Free A Convergence Of Birds by Jonathon Safran Foer

to give evidence by accident. She keeps quiet, out of the way, wondering if music by Byrd might serve to lull the searchers, making them skimp and miss. Little John Owen, still out in the birdhouse in the pond, has done good work here, although perhaps these are not the best of his optical illusions. In one recently modified house he created a painting of a door opening on another door, three-dimensional until you get up close—just the sort of thing to suck in and confound a Hargreaves—but he has not done this everywhere. Another lifetime would help, she thinks. If only he had started work ten years earlier. Off she treads, out of the house, chunk of suet in hand to fasten to the side of the birdhouse in which he roosts—the side facing away from the house. It will be better than nothing, whereas cheese would alert their suspicions. All John Owen has to do is somehow help himself and try to keep the suet down. It is like wartime here, she decides, with troops garrisoned all over the privacy of the house. Is this how they treat the Jews in Europe? I am better doing this by day, in the open; they would wonder why I was doing it at night. If they keep watch, and they will. If Henry Garnet, who hurt his knee, cannot stand being cooped up, what are we to do?
    In the blistering, gusty cold of that night, Wednesday leaking into Thursday, John Owen, who has been outside since Monday, cranks his almost petrified broken body out of the birdhouse, lifting it up and off him, and creeps into Hindlip through an entrance only he knows, thence into a hiding place known to most of them as Curly, because it does not lie straight and whoever is in it—in this case the lay brother Ralph Ashley, also there since Monday—can only lie curved. There is little room for two, but they wordlessly share the apple Ralph Ashley has been saving for three days. It is as cold in the house as it is outside, and Little John feels he has exchanged life for death. Ashley’s body gives off no warmth. What they do next is rash, but they both feel dizzy, weak, can hardly move their legs; indeed, Little John is lucky to have stumbled in unseen. The kitchen tempts, the open road next. As Little John sees it, he is bound to be discovered if the searchers occupy the house long enough, and if he stays any longer in the birdhouse he will die of exposure. Wordlessly, they decide to move out, through the wainscot into a gallery. The house is still and only faintly lit. If someone catches them, they will give themselves up; perhaps the poursuivants will be satisfied with them, mistaken as to who they are. Out they slip, one foot caressing the other before going farther, but the house becomes an uproar; Hargreaves, on his third patrol of the night, wandering into the gallery out of boredom and with no expectations at all, catches sight of two shady figures tiptoeing their way into the hall and communicating with each other in dumb show. In a second, they have been surrounded and pinioned while Sir Henry, half asleep and blustering to compensate for his bleariness, asks them who they are. Just servants, they answer, unable to sleep. But sleepless servants, Sir Henry comments with a sniffle, do not wander through the main house at night like invited guests. Who are you? Are you Tesimond and Oldcorne, Greenway and Hall? He is wide of the mark, of course, but he is convinced he has caught someone, not of high station (he knows the smell of a servant when he sniffs one, and the whiff coming off them is quite different). Rather than interrogate them, he sends them off to his headquarters and occupies himself with the expectant mother, Mary Habington, sister to Monteagle, the savior of the hour.
    “No fear, Sir Henry,” she shrills, “not unless you carry me out yourself. I am staying here, where I belong. How dare you?”
    Clearly he has no business trying to lug around someone so wellborn and well-connected; he makes no offer to remove Anne Vaux, whose sharpened glare