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go. It was early in the morning, a light rain was falling, a mist coming in off the sea, and Harry sat humped in the back of a wagon with Martha beside him. She held her head high, even if he could not. Their few possessions were stowed in an old cabin trunk. Harry bade a silent farewell to the place where he had tasted happiness, only to have the cup dashed from his lips by his own wicked folly, and the wagon lurched off up the street. A minute later it passed the ruins of the burnt house, and Harry turned his face aside.

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    A nd that is where I left them, that night. It was late, and all was quiet in Drogo Hall. I was flagging. More than once my eyes had closed, my head had fallen forward onto my chest, and my uncle had had to awaken me. I should have gone to bed hours before, but I confess that in my desire to hear the story I did not. So all this I had from him before I retired that night, though in a form far more sporadic, more fractured and patchy than the orderly account I have rendered here; and much of it formed the stuff of my dreams.
    I awoke shivering early the next morning to find that the storm had blown itself out and the sky was clear; but it was arctic in that bedroom, which had not known a fire, I would guess, for decades, and what little warmth I had found beneath the dank blankets had long since dissipated. I struggled at once into my greatcoat and stamped out onto the landing and down the stairs, determined through the vigorous motion of my limbs to get my blood moving once more.
    A strange few hours I had of it, wandering the deserted passages of Drogo Hall, and everywhere I felt there were ghosts present, the spirits of those who had been drawn into the influence of the house, and never escaped. Ghosts and secrets: I encountered locked corridors,sealed rooms, doors that opened onto walls. But I did not encounter Percy, nor any other living soul, although I was aware at times of movement within the house, of low voices murmuring in nearby passages, but whoever they were—my uncle’s servants, I presumed, people from the village who worked in Drogo Hall—they kept apart from me. So I settled myself in my uncle’s study with a volume of Scott and whiled away the daylight hours in pleasant dreams of antiquity.
    My uncle did not emerge from his room until late in the afternoon, just as the light was beginning to thicken over the marsh, and we at once retired to his study, where we found a cheerful fire blazing in the hearth, and Percy on hand with the gin and the brandy. Again I gazed at the portrait of Harry Peake that hung over the fireplace. The fate of that flawed man, of whose existence I had been barely aware just twenty-four hours before, had aroused my most sympathetic concern, and I begged my uncle that he not delay, but resume his narrative at once.
    He watched me with a thin smile in which I detected a distinct suggestion of scorn. He saw that he had me hooked, and it amused him. He put his fingertips together, in that familiar way of his, and upon them he lightly rested his chin. It is, he said, an extraordinary story—eh? This poet—this as yet unrealized genius—he lifted his fingers, waved vaguely at the painting—and this brave little daughter of his—eh? Clearly the old man did not intend to resume the story without a preamble of some sort, and so I asked him the question that had occurred to me when I reached my room the previous night. What had it all to do with Drogo Hall?
    But on this he would not be drawn.
    “You will hear everything, my dear,” he fluted, “in its proper order.”

    London! Or rather—London. They reached London some weeks later, and this, by my calculation, would be the late summer of1767 or 1768. They came in on the Oxford Road, and after passing Tyburn Field—no doubt with many a shudder—they made for the river. I have a picture in my mind’s eye of a big humped man picking his way through the narrow streets of the town, his old black coat dusty