They passed Ivy's cottage, and Shequonur, they crossed Puck-a-chee and the stone bridge near East Worthy. From there they saw Calvary's steeple pin a gray cloud to the sky. Like a butterfly. They passed the auctioned farm where Kathy had held the butter pats and then driven away with David. They passed five black buggies with smooth round faces peering out from bonnets and beards. They drove northwest away from East Worthy, just to drive. It was Sunday morning and outside of town the melted snow rose in a foggy nimbus above each low spot--field, gully, and creekbed.
      For a difference, they drove beyond the territory they knew well. Darby thought he remembered a dirty little doughnut shop--Mrs. Pat's--in a crossroads town twenty miles or so on up beyond State Route 56.
      "Do you know what I think sometimes when I see dirt? Just plain old brown dirt in the field?" Set said. She scanned the horizon beyond seven birds that sat like seven dark stones on a necklace of telephone wire.
      "No, September, I can't imagine." Darby adjusted the rearview mirror. Cautiously he maneuvered between patches of mist, darting his head out his rolled-down window, periodically erasing the condensation with his glove. "I certainly don't want some vehicle to emerge out of the fog and ruin our doughnut date." He slowed. "Now what about the dirt?"
      "I feel I could sink in it."
      "You've had a difficult several weeks, my dear, but truly it's not time for you to leave me here, guarding the old girl alone."
      "Really, Darby, I feel like I could sink in it. Run out into the raw umber fields, in the moisture, sink down and down. I remember when I was young, very young, probably three or four, my mother was hoeing a garden, and I grabbed a mouthful of dirt. I wanted to eat it so I jammed it in my mouth. I can still hear her scream, 'Spit it out, September, now.'"
      "What did this du jour of dirt taste like?"
      "It tasted sort of gritty and old, like closed basements," she said soberly. "Now when I look at the fields, they're like . . ." She looked at him. "They're like a prayer, always like a prayer, stretching out, rolling rich loam, laying solemn and dark, with those little patches of crisp dirty snow flecking the edges. See, how it looks over there along the road?" She knew he saw with her even as he listened, a derisive smile artificially playing about his lips. "It's as if I could eat the dirt as I sank in the middle of the fields, as if I could sink to god, some god, any god, some Indian god that still sleeps in the land, that if I opened my mouth and let it fill with dirt, that I could eat god."
      "Strangely enough, I do know what you mean. I wouldn't have thought 'god' exactly and I have no desire to actually nibble the clods, but the fields, yes, the rich breast of the earth."
      "Darby, turn around." Set sat forward and unfastened her seat belt. She reached awkwardly over the back seat and pulled up her leather bag.
      "What? We've just made a good start into the morning. What about Mrs. Pat's doughnuts?"
      "Turn around. I've got it." Her face appeared lit under its skin, alabaster and glowing. "I've got it. I've got it. As if some Indian god . . . that's what I remember. I saw him sitting on the plank. I had a dream."
      "Slow down. What are you talking about, September?"
      She opened a folded paper that she had pulled from her bag. "First, listen to this."
      "Oh, please, not the letter again."
      Set shot the words breathily through the air. "Not only the gabled windows but the door marks this forest glen . . sophisticated. That is, Forster, the door was oddly incongruent with its mother structure. It was brimming with carvings, the image of an animal, perhaps a boar, but I cannot say for sure, garlanded with leaves appearing to be the insignia or crest of the family, or the place. Did you hear that? Don't you see?"
      "Yes, it's Charles again. Believe me, those words are inscribed across my brain."
      "But, Dar, the thing about brimming with carvings. That's it. The big plank. In the cellar. In the cellar at Shequonur. That's the door to the cottage." She stretched her head back over the seat and laughed. She settled in a sigh. "I don't have the page, the actual page anymore. But the door where he stood. Yes." She sat up and tugged at her friend's sleeve. "Let's go back. Forget Mrs. Pat's. Dickens awaits," she added grandly.
      "By jove, I think you've hit upon it." Dar leaned into the glass. "The fog is lifting slightly. But still, I can't see beyond six posts. I think a little road turns off up here somewhere before 56. Why not live dangerously?" He punched in a tape. "And what about some good old Johann Sebastian for our triumphant return, my dear?"
