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would be a tyrant.”
    His face was an unsmiling mask.
    Unable to long hold that wretched gaze she went back to the window and sat looking out across the lawn. It was lit very dimly by the aura of light shining from the disk of earth’s rim. In the distance she could see the edge of the park and the lift of hills, covered over in trees. Which way did she look? Without earth she had no sense of direction. The taste of nightmare rose in her mouth.
    Where was true north?
    There were stars, more stars than she had ever seen before. The skies of Aylesward had become murky of late, competing with the overspill of smoke from neighbouring mill towns. English skies were changeful, and she had never been inclined to look at the night sky when it had been clear. Sometimes in the summer, when the nights of northern England were long twilights lingering into twilights, she had lain awake at night watching the purple play on the horizon, but had never thought to look for stars. And now she did; each star was a perfect glowing pearl fixed above her head, ringing round the haloed earth, distant and distinctly mocking. She suppressed another bitter laugh. They mocked her and she loved them.
    She looked back at Rupert. He had finished his brandy and was putting up the flask, setting aside the soiled tumbler for someone to fetch and clean. It struck her that he had not eaten yet. This sudden night made everything feel as if a full day had come to a close. What time was it, really?
    “De—Rupert.”
    “Yes?” He slid a flask back into the cabinet and shut the glass door with a little click.
    She got up with a voluminous rustle. “I am going to bed. I am not used to this eclipse and I want to sleep while it is dark.”
    “Pull the curtains well shut. They are thick, and made to keep out the light.” He turned back to her. “I will be in my room next door, should you need anything.”
    She narrowed her eyes at him. “My door will be locked, should you need anything.”
    With rampant brows and a short little laugh he stood at the dining room door and let it open for her, nodding deferentially to her as she went past. She met two servants by the stair and another in the upstairs hallway; she could feel them all looking over their shoulders at her as she went by. She soared up the stairs and down the hallway with grim determination and they all got quickly out of the way, but once inside her own bedroom her grimness faded. She leaned against the door, listening to the soft footsteps and hushed voices of the servants without, her hand gripping the lock until her knuckles turned white. Unbidden and unwanted, their unfamiliar faces and searching glances conjured up in her the notion, You are all alone .
    It was strange how hollow those words echoed in her soul. She had always been alone, even before the train at Leeds. Her whole life she had stood alone, trying to be something better, never quite attaining this goal. She remembered her mother’s face, she remembered her sisters’ faces—so very like to her mother’s, it was no struggle to call them up. She looked on them as they fell under her mind’s eye, looked on them as from a great height, raised above and apart so that a gulf seemed to open up between them. She had always been alone among people who disliked and used her, and she had borne it like a queen; only in those parting moments when she had hurled her mother’s visceral emotion back in her face had she descended to their level.
    “I would be fit to be queen,” she murmured—her voice caught and broke, and she hated herself for that. “But I would be cold.”
    Empty, but with her head held high, Margaret turned from the door and entered the room, going patiently and methodically through the motions of undressing and getting into bed. They were small, bright, familiar things that she clung to fervently. As she lay under the warm blankets, staring up at the darkened ceiling, she almost said the old familiar childhood