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Greenwood, staring at the offending rectangle outlined so clearly against the thin white cotton.
    My heart starts pounding. How could I have been so stupid? Why didn’t I leave the book in the kitchen drawer, as I always do, or put it back on the shelf? I’ve just been reading it over and over! And why, oh why, did he have to start noticing me today, of all days?
    I know what’s coming.
    “I’m so sorry, Mr. Greenwood.” My voice is quivering as I set down the teapot and reach into my pocket. I draw out the slender blue volume. “Truly, I am!”
    “My Shakespeare,” he says, ominously quiet.
    “It won’t happen again, sir,” I plead.
    What am I saying? Of course I won’t have another chance, not after something like this. He’ll say it’s theft. And there are no other places open in this town. Mum will send me off to be a live-in for sure. A scullery maid, bottom rung of the ladder.
    He stares at me. “Go. Go and—” A cough stops him; when it subsides, he draws in a deep, gasping breath. I brace myself for the shouting, the raised hand to come. The blood is pounding in my ears so loudly that I miss his next words.
    “Beg pardon?” I whisper.
    “I said go and get a chair. Bring it here.”
    I walk slowly to the dining room and pull out a straight-backed chair, wondering how it will figure in my punishment. My steps are even slower as I walk back.
    “Here,” he rasps. “At the table.”
    I put the chair where he shows me. Whatever is coming, I will not cry.
    He motions me to sit down, and I do. Waiting.
    “The Tempest.” He turns the book over in his hands, opening it to a random page, shutting it again. Finally, he says, “Why this one?”
    I look up from the book to his face, and the gleam of interest in his eyes surprises me so much I find myself saying, “It’s all storm and magic. And freedom at the end.”
    “Ah, yes,” he says. And then, to my amazement, he recites from the play:
“Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes …”
    He stops there, leaning back with a sigh. But it can’t be left like that, unfinished, the words unsaid! And so I whisper the next lines:
“Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.”
    “Exactly!” exclaims Mr. Greenwood, slapping the book on the table so hard, the china rattles. “That’s exactly it!”
    And that’s how it started, this strange arrangement. Now I know he’s batty, because no sane gentleman would act this way. He had me leave the second chair in the drawing room. Every afternoon, when I bring the tea tray, it has two cups and saucers, and two plates for the cake. And heaven help me, I sit down with him and we talk. That’s right. A gentleman like him, sitting at the table and chatting away with a girl like me. It might as well be something out of the cinema, it’s that unlikely.
    I could never tell Mum. She’d say I’m walking a dangerous line, that people who step above their stations get beaten back down, and hard. She’d say it isn’t my place. But it’s getting difficult to tell my place with Mr. Greenwood. It’s as if a switch turned inside him and he started to come alive again, like one of his inventions, after years of stillness. He sees me now when he passes me in the hall, nods, says hello. His voice still creaks like an old gramophone, but the more he uses it, the easier the words flow. He tells me about plays he saw on the London stage, and what that stage was like in Shakespeare’s own day, and what England was like even earlier, in the time of castles and knights in armor. It’s wonderful what he knows. And even more wonderful are the books he puts in my hand and tells me to read, and the discussions we have about them after: Shakespeare and Marlowe, Sir Walter Scott and Dickens.
    Sometimes there’s a shift in him, like the sky beginning to lighten after a thunderstorm, and I think I catch the glimmer of