Chapter One

One

Spring was coming. Eira saw it in the way the wind ran through the plane tree outside her window. She watched the dark twigs catching at the air. Then she left for the museum. The front gardens of the houses trembled as they filled with light. She wanted his love to be like this light.

All day, Henry Lux talked about museum business and seemed to take no notice of the world outside. Henry Lux reminded her of the handsome mallards at the edge of the lake, when all the little globes of water ran off their backs like mercury. After the museum closed, Eira trailed home along avenues and groves where it was already night. She smelled a viburnum through the darkness. From an upstairs window she heard children’s voices.

When she was a child, she saw her reflection once and she said to her mother, who was making the bed somewhere in the depths of the mirror, “I have such a long neck, don’t you think?” She pulled herself up tall for it to be admired.

“A long tongue is what you’ve got, Eira,” said her mother, and it was true—she was always talking in those days. Now, there was Henry to talk to, but she only listened and made small replies that anyone could have made. She didn’t know if he imagined anything about her beyond the limits of these words.

The museum was in a park. It had once been a manor house and once a convent, the park being the old estate of both. Eira did not feel that she should ever have been someone who worked in a museum. She found herself thinking of the nuns. She looked out from the museum at the nuns’ ghosts gathering, like pigeons,