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The children left early that summer; the youngest protesting vigorously all the time but the others happy enough to return to their own home, their own plays and ponies and fishing streams. The summer had been unusually chilly and wet, which of course meant that their solicitous grandfather preferred to keep them inside near to himself and the fire. It was a hard lot for vigorous children accustomed to be given the reign of a loud, busy home close to all the distractions of the city.

"Little Emma was sorry to leave you," another Emma's husband said to her by way of filling the silence as his brother's carriage drove away up the lane.

"Little Emma is sorry to return to the tyranny of her governess," his wife replied drily. "And to being unbearably teased by the bootboy."

"You are much in her confidence."

"Well, someone must be." Thoughtfully, Emma Knightley leaned her head against the side of the doorjamb, still staring down her now-empty lane. "I do not hold with the maxim, you know. I believe little girls ought to be heard. Or they certainly won't be when they're older."

"We ought to send you to London, perhaps," her husband said as he gently led her from the doorway and allowed the servant to close the door on the draft.

"What, to replace Isabella's governess? Am I so forlorn?"

He laughed. "No, to Kensington. You might be useful to little Alexandrina."

"You have been listening to John's gossip again," Emma said, allowing herself to be distracted.

"It's easy enough to be drawn into his fancies, isn't it?" her husband asked. "Prinny on the throne, all London apparently in a panic –"

"His 'fancies' are hardly appropriate hearing for his children."

"Now, Emma," her husband scolded. "How will your namesake ever learn to make herself heard if she doesn't hear anything worth repeating?"

"I hardly meant that she ought to go to her first assembly talking of royal conspiracies and natural children. And in any case, I'd rather she thought for herself."

"No doubt she will."

Despite the rather visible relief of Mr Woodhouse, whose fretful adoration of his grandchildren exhausted rather than invigorated him, the house did feel empty once John and Isabella's children had gone. Emma's slight malaise had always to be concealed from both her father and her husband, both of whom (though in markedly different ways) would worry, and both of whom might be in danger of taking her mood personally – all the more so because Emma had become so convinced over the last year that she would not see Hartfield filled with her own family. Not that she believed, quite, that there would never be Knightley children, but superstition had begun to make her believe that they would not arrive so long as the Knightleys remained in residence in the home of Emma's childhood, watched over by ghosts and locked in the routine of an old man's ills and worries. Of course she could not wish her father abandoned, or wish for his prolonged fair health to fail, and so the thing could never be spoken of.

A welcome distraction, therefore, was provided by the sight one evening of lamps out in the distance and what appeared to be a camp-fire flickering on the horizon. "Who do you think that could be?" Emma asked her husband as they dressed for dinner, their own fire cutting the chill and the descending fog of the August night.

"I suppose the Gypsies might have forgotten their lack of welcome in the county," Mr Knightley said thoughtfully, peering over her shoulder as he struggled with his cravat. "Do not you walk out that way until I've made sure."

"I won't," Emma promised, but the next afternoon Mr Knightley returned with the report that no Gypsies had been sighted in the neighborhood, and that indeed no encampment of any kind existed in the environs of Highbury. That night, however, Emma again saw the lights in the distance as she stood waiting for the maid to lace her gown.

"Thieves, probably," Mr Knightley declared. "I suppose I ought to ride out in the morning."

But at noon he returned and reported that, although he and the gamekeeper had indeed found the remains of a fire and some rudimentary torches out on the far hillside, there was no other evidence of ruffians. "Nothing left behind, no obvious hiding places," he told Emma and the fascinated upstairs maid (Mr Woodhouse being, of course, kept in the dark for his own health). "Perhaps it's just the village boys making mischief." Something in his wife's expression made him add, "Now Emma, that doesn't mean you ought to go exploring . . ."

"I have no intention of exploring," Emma replied primly. "You seem to think I have nothing else to do but follow fancies about the countryside. We've a harvest festival to plan, haven't we, Betty?"

Betty would of course have little to do with planning the harvest festival, but she murmured, "Yes, mum," as she stoked Emma's sitting room fire.

