Anne C. West

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SCENES 1~2~3~4~5~6~7

Bonus Scene — Market Day Kensington’s high street and market stalls — morning

The morning after Camillo’s death, Kensington woke up exactly as it always did, which struck Agnes as faintly indecent.

Trams rattled down the high street on schedule. The baker’s window filled with the same golden rows of bread. Two schoolboys chased a hoop past the chemist’s, shrieking with the particular joy of children who hadn’t yet learned that grief was supposed to slow a person down. Agnes walked among all of it with her basket over one arm, mourning ribbon and candles and a list of provisions Papa had scrawled in his careful hand, and found she resented the ordinariness of it more than she expected to.

She reached the market stalls just as they filled properly, canvas awnings snapping in the light breeze, crates of oranges and cabbages stacked in their usual towers. And everywhere she turned, the same word travelled ahead of her like a scent.

Murdered.

‘…poor Mr Rosser, and right there in his own chair…’

‘…smugglers, my sister-in-law swears it, the same ones from the papers…’

‘…I heard the police found a whole ledger, hidden behind the mirror…’

Agnes bought her ribbon from Mrs Fourie’s stall without correcting a single detail, though her fingers itched to. There was no ledger. There was no smuggling ring, not that anyone had proven, at any rate. Kensington’s gossip mill ran on its own fuel entirely separate from fact, and she’d learned long ago that arguing with it only fed it faster.

‘Terrible business,’ Mrs Fourie said, wrapping the ribbon with brisk, competent hands. ‘My Willem says it’ll be that painter fellow. The Italian one. Nervous sort, always was.’

‘Is that so.’ Agnes kept her voice light and paid for the ribbon and did not, this time, correct anything at all, though something in her chest tightened at how quickly and how comfortably a name had already attached itself to blame.

She moved on to the candle-maker, and then the grocer’s, where Kensington and Co’s awning shaded a knot of women comparing notes over baskets of potatoes with the seriousness of a war council. Agnes joined the edge of it long enough to collect flour and a tin of tea, and came away having learned, variously, that Camillo had been poisoned, strangled, and shot, quite possibly all three; that the paint was a message from a jilted lover; that the paint was a message from a business rival; and that the paint meant nothing at all, and the real culprit was almost certainly a passing vagrant nobody in Kensington would ever see again.

None of it was evidence. All of it, she thought, catching herself at the notion before she’d quite finished having it, was worth remembering anyway. Not for what it proved. For what it revealed about who believed what, and how quickly, and why.

She filed it away without meaning to, the way she’d once catalogued symptoms on a ward chart, and didn’t notice she’d done it until she was halfway to the next stall.

Behind Kensington and Co’s loading platform, a delivery wagon stood backed against the kerb, SUNNINGHILL FARMS lettered across its side in green gone soft with weather. A broad-shouldered man in a faded blue shirt worked steadily at unloading crates, cabbages and pumpkins and bundles of spinach still smelling of earth, lifting twice what the grocer’s own boys could manage without any apparent effort at all. He exchanged a word with one of them, too quiet for Agnes to catch, and went back to his work.

She didn’t look twice. There was nothing in the whole scene to make her look twice, a delivery man doing honest work on an ordinary morning, one face among a dozen others she passed without truly seeing that day.

‘Agnes! Agnes Fane!’

She turned to find Mrs Kruger bearing down on her with a shopping basket and an expression of barely restrained delight, the particular delight of a woman who has just found someone new to share dreadful news with.

‘Have you heard?’ Mrs Kruger didn’t wait for an answer. ‘They’re saying the Inspector’s called it murder outright. Murder, Agnes, in Kensington.’

‘I had heard something to that effect.’

‘Well, of course you would, working where you do.’ Mrs Kruger’s eyes flicked, hopeful, toward the basket over Agnes’s arm, as though mourning ribbon might yield some fresh detail if examined closely enough. ‘Terrible business. Simply terrible. Though I did say to Mr Kruger only this morning, didn’t I say, there’s always been something not quite right about that shop.’

