had a little less work, since that meant also a little less influence. Sarah’s saving of Millie—and other more discreet interventions—made her popular and respected downstairs; and perhaps Mrs. Fairley’s deepest rage was that she could not speak ill of the secretary-companion to her underlings. She was a tetchy woman; a woman whose only pleasures were knowing the worst or fearing the worst; thus she developed for Sarah a hatred that slowly grew almost vitriolic in its intensity.

She was too shrewd a weasel not to hide this from Mrs. Poulteney. Indeed she made a pretense of being very sorry for “poor Miss Woodruff” and her reports were plentifully seasoned with “I fear” and “I am afraid.” But she had excellent opportunities to do her spying, for not only was she frequently in the town herself in connection with her duties, but she had also a wide network of relations and acquaint-ances at her command. To these latter she hinted that Mrs. Poulteney was concerned—of course for the best and most Christian of reasons—to be informed of Miss Woodruff’s behavior outside the tall stone walls of the gardens of Marlborough House. The result, Lyme Regis being then as now as riddled with gossip as a drum of Blue Vinny with maggots, was that Sarah’s every movement and expression— darkly exaggerated and abundantly glossed—in her free hours was soon known to Mrs. Fairley.

The pattern of her exterior movements—when she was spared the tracts—was very simple; she always went for the same afternoon walk, down steep Pound Street into steep Broad Street and thence to the Cobb Gate, which is a square terrace overlooking the sea and has nothing to do with the Cobb. There she would stand at the wall and look out to sea, but generally not for long—no longer than the careful ap-praisal a ship’s captain gives when he comes out on the bridge—before turning either down Cockmoil or going in the other direction, westwards, along the half-mile path that runs round a gentle bay to the Cobb proper. If she went down Cockmoil she would most often turn into the parish church, and pray for a few minutes (a fact that Mrs. Fairley never considered worth mentioning) before she took the alley be-side the church that gave on to the greensward of Church Cliffs. The turf there climbed towards the broken walls of Black Ven. Up this grassland she might be seen walking, with frequent turns towards the sea, to where the path joined the old road to Charmouth, now long eroded into the Ven, whence she would return to Lyme. This walk she would do when the Cobb seemed crowded; but when weather or cir-cumstance made it deserted, she would more often turn that way and end by standing where Charles had first seen her; there, it was supposed, she felt herself nearest to France.

All this, suitably distorted and draped in black, came back to Mrs. Poulteney. But she was then in the first possessive pleasure of her new toy, and as sympathetically disposed as it was in her sour and suspicious old nature to be. She did not, however, hesitate to take the toy to task.

“I am told, Miss Woodruff, that you are always to be seen in the same places when you go out.” Sarah looked down before the accusing eyes. “You look to sea.” Still Sarah was silent. “I am satisfied that you are in a state of repentance. Indeed I cannot believe that you should be anything else in your present circumstances.”

Sarah took her cue. “I am grateful to you, ma’m.”

“I am not concerned with your gratitude to me. There is One Above who has a prior claim.”

The girl murmured, “How should I not know it?”

“To the ignorant it may seem that you are persevering in your sin.”

“If they know my story, ma’m, they cannot think that.”

“But they do think that. I am told they say you are looking for Satan’s sails.”

Sarah rose then and went to the window. It was early summer, and scent of syringa and lilac mingled with the blackbirds’ songs. She gazed for a moment out over that sea she was asked to deny herself, then turned back to the old lady, who sat as implacably in her armchair as the Queen on her throne.

“Do you wish me to leave, ma’m?”

Mrs. Poulteney was inwardly shocked. Once again Sarah’s simplicity took all the wind from her swelling spite. The voice, the other charms, to which she had become so addict-ed! Far worse, she might throw away the interest accruing to her on those heavenly ledgers. She moderated her tone.

“I wish you to show that this … person is expunged from your heart. I know that he is. But you must show it.”

“How am I to show it?”

“By walking elsewhere. By not exhibiting your shame. If for no other reason, because I request it.”

Sarah stood with bowed head, and there was a silence. But then she looked Mrs. Poulteney in the eyes and for the first time since her arrival, she gave the faintest smile.

“I will do as you wish, ma’m.”

It was, in chess terms, a shrewd sacrifice, since Mrs. Poulteney graciously went on to say that she did not want to deny her completely the benefits of the sea air and that she might on occasion walk by the sea; but not always by the sea—“and pray do not stand and stare so.” It was, in short, a bargain struck between two obsessions. Sarah’s offer to leave had let both women see the truth, in their different ways.

Sarah kept her side of the bargain, or at least that part of it that concerned the itinerary of her walks. She now went very rarely to the Cobb, though when she did, she still sometimes allowed herself to stand and stare, as on the day we have described. After all, the countryside around Lyme abounds in walks; and few of them do not give a view of the sea. If that had been all Sarah craved she had but to walk over the lawns of Marlborough House.

