A Friend in Need

Lupin moved to the door and quietly turned the key in the lock. A small click was heard, and the door swung open, to find Uncle Mortimor moving quickly into the room, almost running in to her. She stepped aside in time, and he brushed past her. "Really, madame, disappearing without so much as a word!" he said loudly, his eyes oddly serious and almost sad. He stepped to the door and shut it - at the very end closing it with a precise slam.
Lupin watched him silently, and then sighing, she went to the fireplace and rested her hand on the mantle with a sigh. A quiet peace seemed to emanate from it. "I suppose you and your friend have hatched a plan," she said with a small question in her voice.
Uncle Mortimor's eyebrows came together a little, but he said nothing. "Yes, my dear," he replied simply and a little quietly.
His expression was calm, but his eyes were sharper than usual, and very solemn when they looked at her. He sat neatly down on the settee. "My friend, the viscount, after hearing our story," Lupin looked up at him, her eyes snapping, but he continued to study his nails, unaware of her sudden change in mood. "has recommended that we make an - offensive attack."
"You told him our story?" Lupin asked, her voice soft and contained, her eyes cold and dark.
"Yes."
"You must trust him; you have just placed our entire venture in his hands."
Uncle Mortimor looked at her, his eyes suddenly flat and cold. His voice was nearly expressionless and very distant as he replied, "Viscount Maximilien is a good friend, and though I do not trust him entirely - I know that with this - difficult situation - he will be as silent as the grave."
Lupin stared straightly at Uncle Mortimor, and realized he was right. She could trust herself to him and his friend - for the time being.

Blue Harbor

Lupin found the townhouse silent and still. Uncle Mortimor was nowhere in sight. Too exhausted to care at this point, however, Lupin trod wearily up the staircase to the first floor, and found a small, blue sitting room tucked between two larger salons. A rather frail looking Louis the IV settee graced the far corner, and although Lupin was sure it would be less than comfortable, it was better than the floor. The grate, at least, was lit, and the room small enough to be warmed from it even in the predawn cold. Lupin curled up on the blue silk, pulling the cloak tight about her, and laid down her head. She dozed for a moment, then sitting stalk upright, she looked grimly at the fire. Plodding to the door, she found the key in the lock and turned it deliberately, then walking dazedly back to her couch, she sank down and let the key lose itself in the folds of her borrowed warmth.
She awoke to the sound of precise, peremptory knocking upon the painted wood panels of the door. Groggilly looking opening her eyes, she saw the light was white and bright and gray - the light of midmorning. She rested her head back onto the crook of her arm and felt the cold in her toes. The fire had burnt down. The knocking, however, continued unabashed.
Rising, Lupin crossed to the door and reached out to open it, only to realize it was locked. "Uncle Mortimor, I am looking for the key," she said close to the panelling. The knocking stopped. A frigid voice replied, "I do not care what you are doing, my dear, I want you to come without and entertain me."
It was Uncle Mortimor, and it was not Uncle Mortimor. Lupin failed to understand this sudden and very strange change, but underneath Uncle Mortimor's crisp and angry tones there was an intonation of urgency, as if he was trying to communicate something.
Lupin reached the settee and looking underneath, found the metal key lying on the thick pile of the blue and gold carpet. It was very fine carpet, she realized, as her fingers brushed the surface, and very expensive. This connexion of Uncle Mortimor's was not impoverished.

Crime

It's just a crime.
I'm no criminal,
And yet I move about the day,
Seeing myself in blocks of sin.

How do I escape?
From a prison with no bars?
Where do you run?
When there's no place to go?

How will I survive?
A prison with no walls,
Words that echo,
Feelings that haunt.

They all circle,
Like so many specks of soot,
They fill up my lungs
And then I choke.

I am no crime.
I have done nothing,
I am not evil.
But here's a crime.

The Sailor

Twelve miles out
On a wind-bitten sea
Where the sky is a part
Of the spray-woven fabric

The boat tumbles over
The waves and roils
And cusps curl over the
Brim of the shell.

A grizzled old animal
Weathers the cold and
The wet and the grey
And the salty-tinged spittle

Tossed up like tears of
Some woebegone monster
Weeping and raging beneath
The great waves.

This Godforsaken
Who huddles untouched
By the cold or the
Damp or the
Impending weather

Is not damned, or
A thief or a general
Who’s made victims
Of innocents
Hidden or sleeping
In the night,

But a man, just a man
Of choice and decision
The author of
Whistle-blows
Tuneless-swept by the wind.