      "I don't care, Darby, I don't care at this moment. Bach, or Aretha, or the Righteous Brothers. Just take me through the fog, back to Shequonur."
      "That I shall do and I choose Bach to carry us through the mist," he said in his Vincent Price voice. The fields were draped in gray folds hanging out of the sky and laying like heavy damask in puddles about corn stubble, fence posts, and weedy gullies. With this unexpected November warming the heavy snow had melted and left extra mirrors of water shimmering opaquely across the floor of the earth.
      "You know, with this fog everything is coated with meaning. Even these dingy houses and broken barns look part of the scene. What did Mr. Proctor say to us every day in Art 312 at Klondike? 'Chiaroscuro, class, chiaroscuro, that is the secret of depth in this painting.' Chiaroscuro. He loved the word. Light and dark, fading."
      Dar pulled into a short gravel drive that led back to a small battered house, flanked by a peeling red barn. Out of the half-gray darkness, from a crumbled slab porch, strode a lone figure, lifting his heavy vinyl boots toward morning chores. He swung a plastic bucket at his side. This skinny boy, in jeans, teeshirt and windbreaker, skittered toward the ramshackled barn.
      "See how it changes everything, even him," Dar pointed. "His smooth face and that blond hair could carry him to the barn in a Botticelli shell. His full lips and uncommitted expression say he could feed the cats from a silver urn."
      "Darby, that's beautiful. How poetic and dramatic."
      "You, September Hunt, call me dramatic?" he said implying incredulity. “Behold, even that nauseous cement goose and--did you notice the burro complete with sombrero--even that hideous attempt at sculpture stands grandly curtained on the grand lawn."
      Dar backed away from the hodge-podge yard and turned east. But at the first crossroads neither could see beyond the car's hood. "Set, would you crack your window and give it a good look? I don't want to finish off some old couple, dressed up and chugging toward church." She peered into the gray and felt droplets wet her cheeks and eyebrows. Then she saw. Everywhere clumps of trees were festooned with fog, and from these translucent clumps clattered the intermittent call of crows. She heard it then. Out from the tape deck and up over the littered ravines, Bach joined the liturgy of birds. All the way home the sound spread in her brain and drifted over the ditches and disappeared into the drapery of the cathedral fields.
      She spoke only once before they reached East Worthy. Just before they passed the green corporation sign. "I'll finish the cupola," she said. "With glass. With a stained glass window." She looked at her friend's ugly nose and elegant stick pin. "Will you make it for me, Darby?"
      "Yes," he said. "I'll begin tomorrow."

All the time they lifted and piled, huffed and heaved, slipped on the dank floor's mossy residue and coughed in the boards' scattered dust pockets, Set chattered. She rehearsed it all--Nate's paranoia and overdose, Ivy's distance from her son, uncommitted, and saint-like, Aaron's weak mind, driven and controlled by a teenage pact, David's intellect, focused on a single moment of revenge. What Set could not manage was Kathy. Somehow that subject could not be handled comfortably. All the rest she controlled with words. But not that one, not Kathy, for words did not rein in reason. No impetus marked behavior. No analysis designated a beginning or an end. Although Darby asked her several times for David's explanation of Friday's monologue in the pew to Kathy, Set stepped around the subject. She couldn't form, just now, the sounds that gave such abstraction meaning. If he is intelligent, reasonable, able to think out the matter, why, how, could he run on the tail of this teenage romance. If she were wildly attractive still, or if she were clever and doting, or--and this was the most alarming--if she were intellectually matched with David Owen. If she could even fix herself up with vintage clothes, talk fast, bake cookies. Instead she was less than that. She was below zero, on the negative side, with her Bible verses and her affair with Nate. No, Set circled through her mind again and again, there's no reason, nothing to grab hold of and explain.
      "He didn't say much on that," she offered several times. She would tell Darby when she had thought it out clearly.
      Set stooped and brought up a board--a piece of plywood--covering the plank. "At last, there it is." She felt weak, her muscles ached, drained, tired of mysteries.