‘Had you.’

‘Oh, for years.’ Mrs Kruger’s voice dropped into the register she reserved for her most treasured pronouncements. ‘You mark my words, there’s more to this than a simple robbery.’

Agnes very nearly laughed. Mrs Kruger had marked precisely nothing in advance of anything in the whole time Agnes had known her, and had never once let that stop her from claiming otherwise afterward.

“I’m sure you’re right,” she said instead, and meant it kindly enough, and took her leave before the conversation could widen any further.

She walked home with her basket heavier than it had been that morning, ribbon and candles and provisions, and a good deal else besides that couldn’t be carried in any basket at all: a market full of half-true stories, already hardening into fact the way rumour always did if nobody stopped to question it. She didn’t know yet that she was about to spend the better part of a fortnight doing exactly that, sorting the true from the merely convenient, one conversation at a time.

She only knew that Kensington, this morning, felt like a town already deciding what it wanted the truth to be. And that unsettled her rather more than the silence of the barbershop had.

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Bonus Scene — A Quiet Moment with Papa Pinkerton’s parlour — late evening

The lamp burned low and steady on the side table, and the fire had settled into the comfortable, undemanding stage of the evening where nobody thought to feed it further. Papa sat with the ledger open across his lap, spectacles slipping down his nose, pencil moving in small, unhurried sums. Agnes sat opposite with a stocking she had every intention of mending and had, for the better part of an hour, mostly just held.

‘You’re not darning that,’ Papa said, without looking up.

‘I’m resting between stitches.’

‘You’ve been resting for forty minutes.’

‘It’s a very restful stocking.’

He made a small sound that might have been a laugh or might have been disapproval of a column of figures, and turned the page. Outside, the street had gone quiet the way Kensington’s streets always did once the last tram had rattled past, leaving only the tick of the clock and the occasional pop of a dying coal.

‘Mrs Steyn came by the shop again,’ Agnes offered, mostly to have something to say. ‘Wanted to know whether we’d be requiring more chrysanthemums for the Abrahams service.’

‘And will we?’

‘I told her we’d manage with what we have. She looked terribly disappointed. I believe she’d hoped for an excuse to discuss the flower budget at length.’

‘You could have let her.’

‘I could have. I chose mercy instead.’ She turned the stocking over without darning it. ‘You’re welcome, by the way, for sparing you an afternoon of tedious negotiations and opinions on floral arrangement.’

‘A saint,’ Papa said. ‘Truly.’

‘I do try.’

He licked the end of his pencil, more habit than necessity, and bent back over the ledger. Agnes watched him a moment, the familiar downward tilt of his head, the way his lips moved faintly over the numbers the way they always had, for as long as she could remember watching him do sums at this same table. It struck her, not for the first time, how much she’d missed simply being allowed to watch him do ordinary things.

‘You’re staring,’ Papa said, not looking up.

‘I’m observing.’

‘Is that what we’re calling it.’

‘I like to make certain you haven’t fallen asleep mid-column. Last time you nearly wrote Mrs Abrahams down as owing us for six coffins instead of one.’

‘It was an honest mistake. I misplaced my spectacles.’

‘True. But continued to enter it six seperate times.’

‘I appreciate you correcting my mistake.’

She laughed properly at that, and he glanced up at last, something pleased and a little smug in it, the look of a man who knew exactly how to earn that particular sound out of his daughter and rationed it accordingly.

The gramophone in the corner sat silent tonight, its horn catching the lamplight at an angle that made it look, Agnes thought, rather like it was listening in. She considered putting something on, decided against it, content instead with the quiet, the pencil on paper scratching, the small domestic sounds of an evening simply being there together.

‘Oh,’ Papa said, some while later, setting down his pencil entirely. ‘I meant to mention. Camillo popped in this afternoon, while you were out.’

‘Did he.’ Agnes looked up properly now. ‘What did he want?’

‘Not entirely sure, if I’m honest.’ Papa frowned faintly at the memory, more curious than concerned. ‘Asked whether I still had any old contacts down in Cape Town. Shipping men, mostly, from my early years in the trade. I told him I hadn’t kept up with half of them, and he seemed rather disappointed to hear it.’