Gnarled hands that are
Knotted like the net that
They work,
Twisted and worn and yet
Strong as the binding

Between heaven and earth
Between water and wave
Between the great spirit
Of the sea and the brave.

Safe Haven

It took far into the night, but they finally arrived on the outskirts of Paris, and Lupin, jolted awake from an uncomfortable doze, recognized before she could even open her eyes the loud clopping of horseshoes on cobblestone. It was another hour, and the dawn was just hazing like a light fog in the East when they finally arrived at a fine, if rather motheaten hotel in the heart of Paris.
Uncle Mortimor waved Lupin around to the mews without stopping his horse. She disappeared around the corner of the hotel just as he was sliding from his saddle. He then climbed the ten steps to the door, and gravely rang the bell cord three times, slowly and with severity. A few minutes of tense waiting, and the door swung open, throwing a sliver of golden light onto the bleak pavements. “Mon Seigneur,” a grave voice sounded from within “Nous avons vous attende,” Uncle Mortimor stepped within, and the doors closed solemnly behind the coattails of a page sent to stable the seigneur’s mount.
Lupin, entering the dark, familiar surroundings of the mews, stood waiting, drooping against the saddle of her exhausted horse, for some sign from within. It was not long before a man exited the hotel wearing a long cloak, and silently treading to Lupin, handed it to her nonchalantly. Lupin put it on with numb fingers, too tired to think about the oddness of her situation. She picked up the lamp the footman had brought out, and waiting a quarter hour while he dismissed the page back to his post within and saw to the horses, she carried it with her back into the mansion. The footman, no doubt, would slip in with the baguettes.

