The room smelt of wax. The bed was covered with a heavy flax sheet, rucked where the poles went up to the dark canopy. To her right was her father’s dressing room, to her left her mother’s, and she hesitated.

It was dark in the room. She wished she had thought to bring a candle, but the curtains were open and slowly her eyes became accustomed to the gloom. She could hear her own breathing. Every sound she made seemed magnified; the rustle of skirts and petticoat, the tiny scuff of her bare feet on the wooden floor.

She looked to the right, hearing even her hair as it moved on her shoulders, and she saw the mess in her father’s dressing room. Someone had been here before her, had turned out the chest and pulled clothes from the shelves. She suspected her mother’s room would have had the same treatment. The door was ajar.

She crept toward it, letting her weight gently on to each foot, freezing at the slightest creak of a board, and then her hand was on the door, she pushed and it swung ponderously, silently open.

Moonlight showed her the small room. A door at the far end gave directly into Goodwife’s bedroom. It was shut. If anyone had searched this room they had left it tidy or, more likely, Goodwife had been in after them. It was used now to store the heavy flax sheets that were pale on the shelves. The room smelt of rue which, Goodwife said, repelled moths.

Closed up. Her mother’s big chest stood, its lid open, against the wall.

Campion was nervous. She listened. She could hear the creak of timbers in the old house, she could hear her own breathing, she could hear the far, muffled rumble of Scammell’s snoring.

She was close, she knew she was. She remembered playing hunt-the-thimble with their old cook, Agnes, in the kitchen garden, and Campion knew that at this moment she was warm. Over the years she suddenly heard Agnes’s voice: “You’ll burn yourself, child, you’re that close! Look, child! Go on with you!”

She was utterly still, drawn to this room by instincts sharpened by her long immersion in her father’s papers. She imagined him hiding something. What would he have done?

Secret places. Closed up. Then it came to her, so simple, and again she was listening to her father’s voice. He had preached each Sunday to his household in the days before Faithful Unto Death had come to Werlatton parish, and now Campion was remembering one of those sermons. It had been his usual two-hour length, the servants and family expected to be still on the hard benches as he preached, and she remembered the sermon about the secret places of a man’s heart. It was not enough, her father had said, to be an outward Christian, praying much and giving much, because there were secret places in a man’s heart where evil could lurk. It was in those secret places that God looked.