a candle in the window (excerpt)

Chapter 1: Homecoming

A village against the chalk cliffs of England’s eastern coastline during WWII

Through the fog-thick glass of the train’s window, Evelyn Harcourt watched the village unspool, a study in grays and voids. There was no platform attendant waiting to swing her suitcase from the rack, no cluster of gossips with wicker baskets at their feet, not even a coalboy to sweep the tracks. Instead, the station at Coldharbor-on-Anchor lay under a stratum of muffled stillness, as if the fog had seeped through every brick and timber to snuff out not just the lamps but the business of living. Only the battered sign, letters peeling in a way that made “harbor” read more like “hard” and “anchor” a sneer, stood out with any conviction.

She stepped down onto the flagged stones, her nurse’s uniform bristling under her overcoat, and the chill went up her shins in a spiral. The habit of years, always descend facing outward, case in right hand, step with the left for balance, made her passage onto the platform neat, even mechanical. She stood for a moment, breath rising in disciplined plumes, and regarded the vast emptiness of the station with the expression of one appraising a wounded limb. Something about the silence was anatomical. She could almost diagnose it.

A single gas lamp sputtered in protest at the blackout, its hessian shield notched at the corner where some diligent youth had tried to peer beneath. In its anemic glow, the waiting room’s windows appeared as bruises, glass rippling under old lead and some older unease. She moved forward, heels clicking a Morse code across the stones, sharp, then clipped, then sharp again where one tile had settled lower in the earth. The echo trailed her all the way to the iron gate, which she found already unlatched, the sign reading “CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE” swinging with the lazy confidence of a diagnosis that had become a prognosis.

Behind the main building, someone coughed. The sound was brief, quickly throttled, but in the hush of the blackout it rang out like a starter pistol. Evelyn’s left hand slid, almost involuntarily, to her bag’s side-pocket, thumb grazing the forceps she always kept on the exterior ring. It was an old compulsion, never be unready, never be less than prepared, but now it made her feel faintly foolish. She pressed onward, out the station’s side path and onto the main road, where the world contracted into a tunnel of gray vapor and the salt-wet wind.

The street was unfamiliar in the way a once-loved face becomes after illness. Curtains, once the pride of every window, were now woolen barricades thick with the musk of mothballs and ancient tears. Streetlamps stood at attention, globes shrouded in matte black paint. Above, the bell tower of St. Elwyn’s reared into the night, but even its peal was missing, a silence more pointed than any chime. As Evelyn walked, her footsteps dissolved and reassembled in the fog, sounds traveling in unpredictable vectors. Somewhere, the railway guard locked up his post with a clatter; somewhere else, a dog barked, then whimpered off as if regretting the effort.

The memory of how things used to be prodded at her, sharp as a cautery needle. Evelyn remembered village fêtes with banners strung like bunting from each chimney, remembered the crush of the market in spring when the fishmongers’ shouts outpaced the bells, remembered the sing-song of the delivery boy weaving his bicycle through packs of shrieking children. Now, the only voices were wind and rumor, the latter pressing in even before she’d rounded the first corner. Windows shifted as she passed, silhouettes pausing and then slinking back behind curtains as if watching for the return of a ghost.

She walked with her spine rigid, shoulders squared, face composed in the expressionless mask she’d perfected over long months in casualty wards. But here, the act felt thin. Here, every stone and shutter reminded her of the person she’d once been, and the absence of the familiar, her mother’s silhouette in the upstairs window, her father’s morning whistle from the garden, gnawed at her. She tamped it down by focusing on the catalog of sensation: the brine-laced mist clinging to her collar, the scratch of wool at her wrists, the way her feet mapped the pitch of the lane without looking.

As she crossed the square, the blackout’s effects intensified. The church loomed on her right, its gothic arches shrouded so that the building seemed to hover above the cobblestones. Here, she paused. The market fountain, once a hub of clamor, now brimmed with a stagnant chill and the ghost of last week’s ice. She wondered, almost idly, whether the vicar had survived the last round of fever, and whether Mrs. Pembroke’s child had made it through the winter. Her own name, Harcourt, had not yet fallen from the town’s collective mouth, but she knew it would soon enough. It always did.

