Agnes’s mother had always told her to be wary of old men before dawn. Her mama had just enough of the Sight to see things that might be in dreams. In the dream, her mama would say, just before the run rose, an old man would knock on Agnes’s door and everything would change.
Mama never said how things would change; it could have been good, or it could have been terrible. But she always trembled, and asked Agnes to make tea with an extra dollop of laudanum for the headaches that the Sight caused her.
When her lover’s butler knocked on the cabin door at just past four in the morning, waking her from sound sleep, Nigel’s dead arms around her, she knew everything had changed.
Jamison had never made any pains to hide his dislike of her—she was French, after all, and feelings between the Engli
