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around her as if she were trapped in a raging storm. Then, she felt her hands being pulled free from over her ears.
    “Winnie!” a voice shouted.
    This time it wasn’t a voice carried on the wind that she heard. Opening her eyes, Winnie stared into Thaddeus’s pale face.
    “Winnie!” he shouted, taking her by the shoulders and gently shaking her as if waking her from a dream.
    “There were faces,” she breathed, then glanced back over her shoulder at the treeline.
    “Faces?” Thaddeus asked. “What faces? Where?”
    “They were staring out of the woods at me,” she murmured, feeling confused and disorientated. “There were voices, too.”
    “Voices?” Thaddeus said, sounding evermore confused.
    “It was like they were talking to me,” she said, and her lower lip trembled as she stared into the darkness that separated the trees.
    “I didn’t hear anything,” Thaddeus said, and seeing that she was trembling, he pulled her close.
    “You were inside,” she tried to explain. “You wouldn’t have heard them because of the wind.”
    “Where were these faces?” Thaddeus quizzed her.
    “I’m not sure,” she said, a deep frown forming across her brow. “I saw them reflected in the window.”
    “Reflected in the window,” he frowned back at her. Then a half-smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “Are you sure it wasn’t just the moonlight distorting your own reflection back at you?”
    “No, I’m sure,” Winnie whispered, now starting to feel confused, a sense of self-doubt taking hold of her. “What about the voices?”
    “The wind perhaps?” he said, looking at her. “We’re high up here. The wind can sound like a million different things as it cuts across the fields and rages against the cliff faces.”
    “Really?” Winnie asked him, a part of her hoping that what he said was true.
    “Sure it does,” he said. “Sometimes, when the wind blows really hard, you couldn’t be blamed for mistaking it for a giant pack of wolves racing up the hillside.”
    “But they sounded so real,” she mumbled.
    Then, leading her gently out of the shaft of moonlight, the wind and the rain, they headed towards the house. “I think you had a little too much to drink tonight,” he told her. “You’ll laugh about this in the morning.”
    They reached the open front door, and looking back at the pool of moonlight, Winnie whispered, “You never took that picture.”
    “I couldn’t find my camera,” he smiled back at her, and closed the door.

Chapter Ten
     
    Thaddeus took their wet coats and hung them up to dry in the kitchen. He made them both a cup of sweet black coffee and Winnie sat at the kitchen table. Her head still felt a little groggy as she tried to make sense of what she had really seen outside in the storm. Her cheeks glowed scarlet from where she had been left waiting outside in the cold. Winnie sat and shivered before him, as Thaddeus pushed a mug of coffee towards her.
    "Here, drink this. It’ll warm you up."
    Thaddeus knew that Winnie was still a little tipsy from the wine, but he wanted to give her a list of instructions for tomorrow so that there wouldn’t be any more mistakes and embarrassments.
    He sat opposite her and said, "Winnie, tomorrow morning, a bundle of foreign newspapers will be delivered. They arrive once a week on a Thursday morning."
    She took a sip of her coffee, and then said, "Why do you have foreign newspapers delivered? What's wrong with the English ones?"
    Thaddeus smiled. “I have English newspapers delivered as well, but I like to keep abreast of what's happening all over the world."
    Winnie started to relax a little now that she was in the warmth beneath the glow of the kitchen lighting, the feelings of fear she had felt outside were now slowly ebbing away, like the broken pieces of a nightmare at dawn. With the mug of coffee warming her hands, Winnie looked with surprise across the table at Thaddeus and said, "You mean you can read and understand loads