It was only at the last corner, with her house’s slate roof emerging from the fog like a shipwreck, that her composure faltered. The front window, wide and slightly bowed from centuries of salt and storm, sat empty. There was no candle in its heart, no beacon of light in the gloom, only the dark vacancy of a socket long since emptied. Evelyn slowed, hand clenching tight around the nurse’s bag, and allowed herself a rare pause.

The sight tripped something in her memory, a reel of childhood, unspooling backward through the gray. She remembered her father’s voice, low and gravelly with pipe smoke, as he cupped the match to the candle’s wick every Christmas Eve.

“It’s to bring us all home,” he’d said, every year, as if the words themselves could tether the family to this world. “So none of us gets lost, no matter how thick the storm.”

She remembered standing beside him, her hand dwarfed by his, the glass of the window smudged with her breath as she watched the flame catch and settle. Some years the candle had to fight against drafts that tried to smother it, but her father would always shield it, crouched close in his shirtsleeves, until the flame steadied itself. Only then would he nod, as if the house was truly alive, and call the family to supper.

Now, the window offered nothing back but the blur of her own face, spectral and stretched by the warping of the glass. She stared for a long minute, letting the salt sting at her eyes, and then squared her shoulders and pressed on.

The front gate’s latch had never worked right, and it did not resist her now. She moved up the stone walk, past the beds of yellowed heather and the planter that still bore the rusted shell of last summer’s marigolds. At the door, she paused again, breath held, and waited for the familiar sound of her brother’s boots, always a split-second behind, always with some laconic comment to cut the silence. There was nothing but the wind.

Evelyn lifted her hand to the knocker, then thought better of it. Instead, she retrieved her key from the side pocket of her bag, a dull, heavy piece of metal, burnished smooth by years of use, and fit it into the lock with practiced care.

For a moment, as the key turned and the tumblers shifted, she considered leaving the candle unlit forever. But the thought made her skin prickle. Home was not a place one simply reentered. It had to be staked out, guarded, revived. The only question was whether there would be anyone left to see the signal.

She pressed the door open, and stepped inside. She might have been stepping into a stranger’s house.

Evelyn shut the door behind her, listening to the tumblers seat themselves with a muted click, and stood in the entry hall a moment longer, measuring the temperature and pressure of the air. It was the same old hallway, same frayed runner, same umbrella stand with its splintered rim, but the quality of the silence was different now. It had thickened, become granular, as if the house had not been properly ventilated since her last departure.

She set her nurse’s case on the bench, peeled off her gloves, and, more out of ingrained protocol than nostalgia, ran her fingers along the wall’s paneling. The oak had always felt faintly alive under her touch, warmed by years of hands passing up and down in hurried morning parades. Now it was cool, and the dust clung like a memory. The first photograph on the stairwell, a Harcourt wedding portrait, glass speckled with fly droppings, watched her without recognition.

From deeper in the house came the clink of porcelain and the thin, reedy warble of her mother’s voice. Evelyn squared her shoulders and advanced down the corridor, each step rolling with the controlled efficiency of the ward, not the home.

The parlor was half-lit by blackout candles, their wicks trimmed to regulation length, their glow absorbed by heavy maroon curtains. Evelyn’s mother sat in her usual armchair, wrapped in the same mohair throw she’d favored for decades, but her posture was new, a bony uprightness that looked both fragile and defiant. Before her, on the tea table, was a single cup and saucer. Across from her sat an empty chair, perfectly set.

The old woman glanced up as Evelyn entered, eyes blinking against the gloom. For a moment, confusion flickered across her features, then a brittle smile assembled itself. “Ah! There you are, Sybil. I wondered if you’d bring in the post.”

Evelyn swallowed her correction. It was easier to let the error stand, to enter the scene as Sybil if that was what the day required. “I’ve just come from the station, Mother. Would you like me to open a window?”

Her mother made a face. “No, no, the blackout. Terribly important. Mr. Pembroke says they’ll fine us if there’s so much as a chink. And the dust, can’t abide it.” She reached for her cup, hands trembling with the microseisms of age and hidden ailment, but the tea sloshed only slightly. “Did you see the vicar in the square?”

“I didn’t,” said Evelyn, setting her bag down by the settee. “I imagine he’s kept indoors.”

“Hm. Well, he’ll come round. Always does.” The old woman stared at the cup as if consulting it for augury, then looked up, gaze sharpening. “You’re back early. Tom wrote to say you’d be a fortnight yet. Is he at the docks?”

