The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter

He shakes his head, placing a firm hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, pet. It is still too dangerous. We must pray for their souls. That is all we can do for them now.”

“But I can’t get them from my mind, Father. How can I ever forget their still little bodies, or poor Mrs. Dawson’s suffering?”

“I’m not sure you can, Grace. Nor that you should. We all must face our maker when the time comes and those of us left behind must somehow find the strength to carry on. Our duty as keeper of the light is to warn, but it is also to rescue and to offer a place of shelter for those in need. We did our best, Grace, and you showed tremendous courage. I will write a report for Trinity House and make a note in the Log, and we will trim the wicks and inspect the lenses and the light will turn as usual tonight, and the world will turn with it. That, my dear child, is what we must do—carry on. Today, we have seen the very worst of life, and the very best of it.”

“Best?”

He sees the surprise in my eyes. “Yes. The best. Look at these people—strangers—in our home, in our clothes, eating our food. Look at how they comfort and help each other. Look how much you care for Mrs. Dawson and her children, all of whom you’d never even heard of until a few hours ago. There will always be someone willing to save us, Grace. Even a stranger whose name we don’t know. That is the very best of humanity. That is what puts my mind at ease on a day like today.”

His words, as always, fly to my heart, giving me the strength to keep going. Pushing all thoughts of tiredness from my mind, I tend to the fire, fill the kettle with water to heat for tinctures and tonics. As I work, the door blows open, the wind rushing inside, snuffing out lamps and sending yesterday’s newspaper skittering along the floor.

The storm has brought unexpected visitors.

FROM HER CHAIR beside the fire, Sarah Dawson observes the new arrivals with a strange detachment. Where were all these people when she was struggling to stay afloat? Where were they when her children were still alive? Too late, she wants to call out to them. You are all too late. But she says nothing, only wraps her arms around herself, rocking backward and forward, singing to herself of lavenders green and lavenders blue and muttering how sorry she is that she couldn’t tell Matilda about the lighthouse, and that James never got to use his uncle’s paintbrushes.

Reaching up to scratch an itch at her throat, her fingers knock against her locket. With trembling hands, she unhooks the chain around her neck. The filigree clasp is already undone, the two sides of the locket as open as butterfly wings. Inside, there is nothing. No lock of pale barley. None of darkest coal dust. The sea has robbed her of the last piece of her children. Her past has been erased, her future stolen, her whole world shattered into fragments of what was and what might have been and what can never be again. Like Matilda’s rag doll, she folds in on herself, head to knees, her grief so all-consuming she cannot imagine how she will ever move on from this moment.

Eventually she sleeps, her fingers unfurling like a summer rose until the locket falls into her lap and the piece of emerald sea glass Miss Darling had given to her drops from her hand and rolls a little way along the floor, where it waits patiently for some other hand to find it.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
MATILDA
Cobh, Ireland. May 1938

AS I STEP forward to board the tender, I curl my fingers around the piece of lucky emerald sea glass I keep in my pocket. The pier creaks ominously beneath my feet, the noise tugging at my nerves like fingers worrying at a loose thread. A portly gentleman in front of me bends awkwardly to retrieve his dropped ticket. As I wait for him to move ahead I glance at my fellow passengers, wondering how many of them conceal shameful secrets beneath their boiled-wool coats and the stiffened brims of trilby hats. Behind me, Mrs. O’Driscoll chirps incessantly on about how wonderful America is, and how she hopes the rain will hold off for the departure, and Blessed Heart of God, would yer man ever hurry up. Already weary of her endless commentary, I’m thankful the crossing will only take five days.

Our tender, reserved for those with tickets in Cabin or Tourist class, is half-empty as it slips its moorings and heads out into the harbor. I can feel Mother’s eyes burn into the back of my neck, demanding me to turn and wave to her one last time. I fix my eyes dead ahead and focus on the horizon, trying to ignore the rising sense of nausea in my stomach.

“Departures always make me tearful,” Mrs. O’Driscoll clucks, dabbing at her cheeks with a handkerchief as we move along the deck to find a seat. “The Lord bless us all,” she adds, crossing herself and saying a Hail Mary. Rumor has it that a relative of hers perished on the Titanic, so her prayers are entirely understandable. Still, I wish she would stop. Prayers and tears make me uneasy.