A Little Sleight-of-Character, An Escape

“Stop there, ruffian,”commanded Uncle Mortimor – Lupin did not see how he was able to order these men about, until she closed her eyes and saw the glint of gun metal in her mind’s vision. Uncle Mortimor had a pistol, a very fine one at that, and Lupin wagered he knew well how to use it.
The three sets of boots stilled. Lupin clenched her jaw unconsciously against the incipient chattering of her teeth. She tried, too, to still somewhat the beating of her heart, but to no avail. It sounded like a drum in her ears.
“Out,” Uncle Mortimor snapped. “I will not allow a gang of thieves to steal my things in this inferior posting house just because of some godforsaken French rain!”
Lupin could almost hear Uncle Mortimor wrinkling his nose in disgust. “Out!”
The quartet shuffled a little. Lupin could feel Uncle Mortimor’s tension. But knew nothing else. But she tensed all the same. Suddenly a huge shout of sound, like a thousand hands clapping at once – just once. An acrid, tinny, smoky smell filled the air, and touched Lupin’s nostrils through the wire mesh of the trunk. It awoke her a little form the numb fear she had been gripped with. A man was yelling in pain, but the other boots were not moving.
The instinct to chatter had left Lupin, and she was calm and dark. The yelling of the man had increased, and there was swearing now too. But still no one moved. Uncle Mortimor must have had another gun somewhere. As unreliable as the things tended to be, he must have had it ready. Lupin could only congratulate him on his forethought. “Out!” he barked again, and she heard the boots shuffling backwards, the yelling man begging to be taken with them, and their subsequent flight down the hall. Not too far, though. She could hear they were going into another chamber, and she heard a woman’s scream. No doubt they were amateurs, but they would return if they didn’t find what they were looking for – that is, if they did not find her.
She waited a bare ten seconds and then swiftly, silently undid the latch, drew off her boots, and leapt out of her trunk. Uncle Mortimor was seated on the settle, the gun cradled in his hands.
He had a look of entire distaste. “I do not like violence,” he said simply and primly, and set the gun down carefully beside him.“We must leave now,” Lupin said, very softly and very urgently. “They will be back soon,”
Uncle Mortimor nodded a few times, and Lupin moved to the side of the window to peek out. Uncle Mortimor came to stand beside her, and she moved to draw closed the door. It squeaked, but she could still hear the men down the hall harassing another traveler’s room, and downstairs the loud moans of the shot kidnapper floated up between the thin floorboards.
Lupin took up her boots as she moved past her trunk, and then opened the window latch. As she did so, her face became set. It was not the first window of a posting house she had escaped through, and the memory was very hard to bear.
Lupin took the pistol steadily from Uncle Mortimor’s hand, where it was hanging, and gestured him out the window first. It was a drop of some 15 feet, but there was a small amount of sloping roof just 5 feet under the window, and below that soft bushes, made sodden in the constant rain, but offering gentle landing nonetheless. Uncle Mortimor hesitated, the look of distaste crossing his features once again, but he climbed through the rather high embrasure and hanging down, found footing on the shelf of thatching. And there he stopped. Lupin glanced at the doorway. There was no sound of boots coming down the hall. But neither was there a sound from another chamber. It was not reassuring. She reached out the window nevertheless, and offered Uncle Mortimor her hand as he fought to keep his balance on the slippery thatching.
Another few moments and he landed with a bit of a splash and not a few snaps in the bushes, then, fighting to sit up, managed to roll himself out the side. Lupin pulled on her boots, then swung herself out the window. It was at that moment that she heard the ruffians returning – and this time there was another step with them.
She let go suddenly, forgetting about the pistol, and found herself falling backwards towards the bushes. She managed to twist and fall on her side – but the pistol stayed very close to her body, trapped just next to her chest, where her arm was caught in the branches. She tried to disentangle her arm, but it would not be freed from the bush’s close embrace, and so she took a breath and rolled swiftly out the side. The pistol shot went off then, nearly deafening her. But she took no notice. She leapt from the bushes, and feinted back against the house, drawing far against the clapboard walls. There were shouts from above, and Uncle Mortimor stood alone by the bush, with one hand to his mouth.
Lupin crouched, plastered against the damp lumber of the posting inn wall, the pistol, hot from its shot, gripped carefully between her hands. She watched Uncle Mortimor, standing beside the accommodating bush, his body bent over as if to protect something as he looked defiantly up at the raiders.
“You may have made me lose my gun, but you won’t get my gold, you scoundrels!” he cried, shaking his fist up at them, “the authorities shall hear about this, you may be certain of it!”
Lupin could feel the hatred pulsating from the window, and the lessening of it as Uncle Mortimor shouted his deceptive invectives. The feeling of being hunted lessened for a moment – Uncle Mortimor turned and began to run away. “Thieves!” he called back over his shoulder, “Devils!” He ran around the corner of the stables – more thatched shacks, really – and out of Lupin’s sight.
She sat in the silence for nearly a minute, the tense ringing rather deafening after the last hectic moments. She felt completely stopped from doing anything besides sit in absolute stillness, waiting for she knew not what.
Then she rose slowly, and feeling as if the threat was receding, ventured to the edge of the roof line. The windows were close and dark, the inn still. She made herself walk slowly to the stable corner and turn round it. Uncle Mortimor stood there, leaning against the wall, looking rather green. Lupin looked at him for a moment, gently. Then her jaw set again. “Do you, indeed, have the gold?” Uncle Mortimor reached into his jacket and pulled out the crimson journal with a strange look of distaste and tolerance in his eyes. “I see,” said Lupin, her eyes going rather stony. “No gold.”
They gathered the horses they had hired, and saddled them. A thief once again Lupin mounted her gelding without a word and they set off wearily and quickly.