Mrs. Fairley, then, had a poor time of it for many months. No occasion on which the stopping and staring took place was omitted; but they were not frequent, and Sarah had by this time acquired a kind of ascendancy of suffering over Mrs. Poulteney that saved her from any serious criticism. And after all, as the spy and the mistress often reminded each other, poor “Tragedy” was mad.

You will no doubt have guessed the truth: that she was far less mad than she seemed … or at least not mad in the way that was generally supposed. Her exhibition of her shame had a kind of purpose; and people with purposes know when they have been sufficiently attained and can be allowed to rest in abeyance for a while.

But one day, not a fortnight before the beginning of my story, Mrs. Fairley had come to Mrs. Poulteney with her creaking stays and the face of one about to announce the death of a close friend.

“I have something unhappy to communicate, ma’m.”

This phrase had become as familiar to Mrs. Poulteney as a storm cone to a fisherman; but she observed convention.

“It cannot concern Miss Woodruff?”

“Would that it did not, ma’m.” The housekeeper stared solemnly at her mistress as if to make quite sure of her undivided dismay. “But I fear it is my duty to tell you.”

“We must never fear what is our duty.”

“No, ma’m.”

Still the mouth remained clamped shut; and a third party might well have wondered what horror could be coming. Nothing less than dancing naked on the altar of the parish church would have seemed adequate.

“She has taken to walking, ma’m, on Ware Commons.”

Such an anticlimax! Yet Mrs. Poulteney seemed not to think so. Indeed her mouth did something extraordinary. It fell open.

There rolls the deep where grew the tree, O earth, what changes hast thou seen!

There where the long street roars, hath been

The stillness of the central sea.

The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands;

They melt like mist, the solid lands,

Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

—Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850)

But if you wish at once to do nothing and be respect-able nowadays, the best pretext is to be at work on some profound study . . .

—Leslie Stephen, Sketches from Cambridge (1865)

Sam’s had not been the only dark face in Lyme that morn-ing. Ernestina had woken in a mood that the brilliant prom-ise of the day only aggravated. The ill was familiar; but it was out of the question that she should inflict its conse-quences upon Charles. And so, when he called dutifully at ten o’clock at Aunt Tranter’s house, he found himself greeted only by that lady: Ernestina had passed a slightly disturbed night, and wished to rest. Might he not return that afternoon to take tea, when no doubt she would be recovered?

Charles’s solicitous inquiries—should the doctor not be called?—being politely answered in the negative, he took his leave. And having commanded Sam to buy what flowers he could and to take them to the charming invalid’s house, with the permission and advice to proffer a blossom or two of his own to the young lady so hostile to soot, for which light duty he might take the day as his reward (not all Victorian employers were directly responsible for communism), Charles faced his own free hours.

His choice was easy; he would of course have gone wher-ever Ernestina’s health had required him to, but it must be confessed that the fact that it was Lyme Regis had made his pre-marital obligations delightfully easy to support. Stonebarrow, Black Ven, Ware Cliffs—these names may mean very little to you. But Lyme is situated in the center of one of the rare outcrops of a stone known as blue lias. To the mere landscape enthusiast this stone is not attractive. An exceed-ingly gloomy gray in color, a petrified mud in texture, it is a good deal more forbidding than it is picturesque. It is also treacherous, since its strata are brittle and have a tendency to slide, with the consequence that this little stretch of twelve miles or so of blue lias coast has lost more land to the sea in the course of history than almost any other in England. But its highly fossiliferous nature and its mobility make it a Mecca for the British paleontologist. These last hundred years or more the commonest animal on its shores has been man—wielding a geologist’s hammer.

Charles had already visited what was perhaps the most famous shop in the Lyme of those days—the Old Fossil Shop, founded by the remarkable Mary Anning, a woman without formal education but with a genius for discovering good—and on many occasions then unclassified—specimens. She was the first person to see the bones of Ichthyosaurus platyodon; and one of the meanest disgraces of British paleontology is that although many scientists of the day gratefully used her finds to establish their own reputation, not one native type bears the specific anningii. To this distin-guished local memory Charles had paid his homage—and his cash, for various ammonites and Isocrina he coveted for the cabinets that walled his study in London. However, he had one disappointment, for he was at that time specializing in a branch of which the Old Fossil Shop had few examples for sale.

This was the echinoderm, or petrified sea urchin. They are sometimes called tests (from the Latin testa, a tile or earthen pot); by Americans, sand dollars. Tests vary in shape, though they are always perfectly symmetrical; and they share a pattern of delicately burred striations. Quite apart from their scientific value (a vertical series taken from Beachy Head in the early 1860s was one of the first practical confirmations of the theory of evolution) they are very beautiful little objects; and they have the added charm that they are always difficult to find. You may search for days and not come on one; and a morning in which you find two or three is indeed a morning to remember. Perhaps, as a man with time to fill, a born amateur, this is unconsciously what attracted Charles to them; he had scientific reasons, of course, and with fellow hobbyists he would say indignantly that the Echinodermia had been “shamefully neglected,” a familiar justification for spending too much time in too small a field. But whatever his motives he had fixed his heart on tests.