Settling in a deck chair, I pull a blanket over my legs and take a book from my traveling bag. Mrs. O’Driscoll sits in the chair directly beside me, despite the fact that there are a dozen others she could take.

“I’m not going to fall in,” I snap, a little more harshly than I’d intended. “You can leave me as soon as we’re out of Mother’s sight.”

A shrewd smile crosses her lips as she raises an eyebrow in a knowing arch. “Well now, Matilda. You see, I promised Constance—your mother—that I would see you safely to America, and I intend to do just that. The sooner you accept that I’m here for the duration, the better the journey will be for the both of us.” She rummages in her handbag and lifts out a small paper bag. “Humbug?”

I shake my head, and then wish I hadn’t. With a tired sigh I tell her I will take a humbug, thank you.

She makes a satisfied harrumphing sound and passes me the entire bag. “Keep them. They’re a great help with the seasickness.”

A recently widowed bridge-playing friend of my mother’s, traveling to visit a relative on Long Island, Mrs. O’Driscoll had been appointed as my traveling companion despite my insistence that I didn’t need anyone to accompany me, especially not a turkey-necked woman with a taste for tweed coats and velvet hats. Of course, my mother wouldn’t hear of my traveling alone, accusing me of being deliberately obstinate just to upset her. “If you’d been this uncooperative when it came to ‘other matters’ we wouldn’t be in this dreadful mess in the first place.” Her words had stung far worse than the accompanying slap to my cheek. In the end my protests, like everything else I had to say about this trip, were completely ignored.

As the tender slips its moorings I open my book, hoping Mrs. O’Driscoll will take the hint and leave me in peace.

“What’s that you’re reading?” she asks, leaning forward and peering at the cover. “Instructions to Light Keepers. Never heard of it.”

“You wouldn’t have. It’s a family heirloom. Of sorts.” It is, in fact, an ancient volume which explains the operation of lighthouses in great and very boring detail. Passed down to me with the locket, it has idled in a drawer for years, the tell-tale freckles of age quietly multiplying on the unturned pages.

Mrs. O’Driscoll makes an unpleasant sucking noise with her humbug. “Well, I suppose life would be fierce dull if we all liked the same things.” She takes a copy of Gone with the Wind from her own bag. “Scarlett O’Hara. Now there’s a woman to take your mind off a long sea crossing.” She chuckles to herself and opens the book at her marked page, instantly engrossed.

I turn my book over in my hands. The spine is cracked. The embossed title faded. Instructions to Light Keepers. By authority of Trinity House and the light-house board. While the subject of the book has never interested me, the inscriptions inside hold a particular fascination: For dear Sarah. So that you might know. Grace and beneath that, written in a different hand, For my darling Matilda. From Mummy. x Below these inscriptions, several other names record the various recipients of the book over the generations.

To discover there’d been another Matilda in the family had enchanted me. As a child I’d often imagined her, talking to her in my games of make-believe until she became real. When a great aunt had secretively explained that this other Matilda was my great-great-granny Sarah’s daughter, tragically lost in a shipwreck with her brother, I grieved for her as if she were my sister. In a way, she’d become the sister I never had, the playmate I’d never laughed with or whispered secrets to. With so much of my childhood spent alone, and so much of my life having always felt strangely untethered, I found something comforting in the permanence of the book and locket. I’d brought the book with me not because I wanted to read it, but because its freckled old pages somehow anchored me to my past in a way other parts of my life never had. Something once owned by my great-great-grandmother and part of my family’s past, helps me face the uncertain future I am sailing toward.

The transfer across the harbor is mercifully short. As the tender turns around the end of Spike Island I look away from the buildings of the British soldiers’ garrison, refusing to dwell on the murky memories it provokes. I focus instead on the great transatlantic liner that looms dead ahead. My stomach lurches at the sight of it.

Mrs. O’Driscoll stands up, smoothing her coat with a brisk flick of her wrists. “Fierce big, isn’t she. Twice the height of Carrauntoohil if she stood on end. Plenty of space to lose me in, that’s for sure.” There is an almost playful look in her eyes as she unexpectedly takes my hand and squeezes it tight. “You may feel as though you’re making this trip on your own, Matilda, but that doesn’t mean you have to be alone.”