Emma truly had no intention of venturing out to the hillsides, even though the lights returned in seemingly greater number that evening while Betty was dressing her hair. Mr Knightley was engaged in his usual evening ritual of trying to undo some of the more ornate artistry his valet had inflicted upon his cravat, but on seeing the mysterious lights Emma did not draw her husband's attention to them.

She was full asleep that night when her dreams were invaded by visions of dancing firelight, ghosts rising from glowing coals to leap in the shadows and circle the fire in a backwards quadrille, summoning spirits of the countryside . . . she awoke to the sight of flickering light on the shadow of the bedroom wall, filtering through the window. She was sitting up before she had fully realized that this meant the light was coming from outside, and not from her own fireplace.

She was out of bed and rushing on cold bare feet toward the window by the time her husband began to stir, and her name called drowsily did not distract her from her mission. She stood close to the wall, concealing her figure in the drapery, and peered out through the glass.

Torchlight danced and circled in the grounds just below Hartfield, no more than steps from its foundation. The torchbearers moved too swiftly for Emma to make out anything but the blurred glowing lines left behind by the torches, and perhaps hats of a somewhat battered nature.

A repetition of her name drew her eye to the bed, where her husband was sitting up now in full alarm. "What is it?" he asked anxiously. "Is the house afire?"

"No," she whispered, unreasonably afraid of being heard by the rushing beings two floors below. "The ghosts are here."

"The – what?"

Emma blinked and cursed her sleepy tongue. "The – ruffians. With torches."

"Good heavens!" Mr Knightley disentangled himself from the bedclothes and wrapped his dressing gown around himself as he stood. "Do they intend to burn us out?"

"You are thinking of John's stories again," Emma murmured, fingers gently twitching aside the drape so that her husband could stand behind her and see out. "I do not think they are revolutionists."

"Then what?" He peered over her shoulder, standing close enough that the voluminous folds of her white nightgown clung to his legs. "Good God, so many. I must rouse the household –"

"Don't," Emma said, her free hand reaching behind her to grasp the belt of his dressing gown. "You'll alarm everyone and I do not think they mean harm. Look, they're only dancing."

"Dancing, around someone else's home in the middle of the night?" Still he remained watching as if mesmerized. "Anyway someone else will be awakened and set off a panic if I don't –"

He was interrupted by a loud pounding on the bedroom door. Despite herself Emma was seized with fear, possessed with the old images of the Terror that had plagued her childhood nightmares.

"Sir, sir!" someone outside the door was crying.

Mr Knightley extracted himself from Emma's nightgown and moved around her to go to the door. "Piers," he explained as he went.

When Mr Knightley pulled open the door, the young under-butler was indeed standing there clutching a candelabrum as if he intended to use it as a weapon. "Sir, the house is surrounded!" Piers said in an urgent near-whisper. "I have set the boys to guarding the doors. Shall we go for the guns, sir?"

"No guns," Mr Knightley said immediately. "Not yet. We don't want to start anything that can be avoided."

"The men are jumpy," Piers whispered. "They're talking of Hellfire –"

"Hellfire?" Emma repeated, wrapping the lower part of the drape over her nightgown and stepping into the firelight. "Was there a Hellfire Club in Surrey?"

Her husband turned, his expression either merely quizzical or scolding in the low firelight. "What do you know of Hellfire Clubs?"

"I am not a child," Emma said. "And I had half a Season. People talk. Was there?"

"Mere rumors when I was young, nothing but the usual scandalized hysterics. People like to believe they're surrounded by hedonists, for some reason."

"Sir!" One of the footmen came tearing up the hall with a candle in danger of blowing out in his hand. "They are leaving."

Emma went directly back to the window. The lights were indeed now heading in their disciplined, dancing line back out to the hillside instead of continuing around the corner of Hartfield. Her husband soon appeared at her back to watch them depart, with the under-butler and the footman hovering anxiously behind.

No one spoke until the last of the little flickering torches was as far away as the shrubbery. "Tell everyone to go back to bed," Mr Knightley said firmly. "Leave only two men on watch at each door. No one is to go outside until dawn."

"Yes, sir!"

