READING THOSE words was like opening a gate to go at a gallop. I drank them in, gulp after gulp, late into the night. Mother came up to my room twice to insist on more laudanum, but I shook my head. The third time she spooned the awful stuff into me by threat—“I’ll take that book away, I promise ...
Jorgen, the man she’d hated and feared, was dead. The battered face chewing mud would no longer grin at her, was in fact already hardening into some useless relic. Yet serial images of his ashen face invaded her mind: the hungry manner in which he’d always watched her, the way his eyes roved from...