“Maisie,” she uttered. Still the tears came.

“Maisie,” she said more softly.

I looked up, sniffling.

She smiled and pointed to a captain’s chest behind me, pushed back beneath the eaves. “Go, Maisie, and open the chest.”

As in a dream, I did as I was bidden. I threw up the lid upon the chest, and then stood back, a bit horrified. For the chest was full of loose paper, the capacious grave of page upon page upon page of writing, now spilling over the opened top and onto the floor around my skirts. I picked a handful and regarded the jabs and feints upon the page, scraps of dialogue, dismembered scenes written on the backs of old accounting ledgers, the numbers bleeding through.

“What is it?”

“The tales,” she replied softly. “Born of what happened—to us all.”

“Who?” I whispered, gazing into the mess.

“Myself, my sister, my mother”—she paused—“even Halcy.” She lifted her hand to take in the wide room around us. “And we are, every one of us, all up here. Ourselves the very haunting. Ourselves the very house. What was longed for and did not come to pass, that is the stuff of haunting—that is the stuff of age-old fictions.” She nearly rose from her chair. “Oh, I had such glory in my head, Maisie. For years, I could take life and shape it as I willed—upon the page. I thought my life was vast and grand—our lives become art in my hands. And I grew proud”—she smiled bitterly—“proud with a craftsman’s pride at my renditions of our house. So proud, I lost myself in their making. So proud, indeed”—her voice was low and ragged—“I could not see the truth before me!”

She stopped abruptly. “And so the glory I took in weaving broke this house open.”

I turned slowly round to her, uncomprehending.

“Aye.” She trembled. “Aye, it broke open. And then it stuck.”

“What stuck, Miss Grange?”

“Every story of this house stuck; every voice began to stutter,” she answered, her eyes in the middle distance between us, “after her little grave appeared there in the woods.”

The attic barely breathed.

“Appeared?” I said, a dark fear rising in me. “What do you mean, ‘appeared’?”

“Maisie.” She swallowed and looked at me. “Maisie, I do not know how or why Perdita came to be buried there.”

I stared at her, horrified. “You do not know?”

“I do not know!” she repeated in a savage whisper.

“But … how can that be?” I struggled to make sense of what she told me. Even if she had fallen into some lunacy of forgetfulness, she had been surrounded by her family in the diary.