Her words strike an unexpected blow to my determination to dislike her. Growing up without sisters or brothers, andwith a mother who couldn’t care less what I was doing as long as I wasn’t bothering her, being alone is what I’m used to, and yet I’ve always felt it shouldn’t be. A sense of having lost something follows me like a second shadow, but like my granny when she walks into a room and can’t remember why, I can never quite grasp what it is I’m looking for. Standing here with Mrs. O’Driscoll’s warm hand in mine, I’m suddenly tired of being alone. I stare up at the enormous vessel, blinking away the tears that blur my vision.

“Come along so,” Mrs. O’Driscoll chirps, passing me a handkerchief without so much as a “dry your eyes now.” “We’ve a ship to board, young lady.”

With everyone aboard, the anchor raised, and the engines churning the water far below, three sharp blasts of the whistle signal our departure and we slip peacefully away with a gentle sigh carried in the ship’s wake. We soon pass the Old Head of Kinsale, the proud lighthouse sending us on our way, the endless Atlantic Ocean stretching out before us. I stand at the railing and watch Ireland, my home, disappear behind a light sea mist.

“I’m a little tired, Mrs. O’Driscoll,” I say. “I think I’ll take a nap before dinner.”

She studies me carefully. “Hmm. You do look a little peaky all the same. It might take a few days to find your sea legs. Best have a rest. We’ve an awful long way to go before we see Lady Liberty.”

Lady Liberty. New York. I can hardly believe I will soon see the famous soaring skyscrapers. I’m not as excited to see them as I’d always imagined I would be. The sight of them will signal the start of nothing short of a prison sentence.

I lie down on the bed in our cabin, trying to ignore the increasing sway of the ship as I map out the journey ahead in my mind. From New York I will travel to Providence, Rhode Island, and then on to Newport, to stay with Harriet Flaherty, a distant relative who was triumphantly rediscovered like a forgotten family heirloom as it dawned on my parents that Harriet offered the perfect solution to their problem. Their problem. Not mine. I wasn’t part of their discussions and plans, but I heard enough—Mother’s voice, shrill as a tin whistle; Father’s, turf-thick with quiet disappointment—to understand that Harriet Flaherty was something of a black sheep, so I suppose I will have that in common with her, at least.

The decision made, Mother had related the arrangements to me as if I were a maid being instructed to prepare the guest room. “You’ll stay with Harriet until the child arrives. She’ll help with doctors and appointments and those things. The child will remain in America—your Father will make arrangements—you’ll come home, and we need never speak of it again.” Like a tumor, the unfortunate little creature will be lanced from me, and we’ll all breathe a sigh of relief and carry on as if nothing ever happened.

She made it all sound so simple. Too simple. I wonder at what point her neat little plan will start to unravel.

DESPITE MRS. O’DRISCOLL’S certainty that I’ll find my sea legs, I don’t. Three days into our journey I still spend hours every day hanging over the railings, reproducing my breakfast like a cheap circus act, the locket swinging like a clock pendulum at my neck, ticking away the interminable hours as the ship plunges on and my stomach heaves in endless protest. In this way, the days pass until Ireland becomes a full stop at the end of a long paragraph, impossibly small and far away, and still we don’t reach America.

The farther the distance from home and the greater my sickness, the more I come to depend on Mrs. O’Driscoll. Far from being irritated by her, I am soon grateful for her patient concern, not to mention her endless supply of handkerchiefs and humbugs and reviving tonics. The truth is that in the brief time we’ve spent together, Mrs. O’Driscoll has already acted more like a mother to me than Constance Emmerson has in nineteen years.

I thank her as she helps me away from the railings once again. “I’d be lost without you, Mrs. O’Driscoll. Or lost overboard, more like.”

She bats my gratitude away, but the blush to her cheeks belies her appreciation. “You hush now with all that sentimental nonsense.”

But despite her words, she throws her arms around me and I press my face into the collar of her turf-scented coat, surprised to find that she isn’t as stiff and starchy as I’d imagined. She holds on to me a good while, and I am happy to let her.

“Now, come and sit down,” she says, “and get your breath back. You’re as pale as milk.”

She takes the crook of my arm and leads me, like an invalid, to a deck chair where she tucks a blanket around my knees and tells a passing maid to fetch sweet tea and smelling salts, and to be quick about it because the girl is awful seasick, so she is. I pick at a loose thread on the royal blue blanket and smile to myself, admiring her no-nonsense efficiency.