Now tests do not come out of the blue lias, but out of the superimposed strata of flint; and the fossil-shop keeper had advised him that it was the area west of the town where he would do best to search, and not necessarily on the shore. Some half-hour after he had called on Aunt Tranter, Charles was once again at the Cobb.

The great mole was far from isolated that day. There were fishermen tarring, mending their nets, tinkering with crab and lobster pots. There were better-class people, early visitors, local residents, strolling beside the still swelling but now mild sea. Of the woman who stared, Charles noted, there was no sign. But he did not give her—or the Cobb—a second thought and set out, with a quick and elastic step very different from his usual languid town stroll, along the beach under Ware Cleeves for his destination.

He would have made you smile, for he was carefully equipped for his role. He wore stout nailed boots and canvas gaiters that rose to encase Norfolk breeches of heavy flannel. There was a tight and absurdly long coat ugg boots match; a canvas wideawake hat of an indeterminate beige; a massive ash-plant, which he had bought on his way to the Cobb; and a voluminous rucksack, from which you might have shaken out an already heavy array of hammers, wrappings, notebooks, pillboxes, adzes and heaven knows what else. Nothing is more incomprehensible to us than the methodicality of the Victori-ans; one sees it best (at its most ludicrous) in the advice so liberally handed out to travelers in the early editions of Baedeker. Where, one wonders, can any pleasure have been left? How, in the case of Charles, can he not have seen that light clothes would have been more comfortable? That a hat was not necessary? That stout nailed boots on a boulder-strewn beach are as suitable as ice skates?

Well, we laugh. But perhaps there is something admirable in this dissociation between what is most comfortable and what is most recommended. We meet here, once again, this bone of contention between the two centuries: is duty* to drive us, or not? If we take this obsession with dressing the part, with being prepared for every eventuality, as mere stupidity, blindness to the empirical, we make, I think, a grave—or rather a frivolous—mistake about our ancestors; because it was men not unlike Charles, and as overdressed and overequipped as he was that day, who laid the founda-tions of all our modern science. Their folly in that direction was no more than a symptom of their seriousness in a much more important one. They sensed that current accounts of the world were inadequate; that they had allowed their windows on reality to become smeared by convention, religion, social stagnation; they knew, in short, that they had things to discover, and that the discovery was of the utmost impor-tance to the future of man. We think (unless we live in a research laboratory) that we have louis vuitton to discover, and the only things of the utmost importance to us concern the present of man. So much the better for us? Perhaps. But we are not the ones who will finally judge.

[* I had better here, as a reminder that mid-Victorian (unlike mod-ern) agnosticism and atheism were related strictly to theological dogma, quote George Eliot’s famous epigram: “God is inconceivable, immor-tality is unbelievable, but duty is peremptory and absolute.” And all the more peremptory, one might add, in the presence of such a terrible dual lapse of faith.]

So I should not have been too inclined to laugh that day when Charles, as he hammered and bent and examined his way along the shore, ugg for the tenth time to span too wide a gap between boulders and slipped ignominiously on his back. Not that Charles much minded slipping, for the day was beautiful, the liassic fossils were plentiful and he soon found himself completely alone.

The sea sparkled, curlews cried. A flock of oyster catchers, black and white and coral-red, flew on ahead of him, har-bingers of his passage. Here there came seductive rock pools, and dreadful heresies drifted across the poor fellow’s brain— would it not be more fun, no, no, more scientifically valu-able, to take up marine biology? Perhaps to give up London, to live in Lyme … but Ernestina would never allow that. There even came, I am happy to record, a thoroughly human moment in which Charles looked cautiously round, assured his complete solitude and then carefully removed his stout boots, gaiters and stockings. A schoolboy moment, and he tried to remember a line from Homer that would make it a classical moment, but was distracted by the necessity of catching a small crab that scuttled where the gigantic subaqueous shadow fell on its vigilant stalked eyes.

Just as you may despise Charles for his overburden of apparatus, you perhaps despise him for his lack of specializa-tion. But you must remember that natural history had not then the pejorative sense it has today of a flight from reality— and only too often into sentiment. Charles was a quite competent ornithologist and botanist into the bargain. It might perhaps have been better had he shut his eyes to all but the fossil sea urchins or devoted his life to the distribu-tion of algae, if scientific progress is what we are talking about; but think of Darwin, of The Voyage of the Beagle. The Origin of Species is a triumph of generalization, not specialization; and even if you could prove to me that the latter would have been better for Charles the ungifted scien-tist, I should still maintain the former was better for Charles the human being. It is not that amateurs can afford to dabble everywhere; they ought to dabble everywhere, and damn the scientific prigs who try to shut them up in some narrow oubliette.

