Unspeakable Things

by Elizabeth Hand

Genres: Gothic

Synopsis

Two young women uncover the deadly secrets of a legendary estate—and their own dark bond—in this delicious historical thriller inspired by the mysterious origins of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, and as could only be penned by the award-winning author of A Haunting on the Hill.
 
It's the 1920s and the English countryside is quiet—which suits Olivia and Tamsin, two young women happy to be overlooked by society. Their relationship is complicated: unruly, working-class Tamsin was brought to Kerrith Manor to be tutored at Olivia's side, but the two quickly have found something more than friendship—a bone-deep recognition that ignites an endless passion.
 
But an unexplained death and an unexpected visitor soon disrupt their idyll, sending both women on the run. They find harbor at Ledges, the dazzling estate of ruthlessly wealthy and endlessly mysterious Rex D’Hiver. At Ledges, a favorite hang-out for the wealthy, bohemian Bright Young Things eager to cut loose far from London’s prying eyes, Olivia and Tamsin at last experience the heady power of true freedom…and soon, its deadly cost.

Release date: October 13, 2026

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 336

Sample

When I went down to breakfast, only my father was at the table. A marmalade pot weighted down the sheaf of scribbled-over script pages and notes he’d been worrying over for the past few weeks.

“Martin out already?” I asked.

My father grunted without glancing up from his script. After two years, he’d finally found investors for a production of The Tempest. He’d play Prospero, and direct. Behind him, thin sunshine seeped through windows that needed cleaning after the winter storms had left them cloudy with salt and dead leaves.

I helped myself to the toast and rhubarb marmalade left out by our cook, Mrs. Fletcher. My long hair was tucked beneath a cap left behind by a friend of Martin’s two years earlier. A heavy dark blue man’s jumper hid my breasts, and instead of a dress I wore wool trousers I’d nicked from Martin’s wardrobe. I had on the same sturdy walking shoes I wore every day.

To my relief, my father seemed not to notice how I was dressed. He barely noticed me at all.

Until recently, he’d never made a fuss about me wearing boys’ clothes. It was only after Miss Irikos, my governess, had left the previous autumn that he began to scowl when he met me in the hall. When I was younger, Miss Irikos had been amused by my alter ego, Oliver. She prided herself on having been arrested with Emmeline Pankhurst and agreed with me that Oliver’s clothes were more suitable than mine for painting. On winter nights, she’d curl up alongside me and stroke my hair as we pored over the art books her lady friend, an artist, posted her from London.

She was less successful in attempting to educate me on the cause of women’s suffrage. Most of the books she gave me remained unread, often shoved under my bed, where I hoped, in vain, she wouldn’t find them. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. My Own Story, by Emmeline Pankhurst. Eleanor Marx-Aveling’s translation of Madame Bovary.

“Karl Marx’s daughter,” Miss Irikos said with pride when she caught me uncharacteristically rapt in the Flaubert.

“Who’s he?”

She despaired of ever truly educating me, at least in socialist politics. Perhaps because of that, in the months before she left, Miss Irikos grew more distant.

“You’re a very beautiful young woman, Livvie, not a girl anymore. But you don’t want your beauty to be the only thing you’re known for.”

Now Miss Irikos lived with her lady friend in Bloomsbury. I missed her terribly.

I ate my toast and rhubarb marmalade in silence. My father drank his coffee—one of the few luxuries we maintained—scowling as he scribbled notes in the margins of his script. When I finished my toast, I filched two hard-boiled eggs from the salver along with some sliced bread, quickly wrapped them in a napkin, and slid them into a pocket.

“I’m off to Carn Kerys,” I announced as I walked away.

My father raised his head. His face was unshaven, his eyes bleary. He was banking on Prospero saving his flagging career. If it did, we’d be able to pay off creditors and repair the leaking roof in the sitting room. Under the terms of his lease with Lord Llayson, my father was responsible for Kerrith’s upkeep. Martin argued with my father constantly about him paying to maintain another man’s home.

