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That statement struck me like a knife blow, just under the ribs. Geillis Duncan’s notebooks had held lists of people found near stone circles—some alive, some dead. I hadn’t needed anything to tell me that the journey through the stones was a perilous passage—but this reminder made me feel weak in the knees, and I sat down on Jocasta’s tufted ottoman.

“The others,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “Did they . . .”

He shook his head. He was still clammy and shivering, but sweat glazed his face; he looked very unwell.

“Never saw ’em again,” he said.

He didn’t know what had killed Jojo; didn’t pause to look, though he had a vague notion that there might have been burn marks on his shirt. Finding his friend dead, and none of the others nearby, he had stumbled off in a panic through scrub forest and salt marsh, collapsing after several hours of wandering, lying in the sand dunes among stiff grass all night. He had starved for three days, found and eaten a nest of turtle eggs, eventually made his way to the mainland on a stolen canoe, and thereafter had drifted haplessly, working here and there at menial jobs, seeking refuge in drink when he could afford it, falling into company with Hodgepile and his gang a year or so past.

The wampum necklets, he said, were to allow the conspirators to identify each other should they meet at some point—but he had never seen anybody else wearing one.

Brianna wasn’t paying attention to this rambling part of the story, though; she had jumped ahead.

“Do you think Otter-Tooth—Springer—screwed up your group by deliberately trying to go to a different time?”

He looked at her, mouth hanging open a little.

“I never thoughta that. He went first. He went first,” he repeated, in a wondering sort of way.

Brianna began to ask another question, but was interrupted by the sound of voices in the hall, coming toward the morning room. Donner was on his feet in an instant, eyes wide with alarm.

“Crap,” he said. “It’s him. You gotta help me!”

Before I could inquire exactly why he thought so, or who “him” was, the austere form of Ulysses appeared in the doorway.

“You,” he said to the cowering Donner, in awful tones. “Did I not tell you to begone, sirrah? How dare you to enter Mrs. Innes’s house and pester her relations?”

He stepped aside, then, with a nod to whomever stood beside him, and a small, round, cross-looking gentleman in a rumpled suit peered in.

“That’s him,” he said, pointing an accusatory finger. “That’s the blackguard what stole my purse at Jacobs’s ordinary this morning! Took it right out my pocket whilst I was eatin’ ham for breakfast!”

“It wasn’t me!” Donner made a poor attempt at a show of outrage, but guilt was written all over his face, and when Ulysses seized him by the scruff of the neck and unceremoniously rummaged his clothing, the purse was discovered, to the outspoken gratification of the owner.

“Thief!” he cried, shaking his fist. “I been a-following of you all the morning. Damn’ tick-bellied, louse-ridden, dog-eatin’ savage—oh, I do beg pardon, ladies,” he added, bowing to me and Brianna as an afterthought before resuming his denunciation of Donner.

Brianna glanced at me, eyebrows raised, but I shrugged. There was no way of preserving Donner from the righteous wrath of his victim, even had I really wanted to. At the gentleman’s behest, Ulysses summoned a pair of grooms and a set of manacles—the sight of which made Brianna grow somewhat pale—and Donner was marched off, protesting that he hadn’t done it, he’d been framed, wasn’t him, he was a friend of the ladies, really, man, ask ’em! . . . to be conveyed to the gaol in Cross Creek.

There was a deep silence in the wake of his removal. At last, Ian shook his head as though trying to rid himself of flies, and putting down the palette knife at last, picked up the sketching block, where Brianna had made Donner try to draw the pattern he said the men had walked. A hopeless scrawl of circles and squiggles, it looked like one of Jemmy