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Jerubah came out to empty her night jar, waking the geese herself, which would in turn wake Alice, but her hand and cheek and shoulder pulsed too much for sleeping. She lay in the grass until she heard the geese, lay some more until the sun streaked the woodpile, then stood up, shook off her skirt, and crossed into the dooryard.
    Jerubah had left the door open to the June air and Alice stepped through it. Jerubah lifted her head from the eggs she was beating and stared at Alice; her eyes could go either soft or hard at will, but she seemed unable to decide how to fix them until she fixed them on Alice’s neck, no doubt speckled by now with the plum-colored marks of Verley’s fingers.
    “I’ve come to speak to Mr. Morton,” Alice said.
    Jerubah’s eye slid from Alice’s neck up to her cheek, and down again to the hand, which had closed on itself in an awkward claw. She raised a finger and pointed to Mr. Morton’s study.
    Alice walked up to Mr. Morton’s door, attempting to lift her good hand to knock, but discovered that the injured shoulder was less agreeable to movement than the burned hand. She switched sides, and tapped the wood with her knuckles. Mr. Morton called out, “Come along, come along!” with an impatience Alice hadn’t remembered in him.
    Alice opened the door and stepped in. Mr. Morton lifted his head from his papers and pushed his chair back. “Alice!” he cried. “Alice, my pretty girl! My sweet, good girl! Come here, child, and let me feast my eyes on you!”
    Alice drew closer to Mr. Morton’s chair. The low morning sun cut across her, causing odd patterns and shadows; Mr. Morton peered at Alice until he’d sorted shadow from skin, skin from bruise, bruise from blood, and with his daughter’s eyes, looked away from her. After a time he returned his eye to a spot just beyond her and asked, “Are you visiting with my daughter?”
    “No, sir.”
    “She sends you to do her errands? Some business here in Dedham?”
    “I’ve come to speak with you, sir. To ask if you would take me back from the Verleys. I’ve not been treated well there.”
    “Not been treated well! If you mean they don’t spoil you as I used to do—”
    “They’ve hurt me, sir. First him and then her. The both together.”
    “Now, Alice, you don’t expect me to believe such a fib as that about my daughter. Not unless you’ve grown rude and lazy since you went there.”
    “I’ve grown nothing like it, sir. I only wish to come back here and go on as we did before.”
    “Now you know we can’t do that. You know that Mr. Verley owns your time now,” and there he jerked around in his chair to peer out the window. “What’s that noise? Is it the fox again? Pray tell Jerubah to come in here.”
    Alice had held it in her mind all the way from Medfield that when Mr. Morton saw what had been done to her he would take her back and keep her safe, as he would have kept his own daughter safe, but now she wondered what had dulled her brain so. She wasn’t his daughter. She wasn’t even his servant anymore. She turned away and walked to the door, but there she looked back. Mr. Morton seemed happy enough to look at her more directly from afar, but even so, he began to blink as he looked. Alice might have pretended he blinked out a tear, but in the slashing light the only thing she felt sure of was the look of fixedness that grew on him the longer she stood there. Why should he disrupt his family’s life over a servant he had liked to call his “sweet, good girl,” but who wasn’t so sweet and good anymore?
    Alice returned to the keeping room and let Jerubah stare at her again, longer this time, as if reading the wounds on Alice’s skin the way someone not a slave might read words on a paper. Alice said good-bye to her without passing on any order from Mr. Morton; she wasn’t his servant anymore. She stepped out into the yard and looked first left, then right. The road ahead of her had long been called two different