“We could live like lords if we moved to Paris!” Martin would exclaim. “Look at Claude and Glenn Haverstone, that beautiful house they have in the Fifth, with a cook—a real cook!—and a man who comes in daily and a girl who lives in and—”

“Not while I draw breath,” my father would reply in a frigid tone. Leaving England would mean that his career as a well-respected actor was over; it would be an even more serious exile than the one he and Martin endured here in the West Country. Despite his love for Martin and his career in the theater, my father was in many ways a deeply conventional man, terrified of a loss of social standing, of gossip about himself or me, his only child. Since my mother’s death two years ago, the precarity of his life and the lie that had made it possible had eaten away at him like a cancer. Shouted arguments over my attire, my unladylike manners, and, most of all, my total lack of interest in marriage and society had become daily skirmishes.

Now his icy gaze traveled from my face to my clothes. “Good God. I told you to stop this, Olivia. You’re not a child anymore.”

“Oh, you’ve finally noticed.”

I stared back at him, saw the color rise in his gray face. “Don’t you dare speak to me like that. Your mother always said I should send you to Mrs. Harrison’s.” Mrs. Harrison’s was a finishing school in Kent. “And she was right, damn it! I forbid you to walk out dressed like a—like a freak.”

“A freak?” I stared at Martin’s empty plate on the table beside my father’s. “You’re a hypocrite. Damn yourself,” I retorted, and ran back to my bedroom.

I retrieved a man’s woolen overcoat from the armoire, something else I’d nicked, this item from a guest last Christmas. I thought about taking my sketchbook but didn’t. I was too angry, in too much of a hurry to get out onto the moor.

I grabbed my canteen, filled it from the ironware jug I kept at my bedside, and hurried to the disused music room down the hall. It was crammed with ugly Victorian furniture and rotting valises that disgorged disintegrating ballgowns and mold-blackened letters. I pushed past a broken Chinese screen, squeezed through the door onto the terrace’s uneven flagstones outside. Cracked terra-cotta pots and urns lay on their sides, overgrown with snapdragons and straggling ivy.

But the air was cool and fresh, the lichen-green lawn shimmering with dew. A few sheep cropped the long grass. The sound of waves drifted up from Kerys Cove along with the mineral reek of seaweed drying on rocks above the high-tide mark; farmers gathered it to lay on their fields.

I found the path that led through densely overgrown rhododendrons and avoided the uneven flagstones jutting from the ground. A fallen menhir, hauled down from the moor to serve as a hitching post, showed where an ancient footpath rose to swells of moor grass and gorse. Long ago, trees had been harvested from these hills and used in shipbuilding or for fuel. These days, we used bundles of dried furze, stacked like rolled-up newspapers in the hallway. After a storm, Martin would join others on the shore gathering driftwood, which burned with a ghastly green glow from salt.

Up here, the wind blew so hard, my cheeks ached. I yanked my cap down over my ears and let the cold take the edge off my rage. The wild landscape, with its forbidding granite menhirs and tangled blackthorns; the ancient stone field systems that formed patterns like a drunken spider’s web; the soaring sky, which could shift from the purest blue to pewter to charcoal in the space of an hour; and the endless sweep of sea—nothing else ever came close to mirroring what I thought of as my soul. Walking to Carn Kerys, I felt part of the landscape, as untrammeled as the goshawks hunting overhead. Here, no one cared if I was a freak.

The roar of waves in Kerys Cove receded as I climbed. Granite outcroppings reared up from the heath, splotched with orange lichen like spilled paint. An olive-black line of clouds scudded from the east, casting the world into twilight as they obscured the sun, which reemerged, blinding, in a sky the same teal blue as the sea.

After I’d walked for a quarter of an hour, the rough footpath surrendered to open moor. Stonecrop covered the boulders, flesh pink against the gray stone. A hen harrier arrowed above me, so close I heard the wind hooting through its black-tipped wings. Martin had once captured a fledgling in hopes of taming it, but it clawed his face in its frantic need to escape, so he set it free.

When I’d walked nearly an hour, I paused for a moment beside a standing stone. A Victorian artist had done a painting of it, titling the work Merlin’s Spear—sentimental claptrap for the tourists who bought postcards in St. Ives.

Still, I loved it and all the other strange stone monuments that were everywhere in Penwith, rising like upright coffins from the heath, used as doorsteps on farms, bolstering the stone walls. Stone circles and standing stones, ancient graves and barrows like Carn Kerys—I would have given anything to understand their secrets.

