The full moon won’t lie. In a rush, I bring the print to the window.

My eyes aren’t playing tricks. The photograph has changed. Black ink is scratched at my breastbone. A crooked little heart. No prank, no forgery. The print has been in my bag since leaving the studio.

The fever of Will’s anger has passed through me and is gone, leaving me wilted. Despite the cold, my hairline beads with sweat. I crawl into a corner of the sill and offer my ignited cheeks, one and then the other, like hot kisses against the frosted pane, before I compose myself enough to return my gaze to the photograph.

I lick my fingers and rub. The ink is indelible. Furthermore, I know exactly what it means. “I believe in you,” I whisper to the darkness beyond. “I know you’ve come back to me.” And I do know it. Rarely have I been so sure of anything.

My breath has turned the glass opaque, and I wipe away the fog to stare outside, far across the lawn. The tree isn’t visible from my vantage point, and fresh snow is dropping, thick and fast as rain. I want to leave this instant, but I must be sure the house is asleep. The last thing I need is Mrs. Sullivan catching me again.

My bones seem to vibrate under my skin as I draw up my legs and twine my arms around my knees. I am so quiet that a mouse darts across the carpet and stakes its claim to a bit of tea cake crumb that had dropped from my napkin.

A spy must know when and how to turn to stone.

A thousand years pass before I hear snoring proof that Mrs. Sullivan is lost to the sleep of the overworked.

Creeping along the corridor, I freeze at the sound of Mavis muttering in her bed. But no, she’s only dreaming. It turns my heart imagining what rebuke had been meted at Mrs. Sullivan’s ready hand once she’d discovered I wasn’t home and that Mavis had been lying to her.

Dear Mavis, she’s lost half her hearing to Mrs. Sullivan’s punishing blows, and yet when I press her she’ll swear one more knock doesn’t matter. I’ll have to think of a way to make it up to her.

Outside, the snow sticks four inches deep and continues to fall. In seconds my head and shoulders and back are wet. Hesitant to use the lantern, I let the watery moonlight guide me down the lawn. Almost immediately I’m soaked from my slipping, skidding shoes. My feet are two numb chunks of ice wrapped in soggy wool, and there’s hardly any point in lifting my dragging hem, though it seems to catch on every twig. My dress is all but ruined, but nothing could turn me back now. My photograph has given me hope, and I will doggedly cast my last coin in its wishing well.

A spy advances on every opportunity.

The butternut tree marks an otherwise desolate part of the property. Its branches haven’t been climbed in many years. Its knotted rope swing is too frayed and thin to support a body. But it’s not the swing that interests me.

At the base of the tree I drop down to all fours. My blind hands search and find the nicks and grooves where we have carved our initials: T. P. L., Tobias Pritchett Lovell. W. F. P., William Franklin Pritchett. Q. E. P., Quincy Emory Pritchett. J. R. L., Jennie Rose Lovell.

And then, two summers ago, Will had taken his fishing knife and joined his initials with mine, fencing them together inside a single, exuberant heart. I see it now, cut thick like an artery into the wood’s black bark, shaped like a spade with a kited tail.

An identically shaped heart has been inked into my photograph.

The heart that marks the spot.

My hands crawl at the patch of soft soil directly beneath the heart, at the wedge that divides the tree’s two largest exposed roots. I can feel that the earth has been turned over recently. My breath is short, my hands scrape like a dog, raw, burrowing. Grit flies into my eye. I wipe at it, streaking more wet dirt across my face and lips. It leaves an icy taste of mineral. Tomorrow it will be impossible to explain away the state of my clothes and shoes. But I cannot stop until I have found what William has intended me to find.

The physical sensation of pulling it up is not unlike the complicated pull on the tangle of a winter root loosing its grip in the ground. As if it, too, had been connected to the earth and sustained by it.

Even though I know what it is, a small sound escapes me, a euphoria trickling through the flood of my grief. A knowledge that calms me.

My frost-blunted fingers wind through the chain. My necklace, my locket. Returned.


21.