‘Cape Town.’ Agnes considered this, faintly puzzled. ‘Whatever for?’

‘Didn’t say. You know Camillo. Asks a question, changes the subject before you’ve finished answering it, off he goes again looking pleased with himself for having asked it at all.’ Papa waved a hand, dismissing it, already reaching for his pencil again. ‘Probably some scheme or other. He’s always got one going.’

‘Probably,’ Agnes agreed, though something in it sat oddly with her for a moment. He seemed perfectly content with life in Kensington. And preferred travelling the world through his customers stories.

‘He did leave you something, though.’ Papa nodded toward the mantel. ‘Said to give it to you when you were back.’

A small paper twist sat propped against the clock, the sort the sweet shop used for boiled sweets. Agnes crossed to it and unwrapped it to find three peppermint creams, slightly squashed, and a scrap of paper in Camillo’s looping hand.

For the next corpse who needs cheering up. And you too, if you’re desperate.

She laughed, soft and sudden, and tucked the note into her sewing basket without quite knowing why she wanted to keep it.

‘Ridiculous man,’ she said, fondly, and popped one of the creams into her mouth.

‘The very best kind,’ Papa agreed, and returned to his ledger, and the evening went on exactly as ordinary evenings always did, unremarkable, unhurried, entirely unaware of what the next morning would bring.

Agnes finished her tea. She still hadn’t darned the stocking. Papa fell asleep in his chair before the fire finally burned all the way down, and she woke him gently and steered him off to bed, the way she did most nights, and neither of them thought, even once, to treasure the evening any more than they treasured any other.

There would, after all, be other evenings. There always had been.

---

Bonus Scene — An Extra Visit to Madame Clarisse Madame Clarisse’s House of Beauty — a fortnight after the case closes

The little brass bell above the door chimed with its usual theatrical enthusiasm, and Agnes stepped into a fresh wall of violets and ammonia, entirely unchanged by the small matter of Kensington having recently solved a murder.

‘Miss Fane!’ Clarisse swept in from the back room, arms already open, bangles chiming almost as loudly as the bell had. ‘Come to gloat, have you? I did always say there was more to that business than a simple robbery.’

‘You said a great many things, as I recall. I believe blackmail featured prominently.’

‘Details, darling.’ Clarisse waved this away with a ringed hand. ‘The point stands. I was involved.’

‘You were, in fact, entirely uninvolved, beyond an excellent supply of gossip and a very fine mixture of petroleum jelly and powder.’ Agnes settled onto the same velvet settee she’d perched on weeks before, minus the accompanying dread this time. ‘Which is precisely why I’ve come. We’re low again, and I don’t trust anyone else’s blend.’

‘Wise woman.’ Clarisse disappeared behind the curtain, and returned a moment later with the familiar tissue-wrapped parcel, setting it down with a flourish entirely disproportionate to its contents. ‘There. And how is your good doctor? I do hope he’s recovered from his last visit here. He looked rather like a man being fitted for his own coffin.’

‘He’s recovering. Slowly.’

‘A pity. I’d hoped to see more of him.’ Clarisse settled herself opposite, arranging her skirts with the particular satisfaction of a woman who considered gossip an art form and Agnes, currently, her best available canvas. ‘Now. Tell me everything. The parts the newspapers left out.’

Agnes obliged, in the careful, edited fashion she’d become rather practised at, and Clarisse listened with her chin propped on one hand and her eyes bright, interrupting twice to gasp at entirely the wrong moments and once to declare that she’d known Jacob Murray’s mother, slightly, and always thought there was something sad about that whole family. When the story had run its course, Agnes set down her tea and let a small silence settle before she spoke again.

‘May I ask you something, Madame Clarisse? Rather less to do with murder.’

Something flickered behind Clarisse’s kohl-rimmed eyes, quick and wary, gone almost before Agnes caught it. ‘That sounds ominous.’

