Clothes Maketh The Man — Part 52.

The old woman looked at me and then said, “We’d better get you up to your room. A nice warm bath and you’ll be right as rain.”

With that she picked up my heels from the table, opened the door and beckoned me to follow.

I stood, dazed and confused, and then followed her along the passage and then up a staircase, all the while wondering what these new developments could possibly mean. Apparently Gertrude was neither guarding me, nor about to deliver any punishment.

I glanced out of one of the windows into the gloom of the night, wondering if I should make a break for it and run. I dismissed the thought as quickly as it came to me. I was still cold and wet, and the night looked forbidding, but most of all the question that filled my mind was, “where exactly would I run to?”

With no shoes, no proper adequate clothes, and no idea where I was it was a futile exercise.

Gertrude eventually opened one of the doors off the corridor toward the back of the house revealing a spacious bedroom, a comfortable bed with clean sheets and a large dressing table. If circumstances had been different I would have thought it an excellent room in a hotel in cottage country.

“Now, you get yourself ready for that nice warm bed. You’ll catch your death running about in the cold at…