      They had worked an hour and ten minutes, carefully moving the pile to an adjoining damp cubicle. Dar was particular about saving reusable material. "Look, even a latch. I knew it." A rusted device, a primitive piece of iron-work, remained in place, tight and sure on the plank--what must have been the interior side of the great door.
      "Here, you get it down on that corner," Dar grunted from the top of the massive piece. He squatted into position and, with a hefty pitch from his partner, the door stood up on its edge, webs lengthening and bugs scurrying from its underside. "Good God, it is. Some kind of ornate medallion. When I felt it before I really didn't think it was this. Here, can you hold it up while I get the flashlight?"
      "Are you kidding? I can barely hold it with you. Please, let it down. Let's turn it with the carving up," she groaned.
      "Right. Sorry, Set. I was just so overcome with what it is, what it might be, that I . . ." He paused to ease it down gently, with a grunt, onto the floor.
      His flashlight ran over the medallion--as they now dubbed it--and Set rubbed its nubby, oiled surface. "Leaves, garlands, just as he said, and a pig's face, a boar with a ring. Looks noble, but somehow I wouldn't have thought a hog insignia."
      "Please, my dear, a boar, a wild boar, no doubt. Give the Lindens some credit."
      She caressed the carving, running her hands about its surface, thinking about the oil from his hand that might be there in just the tenderest amount. "What will we do with it, Darby? We must bring it out of here, out of the damp. We can't let it get damaged."
      "My dear, this noble piece has withstood, at the very least, one hundred and fifty years of weathering . . ."
      "A hundred and forty-seven. I figured it before. From 1842."
      "Yes, but Jacob Linden built the log home in 1817. So we'll give it those extra years for sure. I was thinking that maybe it should go back on the original structure, back on the cottage. But then I don't know that Ivy Gilchrist would be amenable to tourists clumping about, into her privacy, to look at a Dickens door."
      "Why would anyone need to know that it is a Dickens door?"
      "We lost the letter. I think the door should be known for what it is." He gave Set a quick look where she sat on the bottom step leading to the first floor. "I'm sorry, Set. It's not your fault and, besides, the letter isn't really lost. We have the words."
      "I know. I know. Let's not talk about it now. Okay? I think you're right about Ivy's privacy. Why not prop it in the library here and indicate its history."
      "Perfect. Almost. Not in the library. Its scale would throw off the balance of the room. Too much Victorian brick-a-brack in there with the General's horn chairs and the books. Why not in the drawing room by the Indian cabinet? Maybe with a display of top hat, cravat, and books--Dickens novels piled high? We can select from the General's collection. Maybe some paisley scarves thrown here and there with urns and leaves."
      "Isn't that a little off kilter, a wee bit pretentious? The whole Dickens thing, so British and all, in the middle of a cornfield, in an American copy of a Chateau?"
      Dar put his hands on his hips and dropped his jaw. "You, Miss Brit Lit, 1989, would rankle against a Dickens display? Why, I'm shocked," he said dramatically miffed. "Besides, what's pretentious? He was here. Charles Dickens was here on this land, and at this leaved door." He made two syllables from "leaved." "You're the one who deciphered the information. You," and he pointed his finger gracefully at her, "should be the instigator of the Dickens door display at Shequonur."
      "I know, I know," she said, with disgust in her voice. "It's just that David said all this stuff about how I try to play a role, you know, a British role. With my,"--here she vilified the word-- "couture. And my copying of British . . . British . . ."
      "British what?"
      "British everything," she exploded. "I'm going up, away from the British door, alright?"
      "Dear, don't allow that pompous ass to discredit you. You, September Hunt. Just the way you are." He followed her up into the hall. They stepped onto the parquet floor, where Darby adjusted a ribbon that had unscrolled on an antler. "He's here, in there, you know, Dear." They passed the apartment door to ascend to Dar's rooms above.
      "I don't want to know where he is." She walked faster along the hall and bounded up the stairs. At the door she turned to Darby. "I'm tired of the whole thing. I guess I have a problem, don't I, with my fantasy about a totally inaccessible person."
