It appeared smaller to me this time, less terrifying. Now I could see that the letters upon the marker had been carefully chiseled into the stone by an unprofessional hand. PERDITA GRANGE, and then the tender plea: Pray for Her. The ground around the grave had been kept clear of fallen branches, the undergrowth picked from the mossy bed. I recalled Miss Grange’s mushroom harvest here, and my throat closed, thinking of her keeping vigil in this lonely spot.

The night wind drew through the inland pines, swaying them back and forth, so that their deadwood creaking gave the eerie sense of doors opening and closing absently. What might she have been, this sister of mine, had she lived? I tried to imagine her—like myself, yet wholly other. Someone who might have stood at her window wishing to see past the dampness and the fog of an ordinary morning all the long, long way down to me, her sister at her window. We might have been companions. I patted her stone. No. For it had been chance that I discovered her; had Papa lived, I never would be standing here, a witness to his long-buried secret.

Cook stood and turned round to me, and I saw her features had grown finer in the light—and for an instant, transformed, almost beautiful, almost—but I cast away the thought.

“When Nell was delivered of her baby,” Cook began, the moon rippling in the folds of her cloak, “’twas as if a madness had dropped across her.” She traced the rim of the shovel blade with an idle finger. “Nay, not madness, more a blankness—as if her mind had fallen to sleep. Morning after morning, I entered her room, to hear the babe’s poor, weak, hungry cries, and Nell upon the bed, unheeding, her eyes fastened upon the door as if she expected a visitor at any moment. Even I went unrecognized, and so I passed in and out of that doorway like a ghost. After four days, I simply took the child with me, and filled a sac with new milk and took up the feeding on my own.”

She stood beside the grave straight as the silent marker that rose to her waist. The square set of her shoulders, the cast of her head upon her neck reminded me suddenly of Miss Grange.

“And then”—she considered me—“there was a dreadful time, worse than the oblivion into which she was cast that first week.”

I looked past Cook’s shoulder to a sound, a soft snap in the trees beyond us.

“She had begun to walk, Maisie Thomas,” Cook continued, reeling in the past so careful, so slow, I think she never heard what cawed around us, nor hardly even saw me—seeing through me, it seemed, to that other time.