He stopped them with a raised hand. "Let no one speak of Hellfire Clubs to Mr Woodhouse, understand?"

The looks on the men's faces suggested this instruction was quite unnecessary.

When the servants had gone, Emma's husband shepherded her back to the bed. "I'll find out what's behind it all in the morning," he promised. "You are not to think about it."

He could hardly prevent her, however, and over breakfast she declared her intention to walk out over the hills and visit her friend.

"Emma," her husband said sternly. He could not say everything he wished, because Mr Woodhouse was carefully eating his gruel at the end of the table. "You ought not to be interfering in things."

"I have said nothing about interfering," Emma replied, her knife not pausing as she buttered a scone. "I promised Harry a kitten, you know."

"And it must be delivered today, I suppose?"

"Indeed it must, for they are weaned and Kitty can no longer keep them from running wild in the stable." Emma set down her knife placidly. "I do not intend to cause mischief."

"You ought to have Spenser drive you."

"You ought, you know," her father echoed, pulled from the contemplation of his spoon. "There is a chill."

"You know the air is good for me," Emma soothed. "And I shall take great care."

Despite her husband's scowls, she set out after breakfast with a gently covered basket on her arm and a footman following in her wake. She was greeted at the gate of the Martin homestead by a girl of six with braided hair coming rapidly undone, who upon seeing her brushed great quantities of dust and uprooted grass out of the lap of her pinafore and ran for the house, calling at the top of her lungs, "Mamma! Mrs Knightley is come! Mamma! Mamma! Mamma!"

Harriet Martin was still brushing flour off her apron when she came to the door, her smile somewhat weary. "You mustn't shout, Harry, Mrs Knightley won't like it."

"But she's brought my kitten, haven't you, Mrs Knightley?" The child danced in Emma's path, fair curls tumbling even looser from her braids.

"I have," Emma said, "and you may have her if you come and sit quietly inside."

"We shall have tea!" little Harry exclaimed, with a great deal more excitement than tea normally called for. She was inside the door, nearly tripping her mother in her haste, before Emma had reached the threshold.

"It is kind of you," Harriet said, leaning to kiss Emma carefully without transferring flour to Emma's neat dress. "She has talked of nothing else."

Emma nodded for the footman to wait as he liked outside, and ducked under the Martin's old, low lintel. "I have brought her the biggest of the litter. She's quite a bully to be honest, Harry, you will have to train her."

Harry barely managed to remember to draw a chair to the kitchen table for the guest. "A bully? Did she bully the other kittens?"

"She did indeed. She is fond of wrestling."

"May I have her now, please?"

Emma smiled and reached into the basket, removing from it a small orange kitten that mewed as it dangled from her hand. Harriet laughed as she moved the kettle onto the stove. "A bully, Emma?"

"She is quite fierce." Emma placed the kitten into the ecstatic Harry's hands. "She will be a splendid mouser for you."

"She will be the best mouser in Highbury," Harry declared, watching the kitten stalk in circles on her lap. "May I take her outside to play, mamma?"

"See you thank Mrs Knightley first," her mother said. "And take her to the barn to play. Now you have something so small to look after, you must watch for hawks and foxes."

"Thank you, Mrs Knightley!" Harry held up her kitten and waved its paw at Emma before running from the kitchen again, the door slamming behind her.

"She is a scattered thing," Harriet said, shaking her head at the departure of her only daughter. "She ought not to have had so many cousins to play with."

"No doubt she is fortunate in them," Emma said. "I don't like to see a lonely child."

"Nor me," Harriet conceded.

"Harriet," Emma asked, as a teacup was placed before her. "Have you seen anything unusual these nights? Fires, on the hillside?"

Harriet shook her head, but added, "The hills are not visible from upstairs in summer. Why?"

"Nothing." Emma looked thoughtfully at the table. "I think I shall have a walk after we have tea."

In the end Harriet accompanied her, her breathing slightly more labored than Emma's as they climbed the hills. The smell of old firesmoke, nearer than the chimneys of the farmhouses and cottages, teased Emma's nose as they drew nearer to the clearing at the top of one hill, which Emma had singled out as the most likely location for the lights she'd seen on the previous nights. She was looking ahead, focused on what might have been a carelessly dug firepit, as she climbed, and therefore was surprised by the figure that stepped from the trees into her path.