At last I reached the hill’s summit, the wind-scoured bedrock exposed between scraggly patches of grass. Four immense stones held up a capstone, high enough to stand beneath. Carn Kerys. In high summer, picnickers and painters dotted the hillside. Otherwise, I never saw a soul here.

Now I halted in disbelief.

Beneath the capstone, a girl sat cross-legged on the ground. About my age, wearing a dark coat too large for her wiry frame. She clasped her knees as she stared down at the cliffs and the sea beyond. Despite the raw wind, she was bareheaded, her long black hair whipping around her face. Her cheeks were reddened by the cold. I’d made no effort to move quietly, yet it was only when I stopped that she turned and scrambled to her feet.

“Who are you?” she shouted.

She was nearly as tall as I was, but the hem of her gray skirt only grazed her knees. Black stockings bunched around skinny legs and above scuffed walking shoes. She swiped lank black hair from her eyes as she stared at me, frightened but also challenging.

I hesitated, then stepped toward her. She reached into her coat pocket. Something glittered in her hand, and she lunged at me.

Before I could move, she’d knocked me to the ground. I fell on my back, tried to shout, but she’d already locked an arm around my throat. I was too shocked to struggle, and she tightened her hold, squeezing out what breath I had as she clung to me like a spider monkey. Black ink spilled across my vision. I heard her panting as, unable to breathe, I let my head loll forward and my body go limp. With all my remaining strength, I flung myself backward.

My skull cracked against her jaw. The girl grunted, her hold loosening as I struck out blindly with my fist. With a groan, she released me. I lurched to my feet, gagging as I tried to catch my breath. The girl lay curled on her side, eyes shut. For a horrible moment, I thought I’d killed her. Or—worse—badly injured her. If she was dead, I could run home to Kerrith. It could be hours or even a day before she was found. If she was only hurt, she’d go to the police.

“Hello?” I said hoarsely. It hurt to speak. “Are you all right?”

She didn’t move. I glanced in the direction of home, saw my cap on the ground. I grabbed it, deciding to run. The girl’s croaking voice stopped me:

“Wait. Who are you?” She pushed herself up, pointing at my head. “You’re not, you’re not a…”

I stared at her, cap in hand. Then I understood. My hair. She rubbed her chin, wincing. “You’re a girl. You right knocked me out.”

“You attacked me! Why’d you do that?”

“Why? Why?” She gestured at my hair, my long overcoat and trousers. “I thought you were just another one, didn’t I?”

“Another one what?”

She shot me a look of such contempt that I felt ashamed without knowing why. Cheeks flaming, I tugged my cap farther down, tucked my hair beneath it.

“What do you think?” she demanded. “Dressed like that.”

Gingerly she got to her feet. Her dark coat was speckled with dead grass; she looked as though she’d fallen into a hayrick. Eyeing me warily, she reached to tug at one of her stockings. “Ugh, it’s torn. My aunt’ll scream about that,” she said.

“Who’s your aunt?”

“Who’s yourself?”

Before I could answer, she crouched and plucked something from the ground—a silver penknife. She stood, cocking her head as she repeated her question, the penknife now pointed at me: “Who are you?”

I squared my shoulders, poised to fight if she made another move toward me. I pointed in the direction of Kerrith. “I live that way.”

“Not what I asked, is it?” She sighed. “Jesus. I thought you’d followed me. I thought you were a man.” She twisted her hand so the penknife shone in the light. “I would’ve gutted you.”

“You would have tried,” I retorted. “Maybe I would’ve gutted you.”

For an instant that same wild rage flared in her eyes. Then her expression calmed. “You’re a girl,” she repeated.

I shrugged. She continued to stare at me, curious. Appraising, even. Boys in St. Ives looked at me like that, and so did Maurice Kelville, a writer acquaintance of my father who’d invested in two of his plays. Kelville would slide a hand up my leg whenever he had the chance.

“You didn’t fight like a girl,” she went on. “Well, not so much. You fought, at least.”

“So you fight with girls?” I meant it as a joke, but she nodded.

“Once or twice. More to teach them what to do. Like my mum taught me.”

“Your mother taught you to fight?”

“Among other things.” She stepped away from Carn Kerys, tugging her coat around her skinny frame as she dug her hands in her pockets. “I forgot my hat. And gloves. Such an idiot.”

