Tight-lipped, Johnny would only ever say that his mother had been the bravest of women.

‘You have her heart, Patricia,’ he’d told Pax when she was about seven, no doubt plastered out of his mind, although she hadn’t learned to identify drunkenness until later. ‘Kind and fierce. It’s a rare thing. You must take good care of it; don’t ever let it grow sour.’

Or old? Pax had found herself wondering more than once whether Johanna Ledwell’s premature death, like her son’s after her, had been of her own making? Was that the curse?

She shuddered. It was so cold up here, she could see her own breath clouding in her reflection.

Looking round at the bleak room, her grandmother’s kind heart stirred with a guilty conscience inside her. Luca O’Brien might be used to sub-zero Canadian temperatures, but she couldn’t let him freeze to death on his first night.

She fetched the oil heater from her old bedroom in the main house, deciding she could sleep in her mother’s room above the warm kitchen. She then locked the doors that linked the annexe to the main house, except the ground-floor one, hiding the keys at the back of a kitchen drawer.

To stop herself gravitating towards the Laphroaig bottle again, she went outside to pick a welcoming spray of rose hips and winter jasmine from the tangled bed by the front steps. The fog was suffocatingly cold now, the gleam from Lester’s cottage windows barely visible through its white veils. Having put the flowers in a small jug on the washstand, she went to fetch Luca a few books to read, some ancient stud manuals for amusement, along with Cold Comfort Farm and Wuthering Heights for irony. He needed a bedside light. She fetched that too, stealing the opposite partner to her mother’s bedside table which was one of the few in the house with a working bulb, forced to trail all the way down one set of stairs and up the other because she’d locked the interconnecting doors. Every time she passed the whisky bottle in the kitchen, her jaw tugged for a mouthful.

‘You’re a drunk, Tishy.’ Mack’s accusing words taunted her.

She took the back stairs two at a time. She would show him. She would quit drinking at midnight. Damn him blaming the symptoms not the cause.

The bedroom, already warmed by the heater, had taken on a whole new personality. Its reawakened scent hit her like a portal to another lifetime. Her father’s smell. Saddle soap, cologne, leather and whisky. Cigarettes, boiling linseed, Hibiscrub and whisky. Coffee, hot horse, wet waxed coat and whisky.

Damn Luca O’Brien for taking her final freedom away. Let him find a cab.

Downstairs again, she sat at the table, reaching out for the malt.

Her mother’s phone let out a shrill beep that made Pax jump, her fingers catching the bottle. As it toppled over, she grabbed for it and missed.

Behind her, the puppy had woken and started barking excitedly.