"Miss Jongleur!" He tried to detach himself but she clung to him like a creature of the tide pools fastened onto a rock. "Ava! Have you lost your mind?" He managed to get one arm against the firmness of her corseted stomach and push her back until he could get a grip on her shoulders and hold her away. He was shocked to see her eyes streaming with tears.

"They cannot see us here!" she said. "Our friend is protecting us!"

He only half-noticed that her phantom friend had somehow become his as well. "Even so, Ava—I told you this was a terrible idea! That it simply cannot be!"

"Oh, Paul, Paul." Disconcertingly, she bent her head and kissed his hand where it clutched her arm. Despite his monstrous uneasiness, the lunacy of it all, something in him responded with a throb in his groin, a twitch of the serpent sleeping in his spine.

"Ava, stop. You must stop."

"But, Paul!" She turned her huge, tragic, damp eyes up to him. "I have just found out the most terrible thing. I think my father . . . I think he is going to have you murdered!"

"What?" It was too much. For a moment he hated her, too—despised her helplessness and her derangement. How had he got himself into such a terrible, ridiculous situation? Something like this would never happen to Niles Peneddyn. "Why should he do that?"

"Come outside," she said. "Come into the wood. We can talk there."

"I thought you said we could talk here. That your . . . your ghost or whatever was protecting us."

"He is! But I cannot stand being in this house a moment longer. Caged like an animal. Time . . . time is so long here!" She threw herself at him again, and although he kept his face turned from hers, refusing her kisses, the straining, panicky need in her tensed body performed a strange inversion and he wrapped his arms around her, soothing her as though she were a terrified child.

Which she is, he thought, his fear and confusion mixed with genuine sorrow. They've done something terrible to her. Whatever they've done, it's criminal.

Her chest heaved against his. At last a little quiet came. "Come outside," she said. "Oh, please, Paul."

He allowed himself to be led to the door of the study, pulling away at the last moment so that they made a more decorous picture as they emerged from the supposed zone of safety.

She's even got me believing this, he realized. This ghost, this secret friend of hers. Either someone really has hacked the system or else Finney and Mudd just aren't paying attention. I can't believe they'd find this kind of behavior acceptable.

The house was quiet, the maids withdrawn to wherever they went—off-duty? Gossiping about their employer's crazy daughter in some modern break room down on lower floors? Or were they hanging in a closet like marionettes, waiting for the unseen puppeteer to use them again?

They have to be real people, he told himself. The Gothic atmosphere was beginning to make even the most freakish notions half-believable. I've bumped into one of them. You can't bump into a hologram and they don't make robots that realistic. He hoped he survived all this to make it back to England, if only so he could tell Niles and his other friends about it someday, preferably with a drink in his hand. This would be one story that he felt sure none of them could top.

Ava's breakfast sat untouched on the table in the sun porch. Paul looked at it wistfully, wishing he'd had more than a cup of coffee himself. Once out in the garden, his pupil broke into a trot. For a moment he felt drawn to hurry after her, then remembered the eyes that were almost surely watching; he walked down the path as sedately as he could manage.

She was waiting for him in the fairy ring, her eyes bright, but not with tears. "Oh, Paul," she said as he stepped into the circle, "if only we could always be together like this. Able to say what we wished without fear!"

"I don't understand what's going on, Ava." He sat down beside her, keeping a careful distance. She looked at him reproachfully but he chose to ignore it. "The last time we were here you told me . . . you told me you had a baby. Now you say your father is going to kill me. Not to mention your friend from the spirit world. How can I believe any of this?"

"But I did have a baby." She was indignant. "I wouldn't lie about such a thing."

"Who . . . who was the father?"

"I don't know. Not a man, if that's what you mean." She paused. "Perhaps it was God." There was no hint of mockery.

Paul was finally convinced beyond any residual doubts that she was mad. Her father's controlling obsessiveness, her prisoned life in this bizarre place—a zoo, really, with only one animal—had completely disordered her mind. He knew he should get up and walk back into the house, take the elevator down to Finney's office and resign, because no good could come from such a situation. He knew he should, but for some reason, perhaps the pain hiding behind her gentle face, he did not.

"And where is this child?" he asked.

"I don't know. They took him from me—they didn't even let me see him."

"Him? You know it was a boy? And who took him?"

"The doctors. Yes, I know it was a boy. I knew it even before I knew I was carrying him. I had dreams. It was very strange."

Paul shook his head. "I'm afraid I'm not understanding this very well. You . . . you had a baby. But you never saw it. The doctors took it away."

"Him. Took him away."

"Him. When did this happen?"

"Just after you came to be my tutor, six months ago. Do you remember? I was ill and I missed several days' lessons."

"Just after I came? But . . . but you didn't look like you were carrying a child."

"It was very early."

Paul could make no sense of it. "And you never. . . ." He hesitated, caught in the strange trap of speaking to her as though she truly were a girl from nearly two centuries in the past. "And you had never . . . been with a man?"

Her laugh was unexpectedly loud. She was very amused. "Who would it be, dear, dear Paul? Poor old Doctor Landreux, who must be a hundred years old? Or one of that horrid pair who work for my father?" She shuddered and inched nearer to him. "I have been with no one. There is no other man for me but you, my beloved Paul. No one."

He was losing the strength to object to her endearments. "But someone took the child away?"

"I didn't know at the time. I had been feeling ill for weeks. I was particularly sick in the mornings. I went to the doctors and they examined me—at least that's what I thought they did. I only found out later that they'd taken away my baby before it could grow. But somehow I knew anyway, Paul—I knew! But I only understood for certain when Miss Kenley told me."

"Miss Kenley. . . ?" He felt like he had walked into a play at the interval, and now was hopelessly trying to figure out what had happened in the first half. "Who. . . ?"

"She was one of the nurses who used to come in with Doctor Landreux. But Finney saw her whispering to me, and now she doesn't come in anymore. Miss Kenley was very sweet—she was a Quaker, did you know? She didn't like working here. She wasn't supposed to tell me anything, but she thought it was terrible, what they did, so she told the doctor she was going to see if I was improving, but instead she took me for a walk in the garden and told me that they'd taken out my little baby." A tear trickled down her cheek. "Before he could even grow!"

"So you only know you were going to have a baby because this nurse told you so."

"I knew, Paul. I knew in my dreams that there was a baby inside me. But when she told me the terrible thing they had done, then I understood everything."

"That's a lot more than I can say." The twitter of bird-song in the trees overhead was continuous and loud. Paul found himself wondering how sound could enter into the circle so freely, but their own conversation could somehow be kept secret.