Charles called himself a Darwinist, and yet he had not really understood Darwin. But then, nor had Darwin himself. What that genius had upset was the Linnaean Scala Naturae, the ladder of nature, whose great keystone, as essential to it as the divinity of Christ to theology, was nulla species nova: a new species cannot enter the world. This principle explains the Linnaean obsession with classifying and naming, with fossilizing the existent. We can see it now as a foredoomed attempt to stabilize and fix what is in reality a continuous flux, and it seems highly appropriate that Linnaeus himself finally went mad; he knew he was in a labyrinth, but not that it was one whose walls and passages were eternally changing. Even Darwin never quite shook off the Swedish fetters, and Charles can hardly be blamed for the thoughts that went through his mind as he gazed up at the lias strata in the cliffs above him.

He knew that nulla species nova was rubbish; yet he saw in the strata an immensely reassuring orderliness in existence. He might perhaps have seen a very contemporary social symbolism in the way these gray-blue ledges were crumbling; but what he did see was a kind of edificiality of time, in which inexorable laws (therefore beneficently divine, for who could argue that order was not the highest human good?) very conveniently arranged themselves for the survival of the fittest and best, exemplia gratia Charles Smithson, this fine spring day, alone, eager and inquiring, understanding, accept-ing, noting and grateful. What was lacking, of course, was the corollary of the collapse of the ladder of nature: that if new species can come into being, old species very often have to make way for them. Personal extinction Charles was aware of—no Victorian could not be. But general extinction was as absent a concept from his mind that day as the smallest cloud from the sky above him; and even though, when he finally resumed his stockings and gaiters and boots, he soon held a very concrete example of it in his hand.

It was a very fine fragment of lias with ammonite impressions, exquisitely clear, microcosms of macrocosms, whirled galaxies that Catherine-wheeled their way across ten inches of rock. Having duly inscribed a label with the date and place of finding, he once again hopscotched out of science—this time, into love. He determined to give it to Ernestina when he returned. It was pretty enough for her to like; and after all, very soon it would come back to him, with her. Even better, the increased weight on his back made it a labor, as well as a gift. Duty, agreeable conformity to the epoch’s current, raised its stern head.

And so did the awareness that he had wandered more slowly than he meant. He unbuttoned his coat and took out his silver half hunter. Two o’clock! He looked sharply back then, and saw the waves lapping the foot of a point a mile away. He was in no danger of being cut off, since he could see a steep but safe path just ahead of him which led up the cliff to the dense woods above. But he could not return along the shore. His destination had indeed been this path, but he had meant to walk quickly to it, and then up to the levels where the flint strata emerged. As a punishment to himself for his dilatoriness he took the path much too fast, and had to sit a minute to recover, sweating copiously under the abominable flannel. But he heard a little stream nearby and quenched his thirst; wetted his handkerchief and patted his face; and then he began to look around him.

The extraordinary productiveness of modern industry . . . allows of the unproductive employment of a larger and larger part of the working class, and the conse-quent reproduction, on a constantly extending scale, of the ancient domestic slaves under the name of a ser-vant class, including men-servants, women-servants, lackeys, etc.

—Marx, Capital (1867)

The morning, when Sam drew the curtains, flooded in upon Charles as Mrs. Poulteney—then still audibly asleep—would have wished paradise to flood in upon her, after a suitably solemn pause, when she died. A dozen times or so a year the climate of the mild Dorset coast yields such days—not just agreeably mild out-of-season days, but ravishing fragments of Mediterranean warmth and luminosity. Nature goes a little mad then. Spiders that should be hibernating run over the baking November rocks; blackbirds sing in December, prim-roses rush out in January; and March mimics June.

Charles sat up, tore off his nightcap, made Sam throw open the windows and, supporting himself on his hands, stared at the sunlight that poured into the room. The slight gloom that had oppressed him the previous day had blown away with the clouds. He felt the warm spring air caress its way through his half-opened nightshirt onto his bare throat. Sam stood stropping his razor, and steam rose invitingly, with a kind of Proustian richness of evocation—so many such happy days, so much assurance of position, order, calm, civilization, out of the copper jug he had brought with him. In the cobbled street below, a rider clopped peacefully down towards the sea. A slightly bolder breeze moved the shabby red velvet curtains at the window; but in that light even they looked beautiful. All was supremely well. The world would always be this, and this moment.

There was a patter of small hooves, a restless baa-ing and mewling. Charles rose and looked out of the window. Two old men in gaufer-stitched smocks stood talking opposite. One was a shepherd, leaning on his crook. Twelve ewes and rather more lambs stood nervously in mid-street. Such folk-costume relics of a much older England had become pic-turesque by 1867, though not rare; every village had its dozen or so smocked elders. Charles wished he could draw. Really, the country was charming. He turned to his man.

“Upon my word, Sam, on a day like this I could contem-plate never setting eyes on London again.”

“If you goes on a-standin’ in the hair, sir, you won’t, neither.”

His master gave him a dry look. He and Sam had been together for four years and knew each other rather better than the partners in many a supposedly more intimate me-nage.

“Sam, you’ve been drinking again.”

“No, sir.”

“The new room is better?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the commons?”

“Very hacceptable, sir.”