The maid promptly returns with a silver teapot and the ship’s best china. Mrs. O’Driscoll pours two amber-colored cups of tea, adding two lumps of sugar to mine. She sits with me until I drink it all and the color starts to return to my cheeks.

She places a floury old hand on mine and looks at me. “A few more days, and you’ll be back on dry land and the swaying will stop.” Her gaze drops knowingly to my stomach. “The other sickness will pass, too. You should be over the worst of it soon enough.”

I clatter my spoon around my empty cup and bite my lip. “You know?”

“Of course I know.”

“Did my mother …”

“She never said a word. Didn’t have to. You’ve that look about you, and besides, those sudden American holidays with long-lost relatives? They’re never that straightforward.” Although I’m embarrassed, I’m relieved that she knows; relieved to drop the charade. “I don’t need to be knowing the ins and outs of it all,” she adds. “But I thought you might be glad of a bit of advice all the same.”

I think about my mother’s refusal to talk, how she closed up like the Venus flytraps in her hothouse whenever I broached the subject of what to expect in the months ahead. I’m so used to not talking about it, I don’t quite know what to say. “Were you as sick as this?” I ask tentatively, sipping my tea as I feel myself slowly coming back to life.

“Suffered dreadfully on both my little ones. But it passes, and then …” She drifts off into some distant place of happy memories.

“And then?” For all that I don’t want to accept my condition or know what happens next, a curious part of me does want to know. Very much.

Mrs. O’Driscoll looks me full in the face. Her pinched little eyes sprout an unexpected flurry of tears. “And then your cheeks grow as round as peaches and your hair feels like gossamer silk. Your skin shines like porcelain and you feel as if all the goodness in the world belongs to you. It’s a miracle.”

I stare into my teacup, ashamed to remember how exceptionally un-miraculous this child’s conception was. Forbidden from courting Dan Harrington, the only boy I’d ever cared for but who wasn’t considered good enough for me, I’d decided to show my mother how much worse my choice could have been. A British soldier, a Protestant, was the worst possible man for me to be with, so I went to the bars where I knew the soldiers garrisoned on Spike Island went when they came into town. Except a bit of harmless flirtation, intended to get back to my mother, developed into far more than I’d bargained for. I wonder what Dan Harrington would think if he knew the real reason for my trip to America. I doubt he’d care. It hadn’t taken him long to fall out of love with me and in love with Niamh Hegarty, just like all the boys did, sooner or later.

“No matter how it happens,” Mrs. O’Driscoll continues, as if she can read my thoughts, “it’s still a miracle. When you feel that first flutter of life … there’s nothing like it.”

I stir my spoon around my cup, watching the whirlpools in the liquid. “Were you ever afraid?”

“Oh, yes. Of course! Fear is perfectly normal.” She pats my knee. “Plenty of courage will see you through. It won’t be easy, but it won’t be the end of the world either.” She straightens the blanket across her knees. “You never know, Matilda. Going to America. The child. It might even be the making of you.”

We talk for a long while that afternoon, Mrs. O’Driscoll glad of the opportunity to reminisce about her children as I hungrily devour her wisdom and experience, realizing how starved I am of any real knowledge about what lies ahead. By the time we sit down together for dinner that evening, I’m sorry to have wasted my first few days with her in sulky disregard. There are only two days left of our journey. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem nearly long enough.

CHAPTER TWELVE
MATILDA
Newport, Rhode Island. May 1938

I SMELL AQUIDNECK ISLAND before I see it, the briny odor of the ocean leaching through the open windows of the bus from Providence. A suntanned woman in the seat across the aisle sees me place my hand to my nose. “It’s the kelp, honey,” she explains. “You get used to it.” I smile politely, wishing Mrs. O’Driscoll was poised with her smelling salts.

I already miss her company and her funny little ways. After standing together on deck to watch Lady Liberty and the Empire State Building loom from the mist, she’d accompanied me to Providence, only willing to leave me when she was sure the bus wouldn’t stop until it reached Newport and delivered me safely to Harriet Flaherty. She’d insisted on taking Harriet’s address, giving me the address she would be staying at in return. “If you need anything at all, just write,” she’d said, pressing the piece of paper into my hand as we said a surprisingly emotional goodbye.

