"A hidden flask, Miss Rook, and a note I don't mean to show you. I could have you in the Hart's cellar by midnight."
"The Hart's burned down."
"Then the parish lockup." He didn't smile. The flask sat between us on the counter, shedding flour.
My hands were shaking, so I put them in the dough trough where he couldn't see. "If I wanted you dead I'd have let you die on my floor."
"Yes," he said. "That's why you're still standing there."
Pip had gone very small behind the broom. I sent him out with a look.
"Someone barred my door from outside," the captain said. "Someone filled this flask. That's twice, and I don't know this village. You do." He turned the flask over once. "I'm not asking you to like me."
"What did you see, last night?"
"A stove door, Miss Rook. You said so."
The stove door had been shut. We both knew it. He picked up the flask and went upstairs, and I stood there understanding that I had been spared by a man who intended to go on watching me.
At three I carried a lamp up to check the landing, because the boards had creaked and I told myself it was mice.
My mother's door stood a hand open. He lay on his back with the lantern on the pillow beside his head, and the chain wound round his fist, three times, tight enough to leave a mark. A man asleep should have an open hand.
I stood there until the lamp spat. Then I went down and knocked back the dough harder than it needed.
Hazel Thistlewood lives on Brook Row, a mile off over the plank bridge, in a cottage that smells of drying mint and cat. She was seventy-four and shelling beans into her lap.
"Chick! You've flour on your face and trouble in it. Sit. My knees are bad, the weather's turning, the Thistlewood girls are all fools, what do you want?"
"Henbane."
Her hands kept going. "Sells well. Rats."
"Who bought it?"
"Half the parish had rats this year. Your loaves are getting dear, did you know? Barley's up."
"Hazel."
The beans stopped. She looked at the door, then at me. "Harlan Mott. Monday the twenty-sixth of September, a week before your soldier came. A pinch in a twist of paper, for the rats in the reeve's barn." She shut her mouth, then opened it again. "Mott keeps a cat the size of a pig. Never had a rat in his life."
"Say that before the captain."
"Before a Lantern man? Chick, he'd want to see my shelves." She nodded at the bundles hanging from the beam. "I'll gather mine at Coldwater Ford up in the Hollin Wood, same as ever, and I'll say nothing to nobody in a grey coat."
I stood. She caught my sleeve with a hand like a root.
"You've still got your mother's book?"
"Rye's proving," I said.
"Burn it, chick."
I took my sleeve back.
"A reeve buying rat poison is no crime," Bastian said that afternoon, across the counter. "I need Mott to say it. In front of someone."
I could not tell him I could make Mott say anything. "Then you'll wait," I said.
"I have until Sunday."
I went across the yard to the bakehouse, twenty paces from my kitchen door. I paced it twice. I mixed plain wheat dough, said my mother's words into it, and the dough went the colour of milk.
The heat left my hands and went into the dough, and I began to shiver. I baked it in the small oven and set it to cool, one clean cut across the top.
For Friday market. Mott buys a loaf from me every week. He always eats the heel on the walk home.
I should have put it somewhere high.
At supper Pip reached for the bread board while I was ladling soup, and I turned in time to see the slice already going into his mouth, the one with the single cut.
"Pip," I said.
"What? It was just sitting there, Tam, and the end was dry, and I was hungry, honest."
The lantern by Bastian's elbow burned yellow. Finished bread, I thought. It couldn't see finished bread.
"Tell me, Pip," Bastian said, buttering his own slice, idly, the way you ask the time. "What does your mistress do at three in the morning?"
"She talks to the..."
The jug was nearest my hand. It went over, water across the board, across the soup, across the captain's knees.
"Finish, Pip."
Pip's face went the colour of putty. He was a boy who couldn't tell a lie, for an hour, and could not keep quiet either, because he had never in his life kept quiet.
"...to the dough," he said. "Says her mum did. It's daft."
Bastian laughed.
It was a real laugh, short and surprised, as though someone had hit a bell in him by mistake. Then I saw his eyes slide to me, and to the jug, and to the bread, and I watched him put the whole evening away somewhere I couldn't reach.
The knock came before the plates were cleared.
Mott filled my doorway in his good coat, with Davey behind him and a handcart in the lane, the iron wheels ringing on the stones. "Evening, lass! Captain. I've been a poor host, leaving you in a bakery. My house has a proper bed and a lock on the door. The Order's penny goes further there."
"I'm comfortable here," Bastian said.
"Won't hear of it." Mott smiled, and the keys jingled at his belt. "Parish business, Captain. Tonight."
Bastian looked at me. For one breath it was plain as a loaf on a table that he was asking.
I had no reason to give him. Nothing I could say in front of the man who had poisoned him.
He picked up his kit. Davey took the cart handles.
I stood in my own doorway still shivering and understood it all at once: I could not keep alive a man I couldn't see. Twelve paces, and I had kept him for two days. Mill Lane was longer than that.
The lantern went down it, yellow and steady, swinging on its chain, and Mott's hand lay on the shoulder above it, friendly as a butcher's.