“Quod est demonstrandum. You have the hump on a morning that would make a miser sing. Ergo, you have been drinking.”

Sam tested the blade of the cutthroat razor on the edge of his small thumb, with an expression on his face that sug-gested that at any moment he might change his mind and try it on his own throat; or perhaps even on his smiling master’s.

“It’s that there kitchen-girl’s at Mrs. Tranter’s, sir. I ain’t ‘alf going to . . .”

“Kindly put that instrument down. And explain yourself.”

“I sees her. Dahn out there.” He jerked his thumb at the window. “Right across the street she calls.”

“And what did she call, pray?”

Sam’s expression deepened to the impending outrage. “”Ave yer got a bag o” soot?’” He paused bleakly. “Sir.”

Charles grinned.

“I know the girl. That one in the gray dress? Who is so ugly to look at?” This was unkind of Charles, since he was speaking of the girl he had raised his hat to on the previous afternoon, as nubile a little creature as Lyme could boast.

“Not exackly hugly. Leastways in looks.”

“A-ha. So. Cupid is being unfair to Cockneys.”

Sam flashed an indignant look. “I woulden touch ‘er with a bargepole! Bloomin’ milkmaid.”

“I trust you’re using the adjective in its literal sense, Sam. You may have been, as you so frequently asseverate, born in a gin palace—“

“Next door to one, sir.”

“In close proximity uggs on sale uk a gin palace, but I will not have you using its language on a day like this.”

“It’s the ‘oomiliation, Mr. Charles. Hall the hosslers ‘eard.” As “all the ostlers” comprehended exactly two persons, one of whom was stone deaf, Charles showed little sympathy. He smiled, then gestured to Sam to pour him his hot water.

“Now get me my breakfast, there’s a good fellow. I’ll shave myself this morning. And let me have a double dose of muffins.”

“Yes, sir.”

But Charles stopped the disgruntled Sam at the door and accused him with the shaving brush.

“These country girls are much too timid to call such rude things at distinguished London gentlemen—unless they’ve first been sorely provoked. I gravely suspect, Sam, that you’ve been fast.” Sam stood with his mouth open. “And if you’re not doubly fast with my breakfast I shall fasten my boot onto the posterior portion of your miserable anatomy.”

The door was shut then, and none too gently. Charles winked at himself in the mirror. And then suddenly put a decade on his face: all gravity, the solemn young paterfamili-as; then smiled indulgently at his own faces and euphoria; poised, was plunged in affectionate contemplation of his features. He had indeed very regular ones—a wide forehead, a moustache as black as his hair, which was tousled from the removal of the nightcap and louis vuittin free shipping him look younger than he was. His skin was suitably pale, though less so than that of many London gentlemen—for this was a time when a suntan was not at all a desirable social-sexual status symbol, but the reverse: an indication of low rank. Yes, upon examination, it was a faintly foolish face, at such a moment. A tiny wave of the previous day’s ennui washed back over him. Too innocent a face, when it was stripped of its formal outdoor ugg boots sale uk too little achieved. There was really only the Doric nose, the cool gray eyes. Breeding and self-knowledge, he most legibly had.

He began to cover the ambiguous face in lather.

Sam was some ten years his junior; too young to be a good manservant and besides, absentminded, contentious, vain, fancying himself sharp; too fond of drolling and idling, lean ing with a straw-haulm or sprig of parsley cocked in the corner of his mouth; of playing the horse fancier or of catching sparrows under a sieve when he was being bawled for upstairs.

Of course to us any Cockney servant called Sam evokes immediately the immortal Weller; and it was certainly from that background that this Sam had emerged. But thirty years had passed since Pickwick Papers first coruscated into the world. Sam’s love of the equine was not really very deep. He was more like some modern working-class man who thinks a keen knowledge of cars a sign of his social progress. He even knew of Sam Weller, not from the book, but from a stage version of it; and knew the times had changed. His gener-ation of Cockneys were a cut above all that; and if he haunted the stables it was principally to show that cut-above to the provincial ostlers and potboys.

The mid-century had seen a quite new form of dandy appear on the English scene; the old upper-class variety, the etiolated descendants of Beau Brummel, were known as “swells”; but the new young prosperous artisans and would-be superior domestics like Sam had gone into competition sarto-rially. They were called “snobs” by the swells themselves; Sam was a very fair example of a snob, in this localized sense of the word. He had a very sharp sense of clothes style— quite as sharp as a “mod” of the 1960s; and he spent most of his wages on keeping in fashion. And he showed another mark of this new class in his struggle to command the language.

By 1870 Sam Weller’s famous inability to pronounce v except as w, the centuries-old mark of the common London-er, was as much despised by the “snobs” as by the bourgeois novelists who continued for some time, and quite inaccurate-ly, to put it into the dialogue of their Cockney characters. The snobs’ struggle was much more with the aspirate; a fierce struggle, in our Sam’s case, and more frequently lost than won. But his wrong a’s and h’s were not really comic; they were signs of a social revolution, and this was something Charles failed to recognize.