As the bus rumbles on, I take the piece of paper from my pocket, and unfold it. Beneath the address of her relative on Long Island, she’s written the word Courage. I lift the paper to my nose, inhaling the familiar scent of lily of the valley and wishing, more than ever, she was sitting beside me.

The bus takes us over a long stone bridge that spans the vast expanse of Narragansett Bay. I press my nose against the glass to get a better look at the view. Yachts and sailing boats speckle the water, stretching as far as I can see. My eye is drawn to two lighthouses on rocky islands in the bay, as I wonder which one Harriet Flaherty keeps. Everything looks pretty with the sunlight reflecting off the water. It is a warm welcome that momentarily shushes the nagging doubts and uncertainties that hang over me.

Over the bridge, the driver turns down a wide boulevard before taking a series of left and right turns down a labyrinth of narrower streets with pretty names like Narragansett Avenue and Old Beach Road, each lined with trees and colonial-style clapboard houses in shades of green and white and rusted pinks. Letterboxes stand on posts in front gardens. A yellow school bus rumbles past. It is all so … American. A quiet smile forms on my lips as I think about everyone back home in small provincial Ballycotton. I wish they could see me. I feel a little proud, brave even, to have traveled so far.

With a crunch of brakes the bus stops at the end of a wide long street. The driver leans around his seat.

“This is your stop, Miss. Corner of Brewer and Cherry.” Hurrying to gather up my things, I make my way to the front of the bus and walk down the steps. He wishes me good luck in a way that implies I’m going to need it. The doors close and the bus rumbles off.

I am alone again. Like a guest suddenly aware they’re at the wrong party, all my optimism and courage depart in a hurry.

Fidgeting with my gloves and tugging at the rayon crepe fabric of my dress that clings to my legs, I start to walk. The damp sea air sends my hair springing into childish ringlets beneath my hat. A quick glance in a shop window confirms that I resemble a crumpled sack of potatoes, but I’m too tired to care. I duck and dodge around people on the pavement, trying not to stare at the American women who wear their clothes in a way that makes me feel as dowdy as a nun beside them. As the first spots of rain speckle the tarmac, I run the final few yards to Harriet’s house, stepping in beneath a white wooden porch.

I knock on the door. Wait. Knock again, a little more firmly. Nothing. As I open my purse to check the address, I see movement behind the screen door. It opens with a slow, grating screech, like fingernails running slowly down a blackboard. A tall woman leans against the doorframe, smoke spiraling lazily from a pipe that dangles from her bottom lip. She is dressed in a paint-spattered jersey sweater and navy corduroy trousers tucked roughly into wellington boots. A patterned headscarf frames her angular face. We quickly assess each other, forming judgments and opinions, measuring the actual against the imagined, wondering what this stranger might become to us in the weeks and months ahead.

“Matilda.” It is more announcement than question, a faint hint of surprise carried in the word.

“Yes.” I smile, remembering my manners even though I want to run back to the bus. “Matilda Emmerson. All the way from Ireland.” She doesn’t smile back. “You must be Harriet?” The question in my voice betrays my meager hope that I’m at the wrong house, and will be sent next door to a sweet old lady who will welcome me with a soap-scented kiss and a warm apple pie. The woman in front of me looks like she’s never baked a pie in her life.

She thrusts a nicotine-stained hand toward me. “Harriet Flaherty. Welcome to America.” Her voice is low and gravelly, her accent an odd mix of Irish and American. She wraps her hand tight around my cotton glove, studying me closely as we shake hands like business partners sealing a deal. Her expression is serious, but there’s something about the way she looks at me that makes me feel a little uncomfortable. “Well? Are you coming inside then,” she says, striding back into the house. “Or were you planning to stay in the porch for the rest of the summer?”

I pick up my bag and step inside, the screen door slamming shut behind me.

The cool interior of the house is a welcome relief after the stuffy bus ride. The room is sparsely furnished with a shabby-looking rug, two chairs, and a low coffee table. A sideboard to my left is covered with small boxes and picture frames, all decorated with seashells. A wireless in the corner plays Ella Fitzgerald, accompanied by the click click click of a ceiling fan. A bunch of browned lilies sits in a vase on the table, withered petals scattered apologetically on the floor beneath. The smell of stale flower water mingles with the bitter tang of kelp, reaching into the back of my throat and sending my stomach bucking in familiar lurching waves. I glance upstairs, gauging the distance to the bathroom in case I need to make a run for it.