“Not remotely. Only, that first afternoon we came, you very nearly called Papa by his Christian name.”

Clarisse’s hand went still on her teacup.

“I’ve wondered about it since,” Agnes went on, gently. “You don’t have to tell me. I only find I’m curious, and I’ve grown rather fond of following curiosity wherever it leads these past few weeks.”

For a long moment Clarisse said nothing at all, which was, in itself, so unlike her that Agnes nearly withdrew the question entirely. Then she set her cup down with unusual care, and something in her face softened into an expression Agnes had never once seen it wear.

‘I wasn’t always Madame Clarisse,’ she said finally.

‘No?’

‘Clarisse De Witt, born plain Sannie Botha, if you can believe such a name attached to all this.’ She gestured, wry, at the velvet and the gilt mirrors around them. ‘I did piecework for a dressmaker on the wrong side of the tracks, and my father drank, and when he finally drank himself into an early grave, there wasn’t a shilling in the house to bury him decently.’ Her mouth twisted, not quite a smile. ‘Every undertaker in Kensington turned me away that week. Every one but your father.’

Agnes went very still.

‘He never once made me feel the shame of it,’ Clarisse said. ‘Buried my father properly, waived half the cost and never once mentioned it again, not to my mother, not to me, not to another living soul in this town, so far as I’ve ever known. I asked him once why he’d done it, and he said something dreadfully sentimental, that everyone deserved to be laid to rest with a little dignity, whether or not they’d managed much of it in life.’ She laughed, unsteady. ‘I built all of this,’ another gesture, wider this time, ‘on the back of what was left of that dressmaker’s wage and a very great deal of nerve. Reinvented myself rather thoroughly, as you may have noticed.’

‘I had noticed,’ Agnes said softly. ‘I hadn’t guessed why.’

‘Nobody has. That’s rather the point of reinventing oneself, darling.’ Clarisse dabbed briefly at one eye with her handkerchief, more irritated by the tears than moved, or so she clearly wished to appear. ‘Your father kept my secret for twenty-odd years without once being asked to. I’ve kept a standing order of powder for him ever since, and never once let him pay full price for it, and that is the whole scandalous truth of it. No romance. No mystery. Only an old kindness neither of us ever saw fit to discuss.’

Agnes felt something loosen in her chest, warm and unexpected. ‘Thank you for telling me.’

‘Don’t you dare go soft on me now.’ Clarisse straightened at once, visibly hauling herself back into her usual register, and swept the moment aside with practised efficiency. ‘I’ve a reputation to maintain, and sentiment simply doesn’t suit these curls.’ She reached for her teacup again, composed once more, eyes already glittering with fresh purpose. ‘Now. Tell me true. Is there anything at all between you and that doctor of yours, or must I go on inventing rumours entirely unassisted?’

‘Madame Clarisse.’

‘I only ask because Mrs Kruger’s version has you secretly engaged, and I do think mine’s rather better. Something involving a dramatic rescue. Possibly a fire.’

‘There was no fire.’

‘There will be, by the time I’ve finished with it.’ Clarisse beamed, delighted with herself, and reached for the biscuit tin as though the last ten minutes had never happened at all. ‘Now sit, and tell me everything you refuse to tell Mrs Kruger. I promise to be considerably more entertaining with it.’

Agnes, rather to her own surprise, found she was in no hurry at all to leave.

---

Bonus Scene — Aida, Before The Altera household, then the walk to Pinkerton’s — morning

Aida woke at the same time she always had, which was, she supposed, its own kind of foolishness. There was nowhere to be at that hour anymore. No barbershop to unlock with the key she still carried, out of habit, in the pocket of her pinafore. No floor to sweep before the first customers arrived, no mirrors to polish until Uncle Camillo could see his own reflection well enough to complain about it.

She lay still a moment longer than she needed to, listening to the house settle around her, and let herself remember instead.

