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wasn’t really looking for Alice.”
    â€œVery wise,” said Lydia. “Alice isn’t easy to pin down. She was here a few moments ago. We’ve been sent out of the house. Perhaps to escape contagion by blasphemy. Pater has several visitors, one of them a certain Mr. Darwin.” She looked up to see if Miss Armstrong registered the name of Mr. Darwin. Miss Armstrong didn’t seem to appreciate the outrageous prestige of such a visitor.
    â€œActually, it is our Ada I require,” said Miss Armstrong. “The new lord of the family is fussing this morning, so Ada and I were to pay a call on your household and contribute a token of esteem. A jar of Mrs. Boyce’s Seville marmalade. Ada left the Vicarage before I had found my gloves.”
    Lydia yawned.
    â€œBut Ada isn’t generally allowed to wander the riverbanks alone, what with her—­” Miss Armstrong looked into the hems of both gloves, as if the acceptable description of Ada’s monstrousness were stitched thereupon. “Her condition,” she concluded.
    â€œAda is able to move about quite well on her own,” observed Lydia.
    â€œOr so she thinks, ” said Miss Armstrong darkly. As if Ada were an amputee who hadn’t yet cottoned on to the fact that walking was out of the question. “At any rate, I tiptoed past you here on my way to the Croft. Your cook said that Ada hadn’t been seen there today, so perhaps she’d met up with Alice on the riverbank. And Alice would be with you, she said. So I’ve returned to find Alice, and I hope Ada with her.”
    Lydia looked about theatrically. “Alice is missing. Generally.”
    â€œThat is unkind. Ada has her struggles, and Alice has hers. And so do you and I.”
    Lydia didn’t want to be part of a compound subject conjoined with Miss Armstrong. “I don’t know where Alice is. She was kicking last year’s chestnuts into the water a while ago but has run off. It’s true that Ada came by as I was reading, but I didn’t see in which direction she headed. I’m sure the girls met up, and are larking about.”
    â€œAda doesn’t lark . It’s not in her nature. And she hasn’t the strength.”
    â€œWell, then,” said Lydia, shrugging.

 
    CHAPTER 8
    W ho first, upon sensing the backward rush of memory said to signal the moment of death, was able to telegraph this apprehension to the family gathered around? Maybe the original gentleman descended from ape said the equivalent of “falling out of tree” to his common-­law ape wife, and she interpreted his words as “just as he left for the dusty world beyond, his whole life passed before his eyes. Then he hit the ground.” After all, falling out of the tree is the first and the last thing we do.
    And what might death seem like for those prior to language? Infants, say. Or for those incapable of memory, the simple folk known as God’s beloveds? What can the final moments be like for humans who are now beyond both language and memory, like certain great-­aunts in bonnets that went out of fashion a half-­century ago?
    For Ada, who was only a decade old, the memories came as illustrations in books. She saw first a dense and beautifully crisp illustration from that collection of Doré’s engravings for The Inferno : specifically, Plate 10 from Canto III, Charon supervising the embarkation of sinners in a boat on a dark lake. Unlike Ada, the sinners were magnificent human specimens, swollen into adult sensuousness with citrus-­round breasts, if female, and mathematically beautiful abdomens and buttocks, if male. Without complaint the damned must have worn their iron spines in childhood, to die with such correct posture. Still, it wasn’t the divine bodies of sinners that Ada now recalled, but the netherworld itself. Beyond the slopes of scree, Doré had limned a black sky pasted across with blacker,