Perhaps that was because Sam supplied something so very necessary in his life—a daily opportunity for chatter, for a lapse into schoolboyhood, during which Charles could, so to speak, excrete his characteristic and deplorable fondness for labored puns and innuendoes: a humor based, with a singu-larly revolting purity, on educational privilege. Yet though Charles’s attitude may seem to add insult to the already gross enough injury of economic exploitation, I must point out that his relationship with Sam did show a kind of affection, a human bond, that was a good deal better than the frigid barrier so many of the new rich in an age drenched in new riches were by that time erecting between themselves and their domestics.

To be sure, Charles had many generations of servant-handlers behind him; the new rich of his time had none— indeed, were very often the children of servants. He could not have imagined a world without servants. The new rich could; and this made them much more harshly exacting of their relative status. Their servants they tried to turn into ma-chines, while Charles knew very well that his was also partly a companion—his Sancho Panza, the low comedy that sup-ported his spiritual worship of Ernestina-Dorothea. He kept Sam, in short, because he was frequently amused by him; not because there were not better “machines” to be found.

But the difference between Sam Weller and Sam Farrow (that is, between 1836 and 1867) was this: the first was happy with his role, the second suffered it. Weller would have answered the bag of soot, and with a verbal vengeance. Sam had stiffened, “rose his hibrows” and turned his back.

“THE PEOPLE CALL Mr. Travis Cook,” Yuki said.

Heads swung toward the double doors at the back of the courtroom, and a young man about eighteen years old, wearing a gray prep school blazer with a crest over the breast pocket, walked up the aisle, ugg through the gate.

Cook’s bushy hair looked patted down rather than combed, and his shoes needed a polish. He looked uneasy as he swore to tell the whole truth and nothing but. Then he stepped up to the witness stand.

Yuki said good morning to her witness and then asked, “How did you know Michael Campion?”

“We went to Newkirk Prep together.”

“And when did you meet Michael?”

“I knew him in our freshman year, but, uh, we became better friends last year.”

“In your opinion, what caused this friendship to grow?”

“Uh, Michael didn’t have many friends, really,” Travis Cook said, meeting Yuki’s eyes briefly, then uggs down cheap uggs at his hands. “People liked him, but they didn’t get too close to him ’cause he couldn’t play any sports or hang out or anything. Because of his heart condition.”

“But you didn’t have the same problem becoming friends with Michael?”

“I have severe asthma.”

“And how did that affect your friendship?”

Travis Cook said, “What he had was worse, but I could relate. We talked about how bad it sucked living with these things hanging over us all the time.”

“Now, did there come a time when you told Michael about the defendant, Ms. Moon?”

“Yeah.”

“Travis, I realize this may be a little uncomfortable, but you’ve sworn to tell the truth.”

“I know.”

“Good. And what did you tell Michael about Ms. Moon?”

“That I’d been with her,” he mumbled.

“Please speak up so the jury can hear you,” Yuki said.

The boy started again. “I told Michael that I’d been with her. A lot of us had. She’s a nice girl for someone who . . . anyway. She’s not crude or anything, and so . . .” Travis sighed. “And so she’s a good person to break you in.”

“Break you in?” Yuki asked, turning away from the witness, looking at the jurors. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Do it for the first time. You’re not worried about what the girl’s going to think of you or anything. I mean, you get to be yourself, have fun, pay her, and leave.”

“I see. And what did Michael Campion say when you told him about Ms. Moon?”

“He said he didn’t want to die a virgin.”

“Travis, did you see Michael the day before he disappeared?”

“I saw him on the lunch line.”

“And how did he appear to you?”

“Happy. He said he had a date that night with Junie.”

“Thank you, Travis. Your witness,” Yuki said to L. Diana Davis.

Davis was wearing a blue double-breasted suit with two rows of four large white pearl buttons and a triple strand of pearls at her throat. Her silver hair was crisp, almost sharp.

She stood up and spoke from the defense table, saying, “I only have one question, Mr. Cook.”

The boy looked at her earnestly.

“Did you see Michael Campion go into Junie Moon’s house?”

“No, ma’am.”

“That’s all we have, Your Honor,” Davis said, sitting down.

JASON TWILLY SAT in the front row of the gallery in Courtroom 2C, right behind the elfin Junie Moon, taking notes as Connor Hume Campion answered Yuki Castellano’s softball questions. Twilly thought Campion had aged tremendously since his son disappeared. He looked haggard, stooped, ugg though Michael’s death was literally killing him.

As he looked at the governor and Yuki together, Twilly felt a shift in his thinking, and a new structure for his book appeared in his mind. Yuki was Michael Campion’s defender, and she was the underdog; feisty and shrewd and at the same time endearing. Like now. Yuki was using the former governor’s celebrity and heartbreak to both move the jury and block the defense.

