An irrepressibly violent past anchors each of these texts-the torturous criminal code of the Ancien Regime and the subsequent Reign of Terror of the French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities; the barely explained murder of a Cavalier poet, shot in the back without warning, in "Oke of Okehurst"; the marauding violence of medieval Knights Templar, "fierce and wicked men . . . the scourge of their time" (39) in "Man-Size in Marble"; and the history of the Sulaco silver mine, initially dug by enslaved people in the days of Spanish colonialism, in Nostromo. In one striking image, she describes Dickens's depiction of the French Revolution "as not only inevitable but also just," a "reversal of a crime against nature-as when a rubber band is stretched too far and snaps back on the thumb that stretched it" (426). Laura, the narrator's wife in "Man-Size in Marble," hasn't deliberately sought out this kind of contact with the past, but as a result of her husband's naive positivism, she ends up the victim of the marble effigies of the Knights Templar, who stalk the village on the night of All Hallows' Eve. The legend of the past-that the poet Christopher Lovelock was killed in an apparently unprovoked attack by Nicholas and Alice Oke in the 1620s-is mirrored in the 1880s when present-day Alice Oke's husband kills her and himself in a murder-suicide that also purports to be an attack on the ghost of Lovelock.