A Brush with History

She fingered the journal gingerly, then swiftly opened it. The odd design on the inside page lay glowing in the dark grey light, seeming to have a light of its own. Lupin shook her head, the odd stiffness in her posture growing even more pronounced. The darkness seemed to intensify around her. She took a deep breath and carefully, efficiently began to turn pages. Blank as ever they turned, riffling in the gloaming air. Lupin sat very upright, taking mechanical breaths, her face very set. Something was about to happen. She shook her head again slightly, as if contradicting something. Surely, she had no way of knowing what would happen. Suddenly, a texture sprang up beneath her fingers, one different from the pages before. These pages were smoother. She ran her fingers over the face of the left page – and there was pattern: ridges in the paper that seemed to swirl across it in no recognizable shape. Her fingertips slipped to the left lower corner, and felt something known – a triangle pointing up and above it, and N.
At that moment Lupin felt her spirits lower immeasurably. She felt completely alone and attacked and stifled. A dark fog clouded her vision for a moment, then it was gone. Startled, she drew her hand away from the journal and looked up at Uncle Mortimor. He was gazing back at her steadily, with a worried frown between his brows. Lupin put her hands into her lap, the feeling did not fade. She suddenly moved forwards and threw the journal back into its box, then slid it quickly across to Uncle Mortimor’s knees. “hide it,” she said, quickly and steadily. Something in her eyes made Uncle Mortimor rose swiftly and silently to lock it away. Lupin stood, then moving to the left of the window, deliberately she placed her open hand against the wall where she had been before. A grim look had come over her face, but she stood nevertheless, her hand pressed full against the thin clapboard wall of the posting house room.
Suddenly she felt a shudder running through the house, a shudder as if a dark liquid were surging up through the walls. Lupin stood still against the wall, her mouth set, and let the feeling flow through her – until suddenly a point of energy disrupted the slow flow of menace. A feeling of hatred. Lupin realized the inn had gone entirely silent. That was warning enough. She sprang from the wall. Uncle Mortimor had been looking at her oddly, but at her movement his gaze turned worried again. “We must leave now!” Lupin whispered. As an afterthought – “The rain has stopped.” Uncle Mortimor nodded once and turned to ready the baggage. “There is no time,” she said, very low and soft, and sitting down in her trunk, she pulled the sides closed just in time to hear four heavy sets of boots outside the door. She noticed that the rain had, indeed, stopped.
There was a boot slammed into the door latch and Lupin heard wood splintering, the door crashing against the back wall with incredible force. She dared not even blink. The stillness within her small world was dreamlike compared to the stomping of boots on the thin wood planks of the floor. She felt them reverberate up through the trunk. There was silence after they entered. Then Lupin heard the familiar tones of Uncle Mortimor’s voice, spoken in uncharacteristic harshness.
“What is the meaning of this?!” he barked.
There was no answer. Uncle Mortimor gasped as they trod further into the room and began to search through the his baggage. Lupin heard his voice again: “Hosteler!” The shout rang through the inn. “Hosteler! ” There was no answer. Lupin realized at that moment that Uncle Mortimor’s shouts were useless. The hosteler would not be coming. She tried not to shudder.
The scrape of boots sounded suddenly, moving towards Uncle Mortimor – to doubt to quiet him. Then, oddly they stopped short.

Shadows Intensify

Upon arrival the next morning at La Havre, Lupin and Uncle Mortimor made their solemn way into the inn in their now familiar and disparate ways, and shared their large supper in the room, as was usual. The next day they spent in constant and speedy travel, Uncle Mortimor hiring a swift postchaise and four to carry them the long journey to Paris. The weather, fair at the port, had turned inclement, however, and late that afternoon they were forced to stop due to the impassable roads. They arrived at a small posting house in the gloaming of cold rain on fogging fields. The rain, not common on the soft plains between the sea and the rising country of Paris, was heavy even for its peculiarity. It was a cold rain from the North, and Lupin could feel the damp and the wet had crept into her as she braced herself for the turn into the hostelry’s drive.
In the chamber abovestairs, she could not stifle a prickling of anxiety as she unlatched her box and climbed surreptitiously onto the cold, slightly moulding wooden boards. She looked about her and narrowed her eyes to see better the darkening room, fast becoming a deep gray in the early twilight. She moved quietly to the window, and standing to one side, looked glancingly out into the fog. Something was amiss, and as much as she endeavored, the feeling would not be quelled by the iron hand of her mind. She could feel something was very wrong. She stepped back from the window quickly, and shook her head. She clenched her fist against the wall, and then spread it out, palm down, onto the damp siding. It was as if the house was – what was it? It was as if it was - malevolent. Or something was malevolent inside it. She gazed into the room and it looked as if it was pulsating in the dark and grainy light, but perhaps it was just her imagination. She felt breathless as if she had been thrown on her back very hard. She took a deep breath. Certainly her imagination. The dark played tricks with the eyes. She forced herself to step out into the room, despite her feelings of unease, and her heart began to race.
The feelings eased for a moment, and Lupin heard the step of Uncle Mortimor soon after. He only brought uncomforting tidings, and little in the way of victuals, however. The innkeeper had commented to another traveler when Uncle Mortimor was visiting the taproom that when the weather turned inclement like it had, it seldom relinquished its hold on the heavens for a week at least. There was little to eat as the cook had left and could not return through the deluge.
Lupin’s stomach clenched uncontrollably. She knew that to stay would be foolish, she could feel it was wrong, but what could be done? Uncle Mortimor would hardly countenance her reasons for endeavoring the storm. She could hardly countenance – or understand - them herself, but the feelings gripped her and she could not escape their clutches.
The knot was tightening in her stomach, but she took baguette and cheese and ate them steadily, looking stonily into the corner of the room, or stared at the poor blaze of mismatched kindling that Uncle Mortimor had built, her back very straight.
She took a sip of her wine with cold fingers, and set the glass down. Uncle Mortimor had lit no candles, lest they attract attention from without. The room was left to shadow. Lupin raised her chin. “I would like to see the journal,” she said very quietly, and glancing at him, she noticed the hardening of his lips even in the gloom.
He looked at her, frowning, but straightening his brow, he rose with a small sigh and paced to the small satchel he always carried with him. From within it he pulled the battered box with its ragged label, and laid them carefully on Lupin’s traveling trunk.
Lupin raised the lid and twitched apart the ragged wrappings from around the crimson book. Even in this dull light, it seemed to gleam and glow, catching the light from the fire and reflecting it in rich hues. Lupin shook her head slightly, and then, glancing up at Uncle Mortimor, commented tersely, “I need to know what my – father – wanted me to know. I must.”