She trembled with the cold, her bravado gone. I didn’t have gloves to give her, and I wouldn’t risk losing my cap. She lifted her face to the sun.

“You live close?” she asked.

“Not far.”

She lowered her head to gaze at me. Which I liked. She wasn’t at all pretty. Her pale face was pinched, her mouth thin. Her hair, black and tangled, stirred in the wind like kelp moving in the tide pools, mysterious and slightly sinister. Her lips were cracked from the cold, and there were fine red lines at the corners of her mouth. Her clothes were plain, not new, but shop-bought. No poorer than the other girls I saw in Penzance or St. Ives working at the stationer’s or the sweet shop, tending to younger brothers and sisters while their mothers baked or cleaned other people’s houses.

I thought how I would like to paint her. Ever since I was very small, I’d loved to draw, copying illustrations from books by Ernest Thompson Seton and Jack London. Miss Irikos gave me my first real paints—a box of Holbein watercolors, proper paints like adults used rather than the little boxes of children’s paints and crayons I received for my birthday and Christmas. She also gave me a box of thick watercolor paper and a portable easel so we could paint outdoors. According to her, the most important thing for a painter was to pay attention.

“‘Look closely,’” Miss Irikos would say, quoting her artist lady friend, “‘look until your eyes bleed.’”

And so I stared at this strange girl. She had greenish-blue eyes, the color of wet slate. When she tilted her head, the sun candled them so that the irises looked translucent, like amber, only green. Her black eyebrows had a natural arch that made her appear at once surprised and dubious.

She saw me staring at her, and I looked away.

“Tide’s coming in,” I said, watching spray erupt around the huge rocks in Kerys Cove. A black-backed gull wheeled high above the rocks.

The girl looked thoughtfully down at the shore. “High tide’s at one forty. Getting late. No wonder I’m hungry.”

“You know the tide?”

She nodded. “You’d be stupid if you didn’t. In Zennor,” she added. “If you’re on a farm, not so much, I guess.”

“Here.” I reached into my pocket, removed one of the slices of bread I’d taken, and offered it to her. “You look hungry.”

“You know I am.”

She settled on the ground, her back against one of the quoit’s upright stones. She still held her silver penknife, which she used to cut the bread in half. She held a piece out to me.

“Thanks, no.” I removed the other slice from my pocket and sat cautiously at the far end of the upright stone, keeping an eye on the penknife. “I have this. And these too.”

I handed her one of the hard-boiled eggs. “Riches,” she said, and laughed.

I smiled, peeled my egg, and ate it, watching her do the same. She ate slowly, catching crumbs on her fingertip and touching it to her tongue. Watching her, I felt a shiver of diffuse pleasure, a sense of coming adrift from my mind but not my body.

My mother, Elspeth, came from a well-off Anglo-Irish family. She had a career as a writer of arch tales set in a Celtic netherworld peopled with louche dryads and fallen gods. My mother wasn’t beautiful, but she had such strong opinions that when she declared to the popular press that she was a great beauty, no one dared to disagree. An atheist and suffragist, she moved to Ireland and lived apart from my father several years before the rest of us decamped to Kerrith—not all that unusual for high bohemians like my parents. Divorce was still scandalous, though much had changed when the war shuffled the social order like a deck of worn-out playing cards.

She died when I was sixteen from some swift-acting cancer that killed her within months.

I saw her only once after she got sick. A skeleton in a pink silk piqué bed jacket, her dyed black hair hanging around her gaunt face like an ill-fitting wig, her breath cold, and her tongue stained green from medicine. I’d been too frightened to speak as Martin gently led me to her so she could kiss me.

“Be a brave girl, then,” she whispered, her soft Irish-accented voice barely audible. “Ah, don’t cry, Livvie, I can’t bear it…”

She gestured at Martin; he whisked me away to the kitchen, where a kind serving girl gave me warm milk and Tivoli chocolate biscuits.

My mother’s death finally exposed my parents’ mariage blanc for what it was. Perhaps it wasn’t unthinkable for my father and Martin to live together in Hampstead, but my father was too vain and fearful to subject himself to gossip. If his career had still been ascendant, maybe, but it had been years since he’d had a successful show. Still, he continued to work, and that income, augmented by some investments, was enough to support us. The money my mother had brought to their marriage was gone, save for a small inheritance that came to me when I turned eighteen.

