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and began to knead. ‘And you are. Moving on, that is.’
    â€˜Well, the dream is changing.’ Dulcie didn’t want to think about the other possible interpretation of Mr Grey’s words. That he was telling her she had to let go of the past. Of him. That maybe he hadn’t come to warn her for some bigger reason. ‘Only, not for the better. Instead of writing a bloody scene, now I have her in it.’
    â€˜You’re not seeing her . . .’ He paused, looking for the right word. ‘Her
end
, are you?’ Concern had overcome the fatigue in his pale and tired face, and Dulcie rushed to comfort him.
    â€˜No, nothing like that.’ It was funny, though. They both knew that the author of
The Ravages
, the subject of Dulcie’s thesis, lived two hundred years before. Therefore, it made sense that she had
died
two hundred years before, too. ‘It’s a man, and it doesn’t look like her. In fact, this time he looked more like me. Or, really, like Lucy always tells me I was supposed to look like, with the flame-red hair and everything.’ Chris nodded. He had heard Dulcie’s mother’s rants.
    â€˜Maybe I’m dreaming that now because of what I read today,’ Dulcie continued. ‘I mean, if the page in the Mildon is what I think it is, she first wrote the victim as a redhead, then changed it to black hair. Which is funny, because the image of blood drying is much more striking if you put it on light hair.
    â€˜What’s also different is that it’s becoming less like a story, and more like it’s happening as I see it. Maybe that’s just because she’s writing it and it’s so vivid.’
    â€˜Well, that’s good.’ He stroked the cat absently. Esmé, Dulcie noticed, did not react with a bite. ‘Isn’t it?’
    The kettle whistled, and Dulcie got up to make the cocoa. ‘I guess so.’ She brought the mugs to the table. Esmé reached to bat at the spoon. ‘It’s just that from the way she’s looking at the scene, I think she was involved somehow. And I think, maybe, Mr Grey is trying to warn me.’
    She looked up at her boyfriend. For a moment, even Esmé held still. ‘I think my author might have been a murderer.’

SIX
    T he phone woke Dulcie. The phone – and Esmé bounding across her stomach as if the little cat had planned to answer it herself.
    â€˜Hello?’ Phone in hand, Dulcie reached for the clock. After nine – they’d gone back to bed around four. Chris must have let her sleep in, and after a moment of panic, she remembered it was Friday. She had no morning sections today.
    â€˜Dulcie! You haven’t gone yet, blessed be!’
    â€˜Lucy?’ Dulcie sat up. To deal with her mother, she needed to be a little more awake.
    â€˜Of course, it’s wrong to intervene, but in a situation like this, with Mars in a grand trine—’
    â€˜Lucy, would you hang on a minute?’ Lucy – Dulcie hardly ever called her mother ‘Mom’ – always talked a mile a minute. Her tendency to assume that whoever was listening had been party to whatever thoughts had come before didn’t make it easy to catch up. Shaking off the grogginess of her troubled sleep, Dulcie took a drink of water – and a deep breath – and prepared to engage her sole parent once more. ‘OK, I’m here now,’ she said slowly and deliberately, in a futile attempt to set the tone. ‘So tell me, where am I supposedly going? And what is the situation?’
    Dulcie had chosen her questions with care. Even half asleep, she remembered that the grand trine had something to do with an astrological alignment. And she was under no illusion that Lucy’s hesitation about intervening had anything to do with her adult daughter’s privacy. If Lucy felt she could boss the planets around, her own daughter’s free will wasn’t worth taking into