She’d always gone in before school, quiet as anything, letting herself through the back the way he’d taught her, careful of the third step which creaked. He was never there that early. That was rather the point. She liked having the shop to herself for those few minutes, sweeping the floor in long, even strokes, wiping down the counter, setting the combs back into their jars in the particular order Uncle Camillo insisted on and never once managed to keep himself.

He always knew, somehow, that she’d been. He’d find some small sign of it, a smudge missed, a jar turned the wrong way round, and pretend to be scandalised.

‘Aida Altera,’ he’d say, when she came by after school to collect whatever coin he’d tucked aside for her that week, ‘you’ve been at my shop again, meddling.’

‘Someone has to.’

‘I am a grown man. I am entirely capable of sweeping my own floor.’

‘You are entirely capable of leaving it for a fortnight and calling the dust decorative.’

He’d laugh at that every single time, as though she’d never said it before, and press a paper twist of aniseed balls into her hand, and tell her, every single time, not to tell her mother he spoiled her, and every single time her mother had known perfectly well for years.

She dressed slowly this morning, in the pinafore, because it was the only thing she owned that was both clean and decent, and because nobody had thought yet to buy her anything more suited to funerals and family arrangements and all the grim, grown-up business that had swallowed the house whole this past week. Her mother’s eyes were red before breakfast most mornings now. Her aunt spoke in the careful, over-bright voice adults used when they thought a child couldn’t hear the crack underneath it.

Aida heard it perfectly well. She simply hadn’t found anywhere to put what she heard.

Downstairs, the kitchen smelled of nothing much, nobody had troubled with breakfast properly in days, and her mother sat at the table with a cup of coffee gone cold in front of her, staring at nothing. Aida poured herself tea she didn’t especially want and drank it standing, because sitting felt, this morning, like admitting to something she wasn’t ready to admit to.

‘We’re to go to the undertaker’s,’ her mother said eventually, not quite looking at her. ‘Your aunt says we should all be there.’

‘I know.’

‘You needn’t come, if you’d rather not.’

‘I want to.’ She did, and didn’t, in the particular tangled way grown-up things always seemed to arrive in lately, wanted and dreaded in the same breath, with no clean way to separate the two.

Enzio was waiting outside when they left, leaning against the low wall the way he always had, cap in his hands, turning it over and over without seeming to notice he was doing it. He looked thinner than she remembered him looking a week ago, though she supposed everyone did, these days.

‘Morning, piccola,’ he said, the old nickname coming out rougher than usual.

‘Morning.’ She fell into step beside him, letting her mother and aunt walk ahead. ‘Are you coming in too?’

‘Not today. I’ll see you as far as the corner.’ He glanced down at her, something careful in it. ‘You don’t have to go in, if it’s too much.’

‘That’s what Mamma said.’

‘And what did you tell her?’

‘That I wanted to.’ Aida watched her shoes against the pavement, counting the cracks the way she used to count them on the walk to the barbershop, out of habit rather than purpose now. ‘I keep thinking, if I go in and it’s real, then it’s really real. If I stay home, it’s only real the way things in stories are real. Something that happened to someone else.’

Enzio didn’t answer for a long moment. When he did, his voice had gone rough in a different way. ‘I know exactly what you mean.’

They reached the corner, and he stopped, the way he’d said he would, and crouched down to her height the way he hadn’t done since she was much smaller.

‘He kept every single one of your drawings,’ he said. ‘Did you know that? Behind the till, in an old cigar box. Terrible drawings, most of them. He showed me once, very proud of himself, as though you’d painted the ceiling of a church.’

Aida hadn’t known that. Something in her chest, tight and aching for a week now, loosened just slightly, just enough to let a small, unsteady breath through.

‘They were quite good drawings,’ she said, with as much dignity as she could manage.

‘Terrible,’ Enzio agreed, and the ghost of his old grin flickered across his face. ‘Go on. Your mother’s waiting.’

She went, the paper twist of aniseed balls he must have slipped into her pocket somewhere along the walk, discovered now, small and sweet and entirely unexpected, the way Uncle Camillo’s always had been.

She didn’t cry. Not yet. But she held the sweet in her closed fist the whole rest of the way, and found, for the first time in a week, that carrying it felt like carrying something rather than nothing at all.