A tremor ran down Evelyn’s forearm as she loosened the bag’s clasps. “I came as soon as I could.” She pulled out a small bottle and a tin of pastilles, placing them on the table with the soundless dexterity of a stage magician. “How are you feeling today? Any shortness of breath? Headaches?”

Her mother ignored the inquiry, eyes flicking to the window and then back. “Have you seen Tom? He left this morning for the dockyard, didn’t he? I made him porridge, always cold by the time he eats, but he doesn’t mind, not my Tom. Did you see him at the station?”

“No,” Evelyn said, “but I expect he’ll be home by supper.”

The lie tasted of salt and chalk. She hadn’t seen Tom’s handwriting in three weeks, and the last missive had been uncharacteristically clipped, just a postscript, a dry weather report and the warning: Tell Mother not to fret.

She knelt at her mother’s side, fingers moving with the unthinking tenderness of muscle memory, one hand to the pulse, the other to steady the birdlike wrist. The old woman smelled of boiled milk and camphor, but under it was a sourness that reminded Evelyn of the fever tents.

“Pulse is thready,” she said, not expecting a response. “Have you been taking the tablets?” Her mother snorted, but Evelyn saw the glimmer of guilt. “Tom says the chemist waters them down. Says we’re lucky if we get chalk and air. But I take what I’m given.” Evelyn tucked the throw tighter, checked the tray for crumbs or signs of upended cups. “You look well,” she said, and meant it more as hope than observation.

They sat in the hush for a moment, the candle’s reflection fluttering in the window glass. Outside, someone swept a stoop, the bristle of the broom in competition with the lowing of a distant foghorn. Every so often, a shiver would ripple through the blackout curtains, signaling the passage of a car or a bicycle. But no one came up the walk, and the world remained contained to this small, flickering chamber.

It was Evelyn who broke the stillness. “Shall I see to supper?” she asked, rising with a practiced efficiency that masked the wince in her knees. “If you like, Sybil. There’s a chop in the icebox, unless Tom’s eaten it. He always does, but he leaves me the bone for broth. Never one to waste, my Tom.”

Evelyn carried the conversation into the kitchen, the same way she’d carried wounded men to triage, briskly, as if momentum itself could stave off collapse. The kitchen, at least, was as she remembered: preserves stacked in neat pyramids, the checked tablecloth pressed flat, the smell of onions and lard lingering above the sink. She checked the icebox and, true to form, found only the chop bone and half a turnip, both sealed in waxed paper. On the counter sat a jar of the barley tea her mother favored, beside a mug whose rim was chipped at twelve and six, Tom’s mug, by immutable household law.

The only evidence of his presence was the absence: no boots in the rack, no balled-up scarf tossed over the chair, no staccato whistling from the hall. Even the pile of letters on the sideboard was thinner than she’d expected; someone had been clearing them away with a discipline Evelyn found disquieting.

She set a pot to boil, trimmed the turnip with a scalpel-sharp knife, and made a soup with the grace notes of pepper and a dash of salt from the ration tin. She moved through the motions automatically, attention split between the tasks and the view from the window, what little could be seen beyond the filmy glass and the prison bars of the blackout tape. A smudge in the fog, a flicker of movement near the hedgerow; she catalogued each, then dismissed them.

At the table, her mother ate in small, mechanical bites, stopping often to glance at the door. “You should have seen him as a boy,” the old woman said, as if continuing an earlier conversation. “Always in some scrape, but clever enough to talk his way out. Not like your father, he’d dig in his heels and say nothing, but Tom, he could charm a crow out of a tree.”

Evelyn smiled, the expression unfamiliar on her face but easier than the alternatives. “He always looked out for us,” her mother continued. “Even after… well, after the troubles. Never thought he’d end up in a uniform, but he did. They said he was brave. Did you know that, Sybil?”

“I did,” Evelyn said softly.

The meal passed in companionable silence, punctuated only by the tick of the grandfather clock and the gentle sighs of the house settling into night. When her mother finished, Evelyn gathered the bowls and returned them to the sink, running the water at a trickle to avoid drawing the attention of the warden, who sometimes walked the lanes at dusk and reported on wasteful households. As she wiped the counter, a knock sounded at the front door.

