Out there stepped, cool as you please, a skinny old gentleman in black, who looked at the coachman as if to say, “Nerves? I advise you to have ’em cut out, my man, and braided into a whip, the better to guide these shambling nags,” dusted off the flakes of snow that had had the impertinence to settle on his bony old shoulders, and made his way across the white courtyard, where the darkness was already beginning to pile up in the comers, as if driven there by the wind. Johann the footman opened the castle door and let out a great quantity of light, which leapt inside again as soon as he shut it. The coachman began to unharness the horses, with many head-shakings and gesturings to the groom, while the girls tried to guess who the visitor might be.

They were English—not Swiss at all, though they’d picked up enough of our language in the time they’d been here to sound like natives. Lucy was twelve and Charlotte was ten, and I wasn’t much older myself; but I counted myself more fortunate by far, because I had a mother still alive and a brother—and no grim uncle like Count Karlstein. They had no other relatives, and since their parents had both died in a shipwreck, they had no choice but Count Karlstein or an orphanage—and if they’d known what he’d be like, they’d have chosen the orphanage without a second’s pause. They’d been here a year now, poor things.

He’d been here for nine, nearly. Old Count Ludwig Karlstein, the previous count, had died without an heir, so the estate had passed to Count Heinrich Karlstein, a thin, dark man, much given to gnawing his nails, muttering to himself, and poring over works of German philosophy at midnight in his stone-walled, tapestried study. Nothing so bad in those things, of course, but he had other defects, such as a temper you’d have put down for its own sake if it’d been a dog, a vile, sarcastic tongue, and—worst of all—a kind of bright-eyed delight in being cruel, whether it was to a horse or dog or a servant—or a little niece from another country, with nowhere else to go. But there it was: he was the master.

And meanwhile, Lucy had remembered who the visitor was.

“It’s the lawyer, Charlotte!” she insisted. “The old man from Geneva! He gave us that dark sweet wine and some cake while we waited for Uncle Heinrich—”

“Meister Haifisch!” said Charlotte.

“That’s right. Perhaps he’s come to take us away again—can he do that? D’you think he could do that, Hildi?”

“Hildi, go and find out! Go and listen! Please!” said Charlotte.