There were lily petals on the stone floor by the doorway. No. Not petals. Strong white feathers scattered like an offering. And there was blood.

She thought of the cat Anna had mentioned. But the feathers were large, great quills, surely the cat would not tackle something of this size, perhaps a big gull.

Rachaela moved the disturbance of the feathers from her mind. She refused to be distracted, and opened wide the door, closed it, and stepped out into air.

The winter’s day was cool but not harsh. The sun rode in a thin blue sky meshed with vaporous clouds.

The pines were a black wall. They had crept up on the house to this side and, further off beyond the angled steeps of its architecture, they had built on their terrace, staring out across the cliff edge at the sea. The path was well-defined and broad. Quite safe, as Anna had said. Wild flowers starred the border, flowers that had no business there, it being too early for the spring. The cliff bulged before it fell, it curved. In gaps ahead it became possible to watch the splintering of the breakers eighty feet below.

Rachaela walked along the path, exhilarated by the freshness of light and open air. The vistas of the sea made her giddy. She knew the death-wish pull of space, the ease of falling, and kept well to the inside of the path.

Presently it coiled its way aside, in among the pine trees.

She looked back at the house.

Pale grey, stained with drainage of rain, other weather, and the velvet fingering of lichens. The roofs raised their crenellations, the smoke of their chimneys, their parapets, a brace of weather-vanes, which had somehow contrived each to point a different way. The cap of the tower was just visible. The windows did not pierce or breach, though many passed down the face of the building nearly to the ground. They were a solid witches’ brew of darkness. Here and there some inner shaft of light sent up a flare in them of yawning rose or stagnant green or the blue of an old medicine bottle. But this was a jewel not an opening. Keep out the windows said. A costive house, containing and intemperate. It fulminated in the grey skull of its walls.

Rachaela admired it. It attracted her. All she liked least about it, its imprisoning smother, appealed to her artistically and intellectually, even while the gusts of real air revived her body. She would succumb to the house in time, Anna had been right. Why fight it.

She walked on along the path and in among the black pines. Needles crunched under her boots. The earth was fox-coloured. More feathers were littered about a tree trunk; that was proper, that the cat should do its Goliath-slaying outside in the savage wood.