It’s edges were dulled by the mounds of snow, but it’s distinctive shape was still plainly visible against the night sky. Then she glanced up the street, toward where her parents had moved a few years ago, escaping the influx of artists and freethinkers who had changed Greenwich Village from an enclave of the rich to a community of bohemians. The same street, but what a change it made in the fifty blocks that lay between her old home and the brownstone town house where they now lived.

Sarah wondered if they ever appreciated the irony. She could have asked her mother, of course, except she hadn’t spoken to either of her parents since Tom’s funeral. The fifty city blocks that separated her humble office-formerly Tom’s doctor’s office and now hers-might as well have been an ocean since she and her parents now lived worlds apart from each other.

Sarah turned her attention to crossing the cobblestone avenue. In the daylight, crossing against the flow of carriages, hansom cabs, and motor cars would be a dangerous and nearly impossible proposition, but because of the storm, even the prostitutes and their clients had retired for the evening. All Sarah had to worry about was picking her way through the piles of horse manure and garbage that the street cleaners hadn’t yet carried away and which were now hidden beneath the snow.

A few more blocks, then they cut across Broadway to the tiny zig that was Astor Place and the quiet residential neighborhood beyond where Mrs. Higgins’s boardinghouse lay. It had once been home to only her and her family, but when her husband’s eyes had failed and he’d lost his prosperous tailoring business, they’d had to move their growing family into two back rooms and let the others out to lodgers.

Fortunately, one of the rooms was vacant at the moment, so Mrs. Higgins was laboring in relative privacy with the assistance of one of her neighbors. After shedding her cloak and stamping the snow off her boots, Sarah joined them.