She froze, heart rate accelerating in the old, familiar pattern. She’d read the intelligence bulletins; she knew the kinds of visits that happened after curfew, the silent men in regulation boots who asked for “just a moment of your time.” But when she cracked the door, she found only Mrs. Winters from next door, her face pinched by cold and something less tangible. “Evening, dear,” the neighbor said, peering past Evelyn’s shoulder as if hoping to catch someone unprepared. “Just thought to see if you’d arrived. Saw the light in the hall and guessed it was you.”

Evelyn nodded. “I’ve only just come in.”

Mrs. Winters leaned closer, lowering her voice. “Your mother’s been having spells again. Last Thursday, she went out in her nightgown and stood in the street for ten minutes, calling for Tom. Mr. Pembroke had to fetch her back.” She tutted, the sound more for show than concern. “You’ll be a blessing, having the training and all.”

Evelyn thanked her, then tried to close the door, but Mrs. Winters pressed on. “Odd thing, though. Several nights this week, I’ve seen Tom myself, only it was late, after the lamps were doused. He’s been… well, slipping down to the harbor. After curfew. Not right, is it?” The question hung in the air, heavy with meaning.

“I’ll ask him about it,” Evelyn said, and this time the door latched with a soft, surgical certainty.

She returned to the parlor, where her mother had drifted into a doze, lips twitching in time with some private monologue. Evelyn watched her a while, then fetched the blanket from the settee and spread it over the thin knees. She checked the pulse again, still erratic, but within parameters. She collected the pill bottles from the side table, lined them up on her lap, and read the labels, noting the number of tablets left, the interval between doses. Everything was as it should be, at least on paper.

The room, stripped of voices, filled with the sound of Evelyn’s own breathing, which felt at once too loud and too shallow. She scanned the shelves for familiar objects: her father’s meerschaum pipe, dusted but unlit; the brass candlestick that used to hold pride of place in the window, now shoved to the back of a shelf; a row of books, many with their spines cracked and flaking, as if the years themselves had gnawed at them.

She thought again of her father’s ritual, the lighting of the candle, the annual promise that it would guide them home. She wondered what use a signal was if there was no one left to receive it.

After a time, her mother stirred and blinked awake. “Has he gone to the docks again?” she asked, voice barely above a whisper. Evelyn knelt beside the chair and took her hand. “I don’t know,” she said. “But if he has, I’m sure he’ll find his way back.”

The words were meant as comfort, but even as she spoke them, Evelyn felt the first cold certainty settle in her chest: something was wrong, and it had started long before her arrival.

The house quieted in the slow, convulsive manner of the ill. First the kitchen fell silent, then the parlor as her mother drifted into shallow, ragged sleep. The blackout deepened, room by room, until only the slenderest line of candlelight under Evelyn’s door proved any life at all persisted.

She sat at her desk, the relic of a childhood vanity table repurposed by war, and ran a square of cotton across her forehead, cataloguing the day’s accumulation of oil and particulate. Her hands trembled less than usual, she noticed. Perhaps she was acclimating. Or perhaps she had simply reached the stage of exhaustion where nerves and muscle agreed to a truce.

For a while, she tried reading an old pharmacopoeia, but the words swam in the guttering half-light, and every page felt as if it had already been memorized and set aside. She considered writing a letter to Tom, in the hope that it would find him, but the blankness of the page stung her with the certainty of its futility. Instead, she let her gaze drift over the room, noting each object in turn: the chipped ewer and basin, the heavy woolen rug, the wall clock arrested at 9:46. Even time here was suspect, running on uncertain batteries.

From down the hall came the occasional murmur, her mother, resuming mid-conversation with the past, or perhaps only with the ghosts. The sound, muted as it was, set Evelyn’s nerves on a higher pitch. The urge to check the perimeter, to search for infection, grew until it was nearly physiological.

Tom’s room, when she entered, had the feel of a recently vacated hospital bed. The bedclothes were undisturbed but there was an impression in the pillow’s center, an indentation so slight only a nurse would have caught it. The window was cracked, letting in a blade of sea air that sliced through the stagnant sweetness of old tobacco and books.

Evelyn moved methodically, the way she had on the wards: first, she checked the perimeter, eyes sweeping for signs of entry or disturbance. She noted the boots by the door, the left one with a spatter of mud that had dried and flaked against the rubber. The pattern was recent, maybe three hours, no more than five. Tom was nothing if not meticulous about the state of his footwear; he would have scraped it clean if given time. She knelt and studied the mud, scraping off a small sample with her thumbnail. It was a pale, silty type, the kind found near the estuary but not on the main path. She stored the details away.