The newcomer was a woman, with her skirts tucked up to expose her knees and shabby boots reaching nearly to her hems. She wore a broad-brimmed hat, rather battered, with a small cluster of goose feathers in the band. Her face was not entirely clean, but not unintelligent.

"I do not know you," was the first thing Emma managed to say.

"No one knows us," the woman – or girl, more properly, as she was certainly younger than Emma herself – replied.

"Pirates!" Harriet whispered under her breath.

"In Surrey?" Emma asked softly. "Ridiculous."

"We aren't bothering anyone," the strange girl said.

"Are you Gypsies?" Emma asked.

The girl laughed. "Not hardly."

"Then who –"

"I help girls," the girl said. "Girls nobody else cares about. If I didn't help 'em, they'd end up in a bad way."

"Help them – how?" Emma asked.

"Teach 'em," the girl said. "Their letters and that, most of 'em can't even write their names." She took a defiant stance. "Help 'em run if they have a need. Get 'em a place."

"Run?" Emma echoed.

"Lots of girls got somebody to run from. I know people can find 'em a place in a good house, or a shop, someplace in another town."

"So who meets here at night?" Emma asked, emboldened by the girl's willingness to share information. "You?"

"We meet." The girl shrugged. "They bring new girls to us at night so I can send 'em off somewhere safe. I meet girls who want to help."

"Girls from Highbury," Harriet guessed, the first time she'd spoken. "Girls from this neighborhood, who help you find places for these other girls, the ones who've run away."

"Why?" Emma asked stupidly.

"Better than staying where I was, and I knew other girls needed help 's much as I did." Hands on hips, the girl faced Emma and Harriet. "I'm telling you because the girls talk about you."

"You know me?" Emma asked.

"Think I've never seen you?" The girl nodded. "You're Mrs Knightley from Hartfield. I got a girl a place there once."

"Who?" Emma gasped.

"Not going to say. Girl I know got us a talk with the under-housekeeper, all above the board. The girl's doing all right there or I'd have known."

"But –"

"Don't look for us," the girl said. "You'll bring trouble."

"I could say the same," Emma said, chin lifted. "I don't know what you thought you and your girls were doing last night, but our servants almost panicked and shot you."

"Not me," the girl said. "But I'll warn them. They get overexcited and girls like us don't get much freedom."

It seemed to Emma that this brash girl enjoyed quite a lot of freedom, but she had no intention of arguing the point. "Just keep away," she said. "Don't frighten my house."

"Call off your men," the girl replied. "You know no one else would help the girls I help. Nobody notices them."

Emma hesitated. "You must be more careful not to raise suspicion," she said. "There's already talk about Hellfire Clubs and you know what would happen if people got into a furor. I won't tell anyone what you're doing but you must find a better place to hide."

She and Harriet waited, practically holding their breath, until the girl had vanished.

"Fancy!" Harriet whispered. "Like pirates after all. A bit."

"I suppose," Emma said quietly. "I suppose she's right, too."

"Poor unlucky things." Harriet gathered her skirt in her hands and turned to begin the descent back toward her home. "And Harry doesn't want to learn her lessons. Fancy if she knew other girls have to sneak at night to learn their letters."

Emma momentarily grasped Harriet's hand. "I don't know what I'll tell Mr Knightley," she said as they picked their way down the hill. "That it was the village boys playing, I suppose, and that their masters have already told them off."

"Mr Knightley won't seek out trouble," Harriet said.

"No, he'd accept that, I think."

"I meant," Harriet said delicately, "that you could tell him the truth."

"Oh." Emma stepped over a fallen branch. "But he's a man."

Harriet laughed. "I think you'd like to be a pirate yourself," she said. "If you do go sailing the seas in search of great adventure, do please take Harry with you."

"I certainly will," Emma said, entering into the spirit of the thing now that her heart had finally begun to slow to its normal rate. "But I draw the line at one kitten only."