Twilly would start the book with Yuki’s opening statement, flash back through time using poignant moments in the boy’s life as told by the governor, flash forward through the trial and the witnesses. Focus on Davis’s maternal defense. Linger on the vulnerable Junie Moon. Then end the book with Yuki’s closing argument. The verdict, the vindication, hurrah!

Twilly turned his attention back to the governor.

“Mike was born with a conductive defect in his heart,” Campion told the court. “It was being managed medically, but of course he could die at any time.”

Yuki asked quietly, “And what did Michael know about his life expectancy?”

“Mikey wanted to live. He used to say, ‘I want to live, Dad. I have plans.’ He knew he had to be careful. He knew that the longer he lived, the more chance -”

Campion stopped speaking as his throat tightened and his eyes watered.

“Mr. Campion, did Michael talk to ugg about his plans?”

“Oh, yes,” Campion said, smiling now. “He was training for an upcoming world chess tournament, on the computer, you know. And he’d started writing a book about living with a potentially fatal illness. . . . It would’ve made a difference to people. . . . He wanted to get married someday . . .”

Campion shook his head, looked cheap uggs for sale the jury, and addressed them directly.

“He was such a wonderful boy,” he said. “Everyone has seen his pictures, the interviews. Everyone knows how his smile could light up the darkness, how brave he was – but not everyone knows what a good soul he had. How compassionate he was.”

Twilly noted that Diana Davis’s face was pinched, but she didn’t dare object to Campion’s meandering testimony about the pain of losing his son. Campion turned and looked squarely at the defendant, spoke directly to her, sadly but not unkindly.

“If only I could have been there when Michael died,” Connor Campion said to Junie Moon. “If only I could have held him in my arms and comforted him. If only he’d been with me, instead of with you.”

“YOU EVER USE THIS THING?” Joe was asking me about the stove.

“Sure I do.”

“Uh-huh? So what’s this?”

He pulled a user’s manual and some Styrofoam packing out of the oven.

“I use the stove top,” I said.

He shook his head, laughed at me, asked if I ugg open the wine and start the salad. I said I thought I could handle that. I uncorked the chardonnay, tore a head of romaine into a pretty blown-glass bowl Joe had given me, and sliced up a tomato. I reached around Joe for the olive oil and spices, patted his cute behind. Then I settled onto a stool near the counter, kicked off my shoes.

I sipped my wine and with a Phil Collins CD playing in the background, listened to Joe talk about three accounts he’d landed for his new disaster-preparedness consultancy and his upcoming meeting with the governor. Joe was happy. And I was glad that he was using his modern, larger, fancier apartment as his office – and making himself at home right here.

And my apartment was a darned cute place, I have to say. My four cluttered but cozy rooms are on the third floor of a nice old Victorian town house, and there’s a deck off the living room where the sun sets on my sliver view of the bay. It was becoming our sliver view of the bay.

I topped up Joe’s wineglass, watched him stuff a couple of tilapias with crabmeat and slide the pan into the oven. He washed his hands and turned his handsome self to me.

“The fish will be ready in about forty-five minutes. Want to go outside and catch the last rays?”

“Not really,” I said.

I put down my glass, hooked my leg around Joe’s waist, ugg boots pulled him to me, grinning as I saw my better idea flash into Joe’s blue eyes. He drew me closer, slid me off the stool, and gathered me up, cupping my butt and grunting theatrically as he carried me down the hallway, saying, “You’re a load, Blondie.”

I laughed, bit his earlobe, said, “You didn’t think 130 was a load when you were younger.”

“Like I said. Light ugg a feather.”

He dropped me softly onto the bed, crawled in next to me, took my face in his big hands, and gave me a kiss that made me groan. I wrapped my arms around his neck, and Joe did the almost impossible, pulled off his shirt and kissed me at the same time, tugged off my pants, and also somehow managed to kick the door shut to keep Martha out of our private moments.

“You’re amazing,” I said, laughing.

“You haven’t seen anything, yet, baby doll,” my lover growled.

Soon we were both naked, our skin hot and slick, limbs completely wrapped around each other. But as we grappled together, making the delicious climb to ecstasy, an image of another man came winging into my mind.

I fought it hard, because I didn’t want him there.

That man was Richie.

WHEN I RETURNED home from Susie’s, the sun was still hanging above the horizon, splashing orange light on the hood of a squad car parked right outside my apartment.

I bent to the open car window, said, “Hey there. ugg wrong?”

“You got a couple of minutes?”

I said, “Sure,” and my partner opened the car door, unfolded his long legs, and walked over to my front steps, where he sat down. I joined him. I didn’t like the look on Rich’s face as he opened a pack of cigarettes and offered me one.

I shook my head no, then said, “You don’t smoke.”

“Old habit making a brief return visit.”

I’d kicked tobacco once or twice myself, and now I felt the pull of the many-splendored ritual as the match sparked, the tip of the cigarette glowed, and Rich released a long exhalation into the dusky air.

“Kelly Malone is calling me every day so I can tell her that we’ve got nothing. Had to tell her about the Meachams.”

I murmured sympathetically.