Next, she crossed to the writing desk. It had been Tom’s pride, an old, pigeonholed affair with secret compartments and a fold-down blotter. The top surface was cluttered with papers, their edges neatly squared, but the center bore the ghostly outline of something that had recently been removed, a rectangle exactly the size of a radio transmitter. Her heart knocked against her ribs as she lifted the first sheet. Beneath, as she expected, was nothing but the next layer of empty, ready-to-be-filled forms.

She searched the drawers. In the shallow center drawer, she found a half-written letter, lines scored in Tom’s tight, angular script:

To Whom It May Concern,

If you have found this note, proceed with utmost caution. Do not trust…

The rest of the page was missing, torn jaggedly, the separation too clean to be accidental.

She moved to the second drawer, where Tom kept spare change, oddments, and the disassembled parts of whatever his current fixation was. Amidst the usual detritus, pennies, wire, an old ration book, she found a coil of copper, clipped and carefully wound, and next to it a crystal oscillator, the type used in illicit radio sets. Evelyn lifted it between thumb and forefinger, holding it up to the light. It was scored on one side, the numbers barely visible: 6.0 MHz. She set it back in the exact orientation she’d found it.

On impulse, she knelt by the radiator, running her palm along the baseboard. There, just below the paint line, were tiny indentations, scuff marks, shallow but regular. As if someone had slid their heel repeatedly against the wood, bracing themselves to climb out the window.

Evelyn straightened and crossed to the window. The sill was cold and slightly damp, paint peeled by years of condensation. When she pressed her fingers to the edge, they came away with a smudge of dirt, and, when she looked closer, a smear of something darker, almost like grease. She sniffed it: oil, with a trace of iron. She looked down at the ledge outside, where the storm had deposited a film of grit, and saw the faint outline of a handprint, larger than Tom’s, but not by much.

She opened the window wider and leaned out, scanning the garden. Nothing moved except the hedge, shuddering under the wind. The street was empty, every streetlight dimmed to extinction, every window battened down as if the houses themselves had surrendered to curfew. Evelyn’s breath fogged the glass, condensing along the perimeter where the paint had cracked and peeled back in thin, desperate strips. Even the evergreens lining the walk seemed to huddle deeper into their shadows.

Below, a solitary figure paced the cobblestones, pausing every dozen steps to peer upward, then hastening on. The posture, shoulders hunched, head tucked, steps measured, signaled neither drunkenness nor the aimless wandering of the displaced. Rather, it spoke of intent, an awareness of being observed and the futility of resistance. She tracked the figure until it vanished into the miasma of fog at the corner, her own heart mirroring the tempo of its stride.

She withdrew from the window, closed it to the merest slit, then resumed her survey of the room. She let her hands, clean, efficient, decisive, perform the work. On the shelf beside the bed sat Tom’s old knapsack, battered but neatly buckled. She unfastened it, expecting the usual jumble of hand-rolled cigarettes and penny novels. Instead, she found a compact field notebook, the kind she’d seen only in the hands of officers, and a pencil sharpened to a murderous point. She thumbed through the first pages. Lists of supplies, sketches of antennae and wiring diagrams, interspersed with the occasional phrase that leapt out in capital letters: “TRUST NO ONE”, “WATCH THE VICAR”, “WED 1900 – CANDLE SIGNAL”.

Evelyn replaced the notebook as precisely as she’d found it, weighing the value of reporting the discovery against her own compulsion for order. She suspected she would do neither, at least not until she understood more. Her hand drifted over the headboard, there, she noted a cluster of minute scratches, as if someone had absently raked a coin or a nail along the wood in repetition. She ran her finger over them, counting in rhythm: two, one, three, then a pause, then two more. A pattern, she thought. She traced it again, slower this time, the repetition soothing as the act of suture.

Her search continued with the wardrobe. Tom had always kept his uniforms to one side, civilian clothes to the other, as if the two halves of his existence required separate air to breathe. She flicked through the hangers, finding a RAF jacket with the wings badge still attached, three civilian shirts pressed with a care that belied his reputation for slovenliness, and a scarf tucked into the sleeve as if stashed in haste. She pressed her face to the fabric. It carried, faint but unmistakable, the salt-and-wire scent of the sea.