My father was in his late thirties when we moved to Kerrith. His career, if not floundering, had entered that twilight phase for an actor whose success had never achieved dazzling heights. I never knew the charismatic young man who’d played Hamlet and Mr. Horner and the male lead in a dozen melodramas, though Kerrith was filled with so many portraits and framed photographs, it resembled a provincial theater lobby.

Now he was mostly cast in parts where he could hide behind false noses and heavy makeup. Cyrano, Malvolio. He was not a great Shakespearean, but his mercurial charm gleamed through even the most lurid makeup.

He was in many ways still trying to repeat his greatest triumph, which had come unexpectedly and when I was only a child. Several years after Peter Pan premiered at the Duke of York’s Theatre, my father was understudying the role of Captain Hook, played by Gerald du Maurier. When Du Maurier wanted to take a fortnight off, my father stepped in, to huge acclaim—so successfully, in fact, that every year, he took over the role for part of its annual run. “It is as though Iago had chosen to become a privateer,” the critic for the Morning Standard wrote, a review that my father never stopped gloating over.

I saw Peter Pan only once, when I was very young. My mother still lived with us then, and she took me to the matinee to see my father playing Hook. The experience cleaved my life in two, just as my meeting Tamsin did years later. We sat in a private box with an exceptionally handsome young man who my mother seemed to know well.

“This is your father’s dresser, Martin Sayles,” she said.

Martin sat between us. “If you’re frightened, you can hold my hand,” he said, smiling.

“I won’t be frightened,” I replied, offended. I knew my father was an actor, not a real pirate—my mother had read me Peter Pan and The Little White Bird.

And I wasn’t frightened—not until late in the play, when my father broke the fourth wall to stare directly at me. In that terrifying moment, I glimpsed the desperate fear behind Hook’s bravado, his knowledge that the crocodile with the ticking clock in its belly was never far away. When I grew older, I understood where that fear had come from: To him, the crocodile was real.

Even more shocking was seeing Peter Pan himself. The heartless brave boy was played by a girl, darting through the air, brandishing a knife as she fended off Hook. Even as a child, I sensed the sexual undercurrents of the role, its dark undertow of longing and danger. I wept uncontrollably when the show ended and my father took his many curtain calls.

That day marked the first time I thought of myself as both Olivia and Oliver. My heart was never divided; my self flowed between its chambers, now a girl, now a boy. When I was young, my bohemian parents indulged my penchant for boys’ clothing. All their friends thought I might want to follow my father onstage.

But after we moved to Kerrith, visits from theater friends grew less frequent. My father insisted the move from London was a cost-saving measure. True, but not the real reason. His liaison with Martin lost him jobs and caused gossip. He grew terrified that those friends who shared his proclivities would expose him. He was too old and too hidebound to embrace the free spirit of younger performers, so he rented out our Hampstead house, claiming that the air in Cornwall would be better for me. As though I were some sickly little girl instead of an aggressive tomboy who raced and fought with boys on Hampstead Heath.

“What about school?” Martin wondered. My father barely registered the question.

“Hmm? She can help me run lines.”

“She needs to learn something, Peter!”

“We’ll find her a governess,” my father replied irritably. “Start making some calls, will you?”

So he leased Kerrith from Lord Llayson, who preferred his elegant Regent’s Park home to the poorly heated and forbidding granite manor that had been in his family for six hundred years. And Irene Irikos, a suffragist friend of my mother’s who lived in London, was engaged to live with us as my teacher.

Beneath Carn Kerys, the slate-eyed girl took another bite of her egg and made a face. “No salt?”

“Sorry.”

“An egg without salt is like a kiss from a beardless man. That’s what my aunt says. I wouldn’t know myself.” She laughed, gazing at me slyly. “Missed my chance.”

I felt myself blush fiercely as I took her meaning. Smiling, she looked down the rock-strewn hillside to where dark waves crashed against the rocks. “This is where Carveth would sit,” she said, pointing at the massive capstone on the formation above us. “Like in a chair, and he’d throw those boulders at anyone who came to bother him.”

I looked at her, confused. “Who’s Carveth?”

“Giant who lives up here.” I wondered if she was joking, but she went on. “Didn’t they teach you anything? My father always told me about him—the greatest of the Cornish giants. Jack the Giant Killer killed the rest, but he never got Carveth. He’s still here. That’s what my father always said.”