---

Bonus Scene — A Second Sighting Kensington high street, near St Euphemia’s — late afternoon

The light had gone long and gold by the time Agnes turned onto the high street, the particular late-afternoon light that made even Kensington’s plainest shopfronts look, briefly, like something worth painting. She’d been to the chemist for Papa’s tonic and was in no great hurry to be anywhere else, and so she noticed things she might otherwise have walked straight past.

Johann Kriegler stood outside the church railings, speaking with the churchwarden.

There was nothing remarkable in it. Men of his standing gave to the church the way other men gave to charity raffles, generously, publicly, with the quiet expectation of being seen to do so. He passed the warden an envelope, thick enough to matter, and the warden’s thanks carried clear across the street, effusive in the particular way reserved for men whose gratitude might be noted and repaid.

Kriegler said very little in return. A nod. A handful of words too quiet to carry. And then the warden hurried off about his business, and Kriegler simply stood.

He didn’t move to leave. He didn’t check his watch, or glance toward whatever errand should logically have come next. He stood at the railing with his hat in one hand and watched the street the way, Agnes thought, a hawk watched a hedgerow, not searching for anything in particular, merely aware, in some deep and unhurried way, of everything that moved within it.

She slowed without quite meaning to.

There was nothing to see. A well-dressed man, standing still on a public street, on an ordinary afternoon. And yet something in the particular quality of his stillness caught at her the way a held breath catches at a room, wrong in some way she couldn’t name and wouldn’t have been able to defend if pressed.

His eyes passed over her. Barely a flicker, there and gone, the kind of glance any stranger might spare another on a busy street. He inclined his head, the smallest courtesy, and turned back to his watching.

Agnes walked on.

She told herself, quite reasonably, that she was tired, and that grief made a person see shadows where there were none, and that a philanthropist standing quietly outside a church was hardly the stuff of suspicion. She very nearly believed it, too, by the time she reached her own front door.

But some small, stubborn part of her, the part that had learned, in four years of watching men’s faces for the lies that kept them breathing, filed the moment away regardless.

Not evidence. Not even a thought worth naming, not yet.

Only a shiver, and the sense, gone again almost before she could catch it, that she had just been looked at by something considerably more patient than herself.

---

Bonus Scene — What the Cough Means Pinkerton’s parlour, then Papa’s bedroom — evening

It started the way it always did, a small catch in his breath over the evening paper, easy enough to miss if Agnes hadn’t spent weeks learning exactly what not to miss. She looked up from her own book without meaning to, the way her body had simply learned to do lately, faster than her mind troubled to catch up.

By the third cough, she was already crossing the room.

This one didn’t stop the way the others did. It dug in, wrenched his narrow shoulders forward, folded him over the arm of his chair until the newspaper slid from his lap unheeded. Agnes knelt beside him and rubbed slow circles between his shoulder blades, the way she had a hundred times before, and counted.

One. Two. Three.

She kept counting long past the point where she usually stopped.

‘Papa.’ She kept her voice level, though something cold had settled low in her stomach and stayed there. ‘Breathe with me. Slowly.’

He tried. It took him three attempts before the breath actually came, thin and rattling, and even then it didn’t sound like enough.

By the time it passed, properly passed, his handkerchief had gone from white to something Agnes chose very deliberately not to look at too closely, and he sagged back into the chair as though the fit had taken something from him it hadn’t quite finished returning.

‘There,’ he managed, eventually, in the same voice he always used, light, a little wry, entirely unconvincing. ‘Fit as a fiddle.’

‘You’ve never played the fiddle.’

‘No.’ A ghost of his usual smile. ‘But I imagine I’d be very good at it, in between coughing fits.’

She didn’t laugh. She meant to, and found she couldn’t quite manage it tonight, and something in her silence must have told him so, because his own smile faded into something gentler.

‘Agnes.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘You’re not counting my breaths because you’re fine.’

