It would have been remarkable if it hadn’t. His employer, a master of the Scribe and Bookkeepers’ Society, slept upstairs, but a journeyman had to make do with a pallet in the shop on the ground floor of the house, just a few paces from the front door. Adolph felt more irritated than alarmed as he threw off his blankets, rose, and groped his way around the writing desks and stools that were all but invisible in the dark. It was true, he led a dangerous double life, but he was cunning about it, and wasn’t worried that retribution had come calling, not at his master’s staid and respectable house. His chief concern was to silence the pounding before it woke the old man, and the old man’s ire. He fumbled with the bolt and cracked open the door. A flare of lightning illuminated Jarla standing on the other side. His irritation evoked a tension in his arm and the back of his hand, as if it were urging him to lay it across her face. “Damn you,” he whispered. “You know I can’t entertain a whore here.”