I decided to play along. “Where is he, then? I mean, he’s a giant—wouldn’t we see him?”

“You see him, all right. Only you think he’s a boulder,” she said with conviction. “That’s what my father told me.”

Daft as this was, I found myself wishing my father had made up stories. I finished eating my hard-boiled egg, wiped my fingers on the grass to clean them.

The girl cocked her head. “What’s your name?”

“Olivia. It’s from Shakespeare. A character in a play. But when I dress like this, I’m Oliver.”

“I know who Shakespeare is, Oliver,” she retorted. “I’m Tamsin.”

“Tamsin? What kind of name is that?”

“Cornish,” she replied scornfully. “You’re not from here, are you? I can tell by your accent. My father was Thomas. My mother lost four babies before me, and she knew there wouldn’t be another. So I got the female version of my father’s name. Smart as a whip, my mother was. It’s not just me saying that—everyone said it. She could’ve been a doctor. Better than a doctor.” I looked at her quizzically. “She was a midwife. Women didn’t die when she helped them. And men didn’t die when she worked with them in hospital in Penzance during the war. My father’d be alive if she’d seen to him.”

“What happened?”

“Fish hook in his hand. Infection set in.”

I shuddered. “That’s awful.”

“It was.” She stared once more at the sea, only now her gaze was distant. “That’s what I’m going to be—a doctor. My mother taught me everything she knew. I have all her books and things. But midwives make fifteen shillings a baby, while doctors get a pound. I’ll go to London and treat rich women.”

“No men?”

She eyed me measuringly. “Do you know Lady Renstone? My mother saved her. Dr. Teague delivered the baby, but Lady Renstone, she got puerperal fever. My mother said he never washed his hands. He got his pound for delivering that baby girl, but Lord Renstone gave my mother twenty pounds for saving his wife.”

“You know all the talk.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

She looked around as though someone might be watching us. But there was only the black gull circling in the blue air, the wind rustling the dry grasses. A silvery gleam as she leaned toward me and used the penknife to flip the cap from my head to the ground. “You should be more careful, Olivia. You don’t know what’s out there.”

Furious, I moved to strike her but froze as she pointed the little blade at me. “Not so fast,” she said.

She leaned in until I felt her warm breath on my chin. “I like your clothes,” she murmured as the penknife sliced the top button from my coat. It shone like a coin before she caught it. “I have to go. Come here tomorrow and I’ll see you again.”

“Wait! Where are you going?”

“I have to mind my cousins after they finish school.”

She spun around and ran downhill, ignoring me as I called after her. I watched, bewildered and exhilarated, until she was out of sight, then ran my fingers over the thick black thread that her penknife had cut.

At last I made my own way home.

I barely slept that night. I felt as I had one evening after a party when my father and Martin and their houseguests had all gone off to bed and I’d walked around the living room drinking what remained of their claret and port and whiskey: dizzied, exultant. The morning after meeting Tamsin I woke ragged and bleary-eyed. It was raining, that bitter spring rain that bites your fingers like rats.

I waited till I heard my father and Martin leave the table before I ran to the breakfast room. I cut slabs of white bread from the new loaf Mrs. Fletcher had baked and made two sandwiches, one with marmalade and butter, the other with the Burgess’s anchovy paste that Martin loved. I added a few slices of cold greasy bacon, wrapped it all in a napkin, and ran back to my room.

I dressed in my girl clothes: a heavy woolen jumper and skirt, thick stockings, my walking shoes. I didn’t want to risk being seen and stopped by my father or questioned by Martin, who had become increasingly concerned for me in the past few weeks.

“She’s so very lonely, Peter,” I’d overheard him saying only days before. “She’s not a girl anymore. She needs friends her own age.”

“Then she can go to Mrs. Harrison’s.”

“You know it’s far too late for that. All the girls her age just made their debut. Anyway, she’d run off.”

“Then let her!”

“She’s your daughter, Peter.”

“Is she?”

“Don’t be an ass.”

I’d been mortified at the time, but my eyes welled at the memory now. Martin’s insight, his attentiveness toward me, and most of all his kindness. My throat tightened as if I’d swallowed a stone.

Martin knew me well: I felt crushed by. . .