She hadn’t realised she was still doing it, one hand pressed lightly over his, her lips moving faintly with numbers neither of them needed said aloud. She stopped, and folded her hands properly into her lap instead, and found she had nothing ready to say that wasn’t either a lie or more than either of them could carry standing up.

‘Let’s get you to bed,’ she said instead. ‘You’ll feel steadier for the rest.’

He let her help him, which told her more than any cough had, Papa rarely let himself be helped without at least three protests first, and tonight he simply took her arm and allowed himself to be walked through to his room, slower than he used to walk, though neither of them remarked on that either.

She settled him against the pillows and drew the blanket up, and might have left it there, might have said goodnight and gone, the way most evenings ended. Instead she found herself sitting on the edge of the bed a while longer, watching the rise and fall of his chest with the particular vigilance she’d once reserved for far younger, far more breakable men in field hospitals half a world away.

‘You did this in the war too, I’d wager,’ Papa said quietly, into the dark. ‘Counted breaths. Kept track, the way you’re keeping track of mine now.’

Agnes said nothing for a moment. ‘It’s what they teach you. Respiration rate. Whether a man’s failing or holding steady.’ Her voice had gone very quiet. ‘I counted a great many breaths that never made it to a full minute.’

‘And did the counting ever stop any of them from stopping?’

‘No.’ The word came out rougher than she meant it to. ‘It never did. It only ever told me how much time there was.’

‘Then you already know,’ Papa said, gentler still, finding her hand in the dark and holding it, his own thinner than it used to be, warmer than she’d feared it might be, ‘that the counting was never really about control. It was only ever love, wearing a number’s clothes, because love on its own felt too large to hold steady.’

Agnes pressed her eyes shut, briefly, and didn’t trust herself to answer that directly.

‘I’m not going anywhere tonight,’ Papa said, softer still. ‘Go to bed, Agnes. I promise to still be here complaining about my breakfast in the morning.’

‘You’d better be.’

‘I generally am.’ A small, tired laugh, more breath than sound. ‘Goodnight, my darling girl.’

She kissed his forehead, the way she always did, and left the door open a crack behind her, the way she always did now, and lay awake a long while in her own bed afterward, counting nothing at all, and finding that the silence, without a number to fill it, was very much harder to bear.

---

Bonus Scene — The Rest of Dr Reitz’s Day Dr Reitz’s surgery — a full working day

Miss Steyn had the appointment book open and the kettle on before Dr Reitz had properly hung up his coat, which was, he had come to understand in his short time in Kensington, simply how mornings worked here.

‘Mrs Abrahams at nine, for the baby’s cough,’ she said, without looking up. ‘Old Mr Fourie at half past, though he’ll talk through most of it, so I’ve given him the full hour. And I’ve told your ten o’clock she’ll need to come back Thursday, since you’ll want the morning clear for whatever it is you and Miss Fane are chasing today.’

‘I hadn’t said anything about Miss Fane.’

‘You didn’t need to.’ Miss Steyn finally looked up, entirely too pleased with herself. ‘You’ve worn the same expression every morning this fortnight. I’ve simply learned to read the schedule around it.’

He had no ready answer to that, and so he retreated, with as much dignity as the moment allowed, into the examination room to prepare for Mrs Abrahams and her cough.

The baby, it transpired, had nothing more serious than a chest cold and a mother thoroughly unconvinced by that diagnosis. Dr Reitz listened to the small, congested chest, pronounced it sound, and spent a further ten minutes reassuring Mrs Abrahams that steam and patience would see the child through it, in roughly the tone he imagined a man used on a nervous horse.

‘You’re quite certain,’ she said, for the fourth time, gathering the baby back into her shawl.

‘Quite certain, Mrs Abrahams.’

‘Only my sister lost one to the croup, you understand, and I couldn’t…’

‘I understand entirely.’ He kept his voice gentle. It was, he’d found, the only register that worked with frightened mothers, and Kensington seemed to produce them in steady supply. ‘Bring him back if the fever climbs, or if the cough turns wet and rattling rather than dry. Otherwise, steam, rest, and I expect he’ll be chasing the cat by Friday.’

