She felt worn out, as if she’d spent the night slogging through a marsh full of soft peat and spiky grasses, but the only dream that she remembered in all its shape and form was the dream—or nightmare—of the meadow. Alice could trace the path of the dream, of course, piecing it together from Freeman’s talk of chaises, triplets, herring. Alice could make sense as well of how the presence of a Verley had turned dream to nightmare. As Alice lay, however, she realized that such a nightmare wasn’t her worst fear; her worst fear was that this was the dream, this supposed waking in the widow’s attics. This was why she couldn’t bear to open her eyes; what if she opened them and saw not the widow’s arching, sunlit rafters, but Verley’s flat, plastered ceiling? Alice opened her eyes. Rafters. Her heart swelled inside her chest as if someone else’s blood pumped through it, but still she didn’t dare believe. She jumped out of bed and ran to the window. The sky hung low and gray and sunless, the road below it empty and still, but beyond the road, even without the sun to decorate it or the wind to rile it, the surface of the sea expanded and shrank as if it breathed.
