The apron over his lantern was still glowing green when the captain said my name.
I couldn't feel my fingers to pull it off, so I took the hem in my teeth and dragged. Flour and scorch on my tongue. How long had he been watching?
The flame came out from under the cloth yellow as butter, and perfectly innocent.
"Stove door," I said. "It warps. Throws light when it's drawn."
He turned his head on my kitchen floor and looked at the stove. Its door was shut. Its fire was a red smear behind the grate.
"Is that so," he said. "Thank it for me."
His eyes closed. He was asleep, or doing it well, before I could decide which I wanted.
I sat against the dresser with the black ball of dough in my lap and watched his chest go up and down until the windows greyed. I could not get warm. The kitchen fire was banked at my elbow and I shook anyway, as if the dough had taken every degree I owned.
At half past four I went across to the bakehouse to see Pip had the oven lit. I left the captain on a folded blanket and the kitchen door on the latch. Ten minutes. Perhaps fifteen.
He woke grey and sour and asked for his flask.
It had rolled under the dresser at supper. I'd watched it go. I got down on my knees on the flagstones and found a clean ring in the flour dust where it had stopped, and nothing in the ring.
"Gone," I said.
"Who was in the house?"
"You. Me."
"And?"
"Nobody. Pip's across the yard."
"Then somebody was." He said it mildly. He looked at my hands. I put them behind my back.
Someone had walked into my kitchen while I counted oven bricks, stepped over a poisoned man, and taken the one thing that could say what was in him. The parish kept keys to my door in more pockets than I could name. A latch is a latch.
I did the morning loaves with a blade I couldn't feel. Tea loaves for the vicarage. Two cobs for the miller's. Each one scored before it went in the basket: a single slash for one house, two slanted for the next, a short hook for the vicar. My mother taught it to me at six, from a stool, and said a loaf could carry a sentence if you cut it right. She never used it for more than whose bread was whose. I cut the Pells' loaf wrong and had to bake them another. Last, the stamp. The rook's foot, pressed into every crust, so nobody could say whose bread had poisoned them.
I hadn't meant to think that.
He was at my table with a heel of rye he didn't eat. The lantern sat by his elbow. He looked like a man who'd been dug up.
"I've asked the reeve for the parish register," he said. "To learn the parish. He says the vicar keeps it and the vicar doesn't lend to soldiers."
"The vicar lends to anyone who brings him warm bread."
"Is that an offer?"
It was. If I read what he read, I would know what he was hunting before he told me, and he would not tell me. "I'm going that way," I said. "You'd have the whole lane counting your steps."
"And you'd bring it straight back."
"Is that a question?"
The corner of his mouth tightened. "Miss Rook. It is not."
The vicar gave me the register for a tea loaf and a promise of its return by dark. I carried it as far as the churchyard wall, behind the yew, and opened it with thumbs that couldn't feel the paper.
Ten years back. The fever autumn. Page after page of burials in a hand like a row of fence posts, forty-three in six weeks, and a last column for the witness.
H. Vey, Lantern. H. Vey, Lantern. The same name, six burials running, the ink fresh and tidy in each.
The sixth line read: Agnes Rook, died 9 October, buried 11 October.
I read it three times. I had been fourteen, in the front pew, staring at a box. Nobody tells a girl who signed. The Lantern had sent an officer to count the fever dead, that was all. Of course it had. A fever that size, they'd want to know if it was catching.
The grave was forty paces from where I stood. I didn't look at it. Sunday would be ten years to the day, and Sunday evening he would break his seal. I had been not-remembering that since Monday.
I put the register in front of him with a flat hand, like a loaf off the peel.
He turned the pages with the book angled away from me. I let him. I cut more bread for something to do.
"How did your mother die?" he said, without looking up.
My knife stopped. "Fever."
"I was ten. When mine went," he said.
I waited. He turned another page. That was the whole of it.
"You'll eat that rye while it's got a crust," I said, and put it in front of him, and he did.
I was turning the shop sign when the paper came under the door.
It skated across the boards, a square of grey, folded twice. Pip's broom stopped. In block capitals on the outside: CAPT. CROWE.
I stooped for it. A boot stepped past my shoulder and a hand took it from my fingers. He had come through from the kitchen without a sound again.
He read it standing. His face did nothing at all. He folded it smaller, and put it inside his coat.
Then he walked past me into my shop, to the big oak flour bin under the window, and lifted the lid. He put his arm in to the elbow. When it came out he was holding his flask, white as a drowned thing, flour sifting off it in the lamplight.
He shook it. Something slopped inside.
"Still half full, Miss Rook," he said.