Cullah shook his head. “Let us admire the trophies in this room.”
After about an hour, Rupert returned to the parlor and escorted us to the same dining table where I had once enjoyed Lady Spencer’s hospitality. A cook brought us vegetables with tiny slivers of meat, and fresh, hot bread. It was somewhat spare, considering the elaborate gilt surroundings, but no doubt had had to be cobbled up out of whatever was left from noon. Rupert himself poured us Madeira, a wine of a sort I had never tasted, sweet and savory at once, dry upon the tongue enough to make a person wish for more.
Cullah watched me and finally told him, “Enough,” when he had poured my third glass. “Bring coffee, if you please.”
We retired after coffee to the bedroom which had been Lady Spencer’s room. Comforted, if not sauced by too much wine, I pulled off my gown, and we slid in our shifts and shirts into a downy bed tick. I did not remember my head touching the pillows when I awoke with a start deep in the night.
I lay in the bed trying to return to sleep, but I could not. I arose carefully, not to awaken Cullah. I felt as wide awake as if it had been midday. I knew I would not go back to sleep, but I knew not whether the worry over my brother’s illness, or his odd behavior, Cullah’s secret message to the filthy basket woman, any of these, were the culprits robbing me of a night’s rest.
I took up the extra blanket folded across the foot of the bed and wrapped it about my shoulders, then went to the window and looked out. The moon above the house behind this one was just rising, the tip almost invisible at first, being no more than a quarter full. I watched it rise, curling like a shaving of wood over the ridge of the house the way a chip came from Cullah’s plane, until the whole of it showed, adding feeble light to the garden below. I opened the window, careful not to waken Cullah, but wondering if the night were pleasant enough to leave it open. When I got the sash raised and found the air brisk but not bitter, I smiled, enjoying the coolness against my cheek. I leaned out. A candle blazed in the window below my room, and as soon as I saw it, it went out. August must have kept up half the night, ill, I thought. I heard a series of soft clicks, and I leaned farther out.
A form, a man, left through one of the tall windows on the bottom floor. He held a shaded lantern in his hand, tiny sparks of candlelight showing through its pierced sides. He wore a low-crowned, wide-brimmed hat, so it was impossible to see his features, yet, I felt, more than knew, that it was my brother. He made his way on a cobbled path toward the back of the yard where the stables were, but stopped abruptly. He turned and looked about himself, scanning the bushes and hedges for movement. I pulled myself inside the window frame, thankful that the moon held little light that might betray my presence. The man studied the house, his hat brim at last rising so that he could see as high as the window where I stood. He watched the window a long time. In the faintest moonlight, I believed I saw a sword tucked into his belt, not in a scabbard, but right under the sash.
My heart beat faster and harder. Had he seen me? Why would I fear that so? If that was my brother, and this his house, why would he slip from a window in the middle of the night? Why not go right out the front door? Could it be that August was asleep in his bed and someone had robbed him and was now escaping? The night watchman called out just then, “Twelve o’ the clock and all’s weh-hel!” The man below turned away and darted into shadows, and from there, I could see him no more. I stood at the window until my feet felt as if they had taken root into the wooden floor. I could not decide what to do. At last, I imagined that if August were asleep in his bed, I would know that it had been a stranger, and I would awaken him and Cullah. If I found August not in his bed, I would assume that he himself had crept out of his own house under cover of darkness.
I felt my way across the room and stepped into the hallway where a single taper burned on a stand. We were above the bottom floor and on a gallery from which several doors opened. I knew the last one, where I had lived when I worked for the old loom maker Barnabus, would be too small. Besides, if my brother were wont to keep late hours, he would not choose that sunny room.