A Safe Passage

Lupin sat dazedly on the hard, tapestried cushions and looked into the flames. “Lord Grefham was here again, you see,” she said emptily. Uncle Mortimor’s brows rose and his lips compressed. He sat carefully on the edge of the couch and looked at the opposite wall for a moment. “He did not find anything, then, I would imagine?” Lupin looked at him sideways, and crossed her arms tightly across her stomach, but nodded slightly, the movement seemed to pain her. “Yes, I see,” Uncle Mortimor remarked. “Then we must finish our stay here and know he believes us not to be here…” Lupin’s gaze, staring into the flames numbly, had sharpened on something within the fire. Suddenly she leapt forward, and seemed ready to reach into it, but coming to herself at the last moment, clasped the coal shovel instead and raked out a shovelful of embers. Within them glinted something hard and rather shiny, but fast fading with a jacket of soot. She reached into the embers quickly, and brushed out the small, round object, onto the stone bricking around the grait. With quick and erratic movements she managed to pick up the small object and juggle from palm to palm long enough to clear the ember soot off of it, and reveal it to be a shining, silver metal button. She looked at it shocked, and then grabbed the button side of her own coat, hanging loose at her right side. There, third button down, there was an obvious gap. She matched the button to the remains of the thread still lurking there. It was unarguably her own.
“This jacket was one I wore at Lord Grefham’s,” she said quietly, and sat back on her heals. He must have found it in London or here, I suppose.” She could still feel the energy of the fire in the metal – and the frantic purpose of Lord Grefhams seemed to cling to it as well, she thought for a moment – but dismissed that as an imagination. Uncle Mortimor was looking at her sharply. He seemed disturbed by the far away look in her eyes as she looked at the button and turned it over. He said nothing, however. “You should dine, my dear,” he said quickly, and rising, brought the tray to the settee and waited obviously by it. Lupin looked up, her brows snapping together. But she gritted her teeth and nodded slowly. “Yes,” she said, and rose to do her best by the meal. The food was dry in her mouth, however, and she was able to swallow little of it. While she sipped at the warm wine, Uncle Mortimor turned away and busied himself setting out clothing and changing the linens on the bed.
That night, Lupin slept in her clothing in the bed while Uncle Mortimor took up the settee. They had set a chair in front of the door and tied the latch in case a maid should try to enter to stoke the fire in the morning. In any case, they expected to be waiting at the channel long before then.
True to their expectations, they were on a wharf along the channel by the time the sun was fully up – in their respective guises, of course. Uncle Mortimor, grave and almost imposing in a solemn way, in his gray travel clothes, and Lupin, in her now usual environment of trunk swabs, at the bottom of a pile of luggage gathered rather close to the water’s edge. The ship that was to ferry them across was a beautiful bark, also carrying a load of cargo meant for the French coast and some various other passengers of assorted ilk. Uncle Mortimor, thankfully, had ordered a stateroom, and Lupin was no less than grateful that she could pass the crossing in a rather larger atmosphere.
They were soon loaded onto the ship, and by the time the sun was quarter way up into the sky, they had set off across the choppy waters. Lupin waited a good half hour into their journey before venturing out of her traveling box. Uncle Mortimor had left to take a walk upon the decks – or so he had commented to himself before exiting the cabin. Lupin tumbled out dazedly and wished that she could promenade aboveships, also. However, the crossing would prove quite challenging enough in the way of their hoax without the added problem of an extra passenger.
The passage did, in fact, pass without event. Uncle Mortimor, never one for ships, weathered testily his bout with seasickness, and Lupin, looking out of the porthole at the passing gray and white water, weathered a different sickness deep in the pit of her stomach that simply refused to leave since her unexpected rendezvous with Lord Grefham. The fear of his presence – the fear for his presence – would not leave her, and she sat or paced quietly over the waters of the La Manche.