Harriet perches on a chair arm, rests her pipe on a rusting metal ashtray and stares at me, clearly as surprised to find me standing in her home as I am to be here.

“Nice locket,” she says.

I hadn’t noticed I was fiddling with it. “Oh. This. Thank you. It’s been in the family for decades.”

“Yes. I know.” She motions toward the small traveling bag in my other hand. “Is that all your luggage?”

“The rest is being sent on. From New York,” I explain. “It should be here in a day or two.”

I can hardly remember what I’d packed, it feels like such a long time ago, but seeing how Harriet dresses I already know I’ve brought far too many pretty skirts and blouses. She looks almost masculine in her scruffy work clothes and her hair tucked inside her headscarf. In my neat primrose-colored cotton dress and matching hat and gloves I suspect I am precisely the sort of prim young thing that Harriet Flaherty loathes.

“Suppose you’ll be wanting to freshen up,” she says, standing up. “I’ll show you your room.”

I follow her up a bare wooden staircase, telling her about the awful sea crossing and Mrs. O’Driscoll being so kind, but my attempts at small talk are ignored as she stomps ahead, leaving sandy imprints from the tread of her boots. Halfway along a short landing, she pushes open a scuffed white door. “This is you. The bathroom’s across the landing. The chain sticks so you’ll need to give it a good hard yank.”

I step into the small bedroom and place my bag tentatively on the bed. A wardrobe, a nightstand, and a small chest of drawers are the only furnishings. There are no pictures on the walls. No photographs. Faded calico curtains hang limply at the window. A collection of painted shells on the windowsill lend the only sense of decoration to the room.

“Thank you,” I say. “It’s lovely.”

“Well I’d hardly go that far, but it’s yours for the duration, so you might as well make yourself at home.” Harriet leans against the doorframe. She looks at me again with that same, slightly surprised expression. “Will you be wanting something to eat? I made clam chowder.” I nod, even though the last thing on my mind is food, and I don’t have the faintest idea what clam chowder is. “I’ll leave it on the table downstairs so. Help yourself to anything else you find.”

“Are you going out?” For all that I haven’t especially warmed to Harriet, I don’t want to be on my own in this strange cold house either.

She nods toward the window on the opposite side of the room. The ocean glistens beyond, the outline of a lighthouse just visible through the haze. “Rose Island. Didn’t they tell you I was a light keeper?”

“Yes. My mother mentioned …”

“That’s where I spend most of my time. I told her to explain that you’d have to entertain yourself.”

“Well, she didn’t.”

Harriet walks over to the window and picks up one of the decorated shells. She’s younger than I’d imagined. I’d assumed I would be staying with an elderly relative, like Mrs. O’Driscoll, but Harriet can’t be much older than forty. “Probably just as well she didn’t tell you. You’d most likely never have agreed to come.”

“I wasn’t exactly given any choice.”

The acknowledgment of the real reason I’m here rushes into the room like a storm, hanging in the air between us. I perch on the bed like a bold child.

Harriet turns to face me, arms folded across her chest. “Whose is it then?” she asks. I stiffen at the unexpected question, color running to my cheeks. “What? Did you think we wouldn’t talk about it? Spend our days drinking tea and saying our Hail Marys and pretend you’re a good little Catholic girl?”

I stare at the whitewashed floorboards. “Of course not. I just don’t want to talk about it right now.” I glance up at her. “We’ve only just met.” I try to sound matter-of-fact but the high pitch to my voice betrays my deep discomfort. I kick off my shoes, suddenly tired of everyone poking around in my life as if I were a pincushion. Exhausted from the journey, fed up with feeling nauseous, and missing Mrs. O’Driscoll more than ever, tears well up in my eyes. I bite my lip to stop them. I don’t want Harriet Flaherty to see me cry. I don’t want her to write to my mother to tell her I’m a homesick little fish out of water, just as she expects me to be. “Besides,” I add, “it’s none of your business.”

Harriet blanches at this. “Really? And there was me thinking you’d come to live in my house, which makes it very much my business.” Taking my silence as a refusal to be pressed any further on the matter, she walks out of the room, closing the door with a bang behind her. “I’ll be back at sunrise,” she calls, more as an afterthought than to offer me any reassurance.