      Inside the apartment she threw herself across a pile of brocaded pillows, laying her head on pottomosserie decking an embroidered pheasant. She reached for a small silver urn that made one portion of Darby's vignette on the small mahogany writing desk. She ran her fingers along the urn's handles, two twisted, gleaming birds, and she lifted the lid where a tiny squirrel perched on a silver bed of metal acorns. "I'm worse than my kids at school. I built a stupid little romance in my mind. Against absolutely impenetrable . . . or impregnable walls. I'm mixing my metaphors. Anyway, he is immovable." She turned on her stomach, groaning, in a fluff of tassels and roping. "I'm disgusting."
      "Stop it, stop it, right now. I'll hear no more of it." Dar sat on the side of the day bed. "You are a magnificent human being, a grand and stylish woman, a dreamer, an artist of the mind. What makes him a whit more desirable than you? And as far as that impenetrable wall, or moat, of whatever you mixed, if the man is so blind as to tinker with the likes of that uninspiring female Faith or that . . ."
      "Kathy, it's Kathy."
      "Well, as I was saying, with Kathy, Faith, who cares? We all have our strange habits, and inexplicable persuasions. The point is, my dear, you are wonderful." He covered her hand with his. "And this day shall be dedicated to the renewal of your spirit." He stood and covered her feet with a velvet throw. "First, a little plate of scones. Mother gave me a mix from the new coffee shop, and a cup of tea, chamomile. After this, we'll wander. I know a little antique shop, a niche in the wall, over by West Masefield. Perhaps, even Mrs Pat's and . . ."
      The knock at the door was light, almost not there. Dar opened the door to David. On the bed, after she had spotted his tweed sleeve and a key in his hand, Set kept her face in the pillow.
      "Thank you, Darby Lambert, for a most aesthetic stay. Even with the events of the last several weeks, I enjoyed my moments here near the conservatory and my old haunts. I thank you for your courtesy. And I apologize for any unpleasantness I've brought here."
      Darby took the heavy skeleton key and shook his hand. "You brought only a scholarly presence into the old girl. And, I do admit, a certain amount of drama. Are you on your way, then?"
      "Faith is still washing a few dishes, and straightening, and, yes, in a few minutes I'm heading on to Pennsylvania. Again, thank you." Set could hear him descending the staircase.
      "I loved your Gregorian chant," Dar called after him.
      Set heard no response. She lifted herself from the pillow. At the window she stood behind the draperies and pulled, very gently, one fold away from the glass. "In a few minutes, then, you'll be gone, and I don't have to see the tweed and leather." Below she could see that his car was already on--chugs of exhaust fume drifted up into the fog. "Strange, it's all silver."
      "What is silver, my love?"
      "The car, the exhaust, the fog, maybe the day. Dar, I always think in colors. Is that weird or . . ."
      "You're doing it again, September. Colors are glorious. You are wonderful."
      "No, Darby Lambert, you are wonderful." She smiled back at him where he fussed at a kettle on the stove. When she turned again, she saw them at the car. Nothing was clearly defined in the mist, but she could see that David helped Faith into the passenger side. Her head was wrapped in the long green scarf that hung down over her back. Set watched the single thread of green stretch against the gray and then she saw it eclisped by the car door. She watched all the way, as David Owen dissolved in the driveway's cloud. She watched in the direction of the entrance stone pillars, but now she was just imagining, for there was nothing more to see.
      "Well, that's it. Could we get out of here, Darby? Truly, I can't bear to be here this afternoon."
      He turned off the gas flame and grabbed his muffler. "No more needs to be said. Mrs. Pat's or bust."
      Within several minutes they were trembling in the damp cold of the lower hall where Darby fumbled for keys he kept stowed on the mantle behind the Jacob Linden portrait.
      "Brrr. Hurry, Dar. This damp is going straight through . . ." The door moved, swung inward. A single figure stood black against the mist. A round face, simultaneously foreign and familiar, looked out from a Medieval head piece. A wimple. Waves of realization rolled up the beach. Below the circle face glistened a chain with a silver disc. The one from the shed, the one around Faith's neck. It was Faith.
      "You . . . you are a . . . a . . ." Set was embarrassed to say the word.
      "A nun. Yes."
