Rook

(us), she was nine years old and about to stuff her gob with a chocolate digestive. As I recall, we had all finished our tea, but neither Lady Farrier nor Sir Wattleman spoke directly to me. I remember feeling somewhat irritated by this but not so irritated that I didn’t start wolfing down everything on the pastry tray. And then Lady Farrier sent me away to the Estate.
     
    The letter continued, but she was too tired to read further. The pages fell back into her lap, and soon she was asleep on the couch, a couch that had been chosen for its extreme coziness.
    If she had any dreams, she did not remember them.

3
     
    M y name is Myfanwy,” she said, concerned by how unsure her voice sounded. The face she saw in the mirror might belong to someone named Myfanwy, but it was taking her a little while to think of herself as such. She was, however, beginning to think of the person who had previously occupied her body as Thomas.
    “I’m Myfanwy,” she said again, a bit more convincingly this time.
    “Were you a morning person, Thomas?” she wondered aloud as she struggled up out of bed. She’d spent most of the previous day sleeping and reading through the dossiers that Thomas had left her. She’d fallen asleep around midnight, her face covered by a report on the Checquy’s diplomatic relationship with the Great Barrier Reef. Now it was five o’clock on Monday morning, and she’d woken with a start, petrified that she was late.
    For a moment she’d toyed with calling in sick, but a number of factors had dissuaded her. To begin with, the letter writer had seemed reluctant to suggest that missing work was even an option. In addition, the prospect of staying alone in the contrived apartment another day was, well, kinda creepy. Nope, it was definitely time to go in to work and figure out what the hell was going on. She stumbled to the shower and ran through a variety of possible wardrobe combinations in her mind before settling for a suit. It was Myfanwy Thomas who had picked out the clothes, so at least she didn’t need to worry about turning up and not looking like Myfanwy Thomas.
    She’d noticed the previous morning that the cupboard was surprisingly bare of breakfast foods.
Slipping a little, aren’t we, Thomas? What kind of “extremely capable administrator” doesn’t take care to leavebreakfast for the woman inhabiting her future amnesiac body? Not even a Pop-Tart? A frozen croissant? Honestly.
Still, there were coffee beans and a grinder, and she was able to sit down with a cup of coffee and that big-ass purple binder.
    Thomas seems like a decent sort, but she’s a glorified paper pusher,
she thought ruefully.
Even if she
does
work for a paranormal version of the MI5, she’s probably dealing with the boring bits. “Heavens! Some kind of werewolf is eating the Queen! Fetch some forms and ask her to fill them out in triplicate, and then perhaps we can attend to her needs at some point during the next quarter.”
Snorting to herself, Myfanwy opened the binder and read the instructions Thomas had left for getting ready for the office.
    Half an hour later, she was wearing one of the ugly suits from the wardrobe, holding a briefcase, and anxiously explaining to the man on the phone that she’d like a cab as soon as was humanly possible and admitting that yes, she was in a hurry, and so, yes, she should have planned ahead. The next fifteen minutes were spent in the lobby of the apartment building looking out for the cab. When it finally appeared, she gave the address to the extremely scruffy driver and was then forced to concede that she didn’t know where it was.
    As the driver perused his map, she thumbed through the purple binder. She’d only managed to read the summary, which had been mind-bogglingly intricate. She’d found some sticky notes in the flat’s office and was marking various important-seeming passages. As a result, every page was marked, some of them three times. Apparently Thomas had not felt an index would be necessary, although there was a vague table of contents.
    “So, you have no idea where this house is?” the driver asked. He was elderly and wearing one of those dubious flat caps.
    “No,” she admitted as she turned a page and found an entirely new alarming topic.
    “Whose house is it, then?”
    “Oh, it’s mine,” she said distractedly and was sufficiently absorbed in her reading not to notice the look he gave her. In fact, she kept her head down for the entire trip