e last read The Thirty-Fourth Chapter, in which the widow’s retinue prepared for her return. If you have recently joined us, start with The Prologue.
The servants waited by the windows for their mistress to arrive. The hour was late, the candles burned to their last, and her dinner grew colder. Each held their breath in anticipation of the moment that would startle them from their waiting. Wondering when, if ever, it would arrive.
They waited in a spare but furnished room hidden from the remainder of the inn by a door that appeared to be a broom closet. The innkeeper was a friend of the captain’s, who had rented the entire inn and settled Séverine’s servants within it, establishing a room for each of the inn’s inhabitants.
The servants fidgeted with their gloves and inspected their shirts. They filled and refilled the water pitcher and tenderly touched the leaves of an alligator fern that bathed leisurely in a shallow vase. They peered from the windows, fogged by night and obscured by botany. They paced the floors and checked the locks.
They listened for the sound of a hinge or a footstep on the stair, and worried that whoever occasioned such sounds might not be the person they expected. There seemed to be so many sounds in that silence, and each of them lacking some salient cause. There was no person roaming the attic, and yet steps could be heard nonetheless. There was no hand running the length of the hall and yet a woman’s glove appeared on the bureau.
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