“She says she can’t sleep, thinking how her parents died. She’s crying all the time.”

Rich coughed on the smoke and waved his hand to tell me that he couldn’t talk anymore. I understood how helpless he felt. The Malones’ deaths were shaping up to be a part of a vicious serial killing spree. And we were clueless.

I said, “He’s going to screw up, Richie, they ugg boots always do. And we’re not in this alone. Claire, Hanni -”

“You like Hanni?”

“Sure. Don’t you?”

Conklin shrugged. “Why does he know so much and so little at the same time?”

“He’s doing what we’re doing. Wading through the sludge. Trying to make sense of the senseless.”

“Good word for it. Sludging. We’re louis vuitton and the killer is laughing – but hell, I’m a bright guy. I can translate Latin platitudes into English! That’s worth something. Isn’t it?”

I was laughing with Rich as he joked himself out of his blue mood when I saw a black sedan crawling slowly up the street in search of a parking spot. It was Joe.

“Oh, look. Stay and meet Joe,” I said. “He’s heard a lot about you.”

“Nah, not tonight, Linds,” said Rich, standing up, grinding out the butt of his cigarette on the pavement. “Maybe some other time. See you in the morning.”

Joe’s car stopped.

Richie’s car pulled out of the spot.

Then Joe’s car pulled in.

I MET CLAIRE at her car after work. I moved a pair of galoshes, a flashlight, her crime scene kit, a giant bag of barbecued potato chips, and three maps into the backseat and then climbed up into the passenger side of her Pathfinder. I said, “Richie got a translation of that Latin phrase that was written inside that yachting book.”

“Oh yeah? And what did it mean?” ugg boots sale uk said, pulling her seat belt low across her belly, stretching it to the limit before locking it in place.

I cinched my seat belt, too, said, “It roughly translates as ‘Money is the root of all evil.’ I’d like to get my hands on the sucker who wrote that and show him the victims all crispy and curled up on your table. Show him what real evil is.”

Claire grunted. “You got that right,” she said, and pulled the car out onto Bryant heading us north, apparently deciding to take the 1.8 miles to Susie’s like she was racing the Daytona 500. She jerked the wheel around a slow-cruising sightseer, stepping on the gas. “You’re saying ‘him,’ ” Claire pointed out. “So that Debra Kurtz person is off your list?”

“She has an alibi,” I told Claire through clenched teeth. I grabbed the dashboard as she cleared the yellow light. “Also, her alibis check out for the nights of the Malone fire and the Jablonskys in Palo Alto.”

“Humph,” Claire said. “Well, about the two legible fingerprints on that bottle found at the scene. One belongs to Steven Meacham. The other didn’t match to anybody. But I’ve got something for you, girlfriend. Sandy Meacham had a good-sized blunt-force wound to the skull. Looks like she got clobbered with maybe a gun butt.”

I thought about that – that the killer had gotten violent – then I told Claire how the canvass of the Meacham neighborhood had netted us no leads whatsoever. She gave me the results of the blood screen – that Sandy Meacham had been drinking, and that the Meachams had both died of smoke inhalation.

It was all interesting, but none of it added up to a damned thing. I said so to Claire as she pulled into the handicapped zone right in front of Susie’s Café.

She looked at me and said, “I am handicapped, Linds. I’m carrying fifty pounds of baby fat, and I can’t walk a block without huffing.”

“I’m not going to write you up for this, Butterfly. But as for the land uggs on sale uk record you just set in a business district . . .”

My best friend kissed my cheek as I helped her down out of the Pathfinder. “I love that you worry about me.”

“Lotta good it does,” I said, hugging her, cracking open the door to Susie’s.

As we plowed through the gang at the bar toward the back room, the plinking steel-band version of a Bob Marley classic surrounded us, as well as the divine aromas of roasting chicken, garlic, and curry. Cindy and Yuki were already at our booth, and Lorraine dragged up louis vuittin free shipping chair for Claire. She dropped laminated menus that we knew by heart onto the table and took our order for a pitcher of tap and mineral water for Claire.

And then with Cindy urging her on – “Yu-ki, tell them, tell them” – Yuki “volunteered” her news.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “Okay. I had a date. With Jason Twilly.”

“And you were careful what you said to him,” Cindy said, sternly. “You remembered that he’s a reporter.”

“We didn’t talk about the case at all,” Yuki said, laughing. “It was dinner. A very nice dinner, no kissing or anything, so all you guys calm down, okay?”

“Was it fun? Are you going to see him again?”

“Yeah, yeah, if he asks me, I suppose I will.”

“Jeez. First date in what, a year?” I said. “Think you’d be more excited.”

“It hasn’t been a year,” Yuki said. “It’s been sixteen months, but never mind that. What’re we toasting?”

“We’re toasting Ruby Rose,” said Claire, lifting her water glass.

“Who?” we all asked in unison.

“Ruby Rose. She’s right here,” Claire said, patting her belly. “That’s the name Edmund and I picked out for our little baby girl.”