She opened the wardrobe’s bottom drawer, her expectation set to mundane: shoe polish, lint, the odd sock. Instead, the drawer contained a radio receiver, not military issue but civilian, modified. The casing was pockmarked and the dials scored with a sharp instrument to better grip the metal. She recognized Tom’s handiwork instantly. Nestled beside the receiver was a roll of electrical tape and a half-used candle stub, brass colored. She picked up the candle, ran her thumb over the surface: the wick was blackened, but the base was unburned, as though only a fraction had been used before being pinched out and replaced. The wax itself had been scratched with a series of notches, uneven, but deliberate.

She rolled the candle between her fingers, thinking. The last time the candle had sat in the window was the week their father died; Tom, seventeen, had lit it from a splinter in the hearth and let it burn all night, an act of rebellion or benediction she’d never been able to categorize. Since then, the candle had become a relic, kept for its memory, not its function.

She replaced the radio and the candle, aligning them exactly, then surveyed the room with a final, diagnostic sweep. Only the window’s worn sill and the mud on Tom’s boots argued for any presence at all. The rest was absent, as pervasive and total as the blackout itself.

A clock down the hall chimed once, twice, as she moved to the door. Evelyn paused, reconsidered. She retraced her steps to the cabinet above the desk, where her father had once kept cigars and later, after the embargo, correspondence and clippings from the Gazette. She reached to the back, past the loose envelopes and the pile of ration books, and felt the cold rim of brass. She pulled it free.

The family candle holder, a heavy affair of Victorian manufacture, balanced itself in her palm. It was etched with a pattern of laurel leaves and, around the neck, an inscription so worn it required memory to reconstruct: “For Those Who Wait.” The surface was spattered with old wax, red and white, each layer a palimpsest of long-ago nights.

She held the candlestick to the light, tilting it so the flame of her own candle revealed the surface beneath. There, in the pooled residue at the base, she noted something new: a runic groove, shallow but unmistakable, cut through the wax and into the brass itself. It was not decorative. It was the kind of mark left by a razor, or the sharp end of a file, in the process of counting, or keeping score, or perhaps marking a code.

Evelyn set the candlestick on the desk, then sat before it, elbows squared, hands folded. The urge to reconstruct every step, to align evidence and deduction until the facts assembled themselves into order, rose up inside her. She resisted, for now. Instead, she focused on the act of lighting the candle.

From the drawer, she withdrew a matchbox, the last from her Red Cross parcel. She struck the match with a careful flick, watching the sulphur flare and die to a measured ember. She touched the flame to the candle’s wick, and the fire took hold instantly, devouring the blackened string and blooming outward with hungry resolve. She steadied the candle, counted to ten as the wax softened and began to run, then carried it, as in ritual, to the windowsill.

Outside, the fog had thickened. The street was empty, the houses along the lane now mere silhouettes. The candle’s glow projected itself onto the glass, then into the gloom beyond. She thought of her father, shielding the flame from the draft, insisting that the light would guide them home. She wondered, not for the first time, whether there was anyone left to guide.

She stood at the window, back straight, arms at her sides, and watched as the flame was refracted through the handblown glass, splitting into a dozen warped orbs that danced and overlapped. The light, feeble as it was, marked the house on the lane as a singularity: a point of illumination in a sea of dark. She allowed herself the comfort of it, then turned from the window and closed the door to Tom’s room behind her.

Downstairs, her mother’s snoring had become regular, predictable. Evelyn poured a glass of water, placed it at her mother’s side, then seated herself in the parlor’s shadowed corner. She did not light the lamp. Instead, she waited for her eyes to adjust, for the outlines of furniture to emerge from the gloom.

Above, on the second floor, the candle burned steady, its wax forming slow, deliberate rivulets down the side of the holder. Each droplet cooled and solidified, leaving a new pattern of trails. As the night deepened, the fog outside pressed closer against the glass, but the light persisted.

Across the street, barely visible through the haze, a figure emerged from the hedge, moving with the calculated patience of someone trained to avoid notice. The shape paused, faced the window, and stared at the candle’s flame. For a full minute, nothing moved. Then the figure stepped backward, dissolved into the darkness, and was gone.

Upstairs, the candle guttered once, twice, but held its fire. In the parlor, Evelyn sat with her hands folded, her breath measured, her eyes wide open. The signal was lit. Whatever machinery lay outside her knowing had been set in motion. She waited, as all the Harcourts before her had, for what would come.