A Trip to the Continent and Its Antique-Noveau Religious Edifices...

A Little More Left to the Imagination

After another lost interlude, we march on...We are now far after Lupin's escape from the posting house where she slept. She is now far away, on her way to France with her Uncle Mortimor, travelling in a trunk especially crafted for the (mostly) comfortable and hidden accommodation of a sequestered inhabitant.

Lupin saw the bright mass of flames through the grating in the trunk, and felt the heat emanating towards her. Tired and cold, she lifted the latch and let herself out of her long-inhabited couch. A few moments later she had crawled into the large bed in the room and wrapped herself in covers. The jostling of the carriage ride still tremored through her bones, but when she closed her eyes all she saw was the form of Lord Grefham dead on the ground, his face a deathly white that seemed to shine in the gloaming of the greying forest.
She could not easily lift herself up from the comfort of the mattress, but she knew that she must indeed hide once more in case a maid might enter with a warming pan. Her stomach growled, protesting the treatment she had given it, but she ignored the noises as best she could, and gathering a quilt from the bed retired again to her latched traveling trunk.
A few moments later she heard bootsteps outside the door. She was expecting Uncle Mortimor and a supper tray – but a strange feeling flashed through her mind, and she realized that the step was not the light, somewhat solemn gait of Uncle Mortimor, but a heavier one, much more sure of itself, and seeming to have no qualms about entering a strange room. The feeling that came to Lupin was unmistakably that of Lord Grefham, and she felt as if her soul were shattering. The feeling of her dream intensified around her, but she crushed it and as she heard a click and the latch draw back, she drew in a silent breath and held it. The boots trod around the room. They paused here and there, behind the scope of Lupin’s view. Finally they crossed in front of her. The latch on the outside of her trunk appeared locked, as it was not the means by which she exited the makeshift travel accommodations. She saw Lord Grefham’s legs silhouetted to the knees by the fire, and tried valiantly to push down the feeling of longing that reached out to him desperately from within her. She could hold her breath no longer and sighed it out silently, breathing only shallowly. He seemed to pause in front of her for an eternity - then he turned towards the hearth and leant against the mantle for a moment. Lupin felt his exhaustion as if it were her own; in her mind she could see his shoulders – so tall and proud - drooping momentarily, and heard the soft rustle of his laying his head in the crook of his arm, a gesture so thoroughly out of character for him, Lupin’s stomach wrenched in shock. She was crying out inside, but she silenced her inner voice, lest he somehow sense her so close by, and forced herself to look at him as a stranger. She was – by her own choice or not – no friend of Lord Grefham.
He straightened slowly, but after only a short time. He threw something in the fire and his boots moved past her trunk in an excruciatingly deliberate and controlled manner. She heard the latch click quietly, and him slipping from the room. She felt the loneliness, the anger of his gait as he made his way down the hall away from her. Away from any possibility of finding her. Away from death.
She let herself relax slowly, taking a deep breath and moving her head to the side, then the other, putting her chin down. The pain in her belly was harsh and unmitigatable. She held her knees still, but leaned back and closed her eyes tight as the waves of pain swept over her.
It seemed like only a few moments of an intense, ringing silence in her head had passed when she heard the latch click distantly once again, and the soft, precise step of Uncle Mortimor enter the room. A heavy and swift step also accompanied him, and the scent of food. The heavy shoes of the maid exited the room in a few moments, and the door closed once again. Lupin took a deep breath and dazedly undid the false side of the trunk.
Uncle Mortimor was standing with his back to her, attending to the supper tray as she crawled wearily out of the trunk and stumbled to her feet. She stood straight, but swaying, and walked unsteadily towards him. Putting her hand out to the edge of the small table upon which the supper tray was set, Lupin steadied herself and looked with less than eager eyes upon the procured victuals. Uncle Mortimor straightened from filling her glass with wine, and raised his eyes to her face. “My dear,” he said, shocked, “you look exceedingly pale!” He took her wrist lightly and felt her pulse. “I suspect something has occurred,” he sighed, and taking her arm, led her to the settee by the fire.