      "But I don't understand. How could that be? I mean, didn't you come to be with him? I guess I've been . . . I'm sorry, Faith. I don't understand." Set was grasping for reason and she felt herself flailing about for words.
      Faith laughed, gentle. Kind and maternal. Set watched her stocky arm reach in a practiced motion toward Set's incredulity. Set, surprised, offered her hand. "Of course, it's difficult for you. It's difficult for me. First, you must know that the sisterhood has changed. We are a religious community. But things are changing."
      Darby spoke. "So there are no vows of poverty, chastity, etcetera? God knows I'm not judging you."
      Faith laughed that warm laugh. "Yes, the vows remain in place. But we . . . we are evolving from within."
      "Forgive me for being naive. Do you mean you live in a . . . a convent? With other nuns?" Set felt inadequate to find the right vocabulary for Catholicism.
      "I am Sister Faith McDonald. Sister of the Most Precious Blood. St. Louis Synod. And I wouldn't call it a convent, as you are probably thinking. A house. Together. But these are all just trappings." Faith stepped into the hall and Set stared at her habit. Not really Medieval. Short A-line skirt, street-length. A white blouse, a black nondescript polyester jacket on top, and the necklace.
      "Please, come in," Dar apologized. But all three continued to stand in the hollowness of the hall.
      "I am in transition in my spiritual life. But I am, in the truest sense, the bride of Christ." She looked down. When her eyes looked up again, she appeared rearranged. Her eyes shifted away from Set and down the hall. "Sometimes when we were alone, or intimate, I'd say to him, 'Now I am a nun. A none nun.'" She smiled a sickly whitish smile and Set attempted a grin but the situation was too ghastly to do more. "That's alright. I see you're ill at ease. It would be more fitting to laugh. I do. Sometimes." Then she was stony serious. "But he would never laugh at that."
      Her voice drifted farther away, in the cold damp, echoing down beyond the end of the hall, beyond the mantle with the twist of antlers, hollow. Then with in a thud of reality, Set exchanged Faith's voice with a wave of deadened thought. The passenger in David's car. "But I thought you went with him just now when . . . I saw your scarf.
      "Set, you know who that was. I gave her my scarf for the . . . for their . . ." But she didn't finish and she didn't say a name. "I though perhaps we could just be friends. I drove several times to Pennsylvania after Oxford. We wrote letters. I've had involvements before, but this, this man was more--is more attuned to my needs. He has a depth that is a rare spiritual gift. Yes, I followed him," and her eyes appeared glistening and hard, "even when he advised against it. But he was never unkind. I'm at fault."
      An uncomfortable silence drifted between them. Darby, always anxious to fill in awkward spaces, clamored into the emptiness.
      "And so, then, you'll be going back to St. Louis, Faith?" He was upbeat and perky.
      "Yes, Darby, my mother will need more help now, with my father's grave illness." She stretched out her masculine arm and took Set's hand. "September, you're a good woman. Trust yourself. And, Darby, you are a gentle man and a spirit. Take care of your lovely world here at Shequonur. Thank you, thank both of you." She turned to go. Darby held the door. Still the moment seemed incomplete.
      "Can I get you a coffee or chocolate for the road?"
      "How kind of you. I'll stop at a gas station and get a bite. Now I've got to head west. Sixteen hours ahead." There was nothing more. They stood watching Faith disappear into the gray behind the building.
      Darby took Set's hand and pulled her away, into the drawing room, cold and color-filled, parquet and oaklined, under the frescoed sunflower that shaded the frigid air from its painted garden.
      "What are you doing?" She tried to twist out of his hand, but he clung and pulled and swept her over the icy inlaid floors. With a flourish he bowed, and brought her hand to his lips. He offered his arms in a formal gesture.
      "Shall we dance, my dear?" She smiled. She couldn't stop the smile. "And after the first round, we'll decide exactly where to place the door. I think there." He pointed across the huge room to a mammoth, clawfooted case that almost touched the ceiling. "There, near the General's Indian artifacts. What say you, my love?"
      "I say yes, and yes." She curtsied, pulling out the sides of her knickers. "My card isn't filled. This dance is yours."
      And they circled under the great sunflower.