She left considerably lighter than she’d arrived, and Dr Reitz allowed himself thirty seconds of quiet before Miss Steyn’s voice carried through from the waiting room, cheerfully informing Mr Fourie that the doctor would see him now.

Mr Fourie’s complaint, insofar as he had one, concerned a persistent ache in his left knee, which occupied perhaps four minutes of the full hour Miss Steyn had allotted him. The remaining fifty-six were given over, in no particular order, to his opinion of the new tram schedule, a lengthy account of his late wife’s prize-winning marrows, and a story about the war that Dr Reitz suspected had grown considerably taller with each retelling over the intervening years.

‘…and I said to the sergeant, I said, you’ll not get me digging that trench twice, not for love nor…’ Mr Fourie paused, apparently noticing, for the first time in several minutes, that his doctor’s attention had drifted somewhere else entirely. ‘You’re not listening, young man.’

‘My apologies. You were saying, about the trench.’

‘I was saying about the paint,’ Mr Fourie said, with the satisfaction of a man who’d caught someone out and intended to enjoy it. ‘The murder. Everyone’s saying about the murder, this week. You’d know more than most, I expect, being who you’re keeping company with.’

‘I really couldn’t say.’

‘That’s what they all say.’ Mr Fourie levered himself up from the examination table with a groan entirely disproportionate to the mildness of his knee complaint. ‘Well. You give Miss Fane my regards, when you see her next. Fine woman. Terrifying, but fine.’

He shuffled out still discussing his marrows, and Dr Reitz found himself, not for the first time that week, wondering how a town this size managed to know quite so much about business that was, strictly, none of its own.

The afternoon brought a scraped knee, a suspected case of nothing more sinister than overindulgence at a christening, and a long consultation with a farmer’s wife whose husband refused to come in himself and had, in his stubborn absence, been diagnosed twice-removed via his wife’s careful description of symptoms he’d apparently never once described accurately to anyone. Dr Reitz wrote out advice he doubted the man would follow, and thanked his wife for her patience, and meant it.

By the time the last patient had gone, the light outside had turned the particular gold that meant evening wasn’t far off, and Miss Steyn was tidying the waiting room with the brisk efficiency of a woman glad to be nearing the end of her own day.

‘You were somewhere else again today,’ she said, not quite looking at him, folding a stack of old newspapers with more attention than the task strictly required. ‘During Mrs Abrahams. And most of Mr Fourie, though I don’t entirely blame you for that one.’

‘I was attending perfectly well.’

‘You were attending Mrs Abrahams’s baby with your body, Doctor, and something considerably more interesting with the rest of you.’ She set the newspapers down and studied him with the particular directness she reserved for moments she’d clearly been saving up. ‘I don’t mind, you understand. It’s rather nice, actually, seeing you distracted by something. You were dreadfully serious, that first month.’

‘I remain dreadfully serious.’

‘You remain dreadfully serious with considerably more colour in your face than you had in April.’ She picked up her coat, entirely too satisfied with her own observation. ‘Sergeant Shephard came by again this afternoon, while you were with Mr Fourie. Third time this week.’

‘Did he need something?’

‘He said he was passing.’ Miss Steyn’s mouth twitched, fighting a smile and losing. ‘He is very often passing, lately.’

Dr Reitz, recognising an opportunity to redirect entirely too gratefully, seized it. ‘Perhaps you ought to ask him why.’

‘Perhaps I ought.’ She said it lightly, though something in her eyes suggested she’d already given the question rather more thought than she was letting on. ‘Goodnight, Doctor. Do try to get some sleep. Whatever it is you and Miss Fane are chasing tomorrow, I imagine it’ll still be there in the morning.’

She left him locking up alone, the surgery quiet around him in the particular way it only ever went once the day’s small emergencies had all been resolved, and found, standing there in the fading light, that he was already thinking ahead to tomorrow morning, and to precisely whose company it would involve.

He told himself it was only professional interest.

He did not, entirely, believe it.

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