The old wall clock still insisted it was still far too early to set off for the airport, even allowing for fog. She remembered she had yet to take a set of towels and spare sheets through to the attic flat. The more self-contained Luca was there, the better, she felt.

Contrary to its name, the attic flat ran across three floors, utilizing the maze of old servants’ rooms that led off the back staircase beyond the service doors, along with the entire top storey. It had its own small kitchen, sitting room and study, several bedrooms, a vast bathroom that was supposed to be haunted by a giggling housemaid, and lots of little rooms that had once stored laundry and silverware. It was ridiculously big for just one person – her parents and all three siblings had lived there, along with a nanny, before her mother left. It even had its own little courtyard garden, and a roof terrace at the back on which a newly married Ronnie had scandalised her husband by sunbathing naked.

Nowadays, there was little evidence left of her parents’ time there together; Pax had been so young when her mother left them that she had no memory of living there before she and her siblings had all moved across to the old nursery in the main house. Her father had stayed on in the flat, drinking himself to oblivion each night, but most traces of Johnny Ledwell had gone. Pax wished her memories of him were sharper. She’d been just eleven when he’d died. Before that day she’d thought he would live forever, not leave her with a decade of fading snapshots.

She’d made Luca O’Brien up the sleigh bed in Johnny’s old room, which was at least tidy and had a lavatory next door. Unapologetically masculine, it had been a dressing room once, with a wall of heavy-fronted cupboards still crammed with hunting coats and dinner suits reeking of mothballs, an old-fashioned washstand in one corner, and a big, speckled full-length mirror which she glanced in as she placed the towels on the chest of drawers. Eyes pinched, neck poking scrawnily from her thick jumper, skin pale and dry as a bleach stain, she looked like a tortoise – and at least a decade older than her thirty-one years.

How many times had her father stared into this mirror? Had he seen in it anything that she saw now? It was Alice who had inherited Johnny’s dark, fierce good looks; Tim had their mother’s blonde perfection. Pax was altogether different, and yet she was the one who sensed a strong bond the others denied: the familial curse.

She unpinned her hair and shook it out, wild liver-chestnut curls that had loosened from clock to bed springs over the years, yet remained defiant, refusing to be tamed. Hers was her paternal grandmother’s hair, she’d been told. Johanna Dwyer had been the fast-riding daughter of Tipperary horse dealers who – if legend was to be believed – had been added as a sweetener to four good hunters and a harness draft, marrying the purchaser to seal the deal. All too briefly a goddess riding astride over Worcestershire hedges and hostess of the best farmers’ meets in Kinver, she’d drowned in the River Severn at just twenty-nine, the circumstances of her death shielded in typically gothic Ledwell family secrecy.