“Night after night, she would walk. And as I lay in my own chamber with her baby snug and close to my side, I heard her footsteps wander up and down the dark passageway. And heard the sound of her hands.” Cook gripped the shovel still tighter.

“The sound of her hands?”

“Pressing into the walls of the corridor, pressing them softly as she passed along.” Cook let the shovel drop and raised her own two hands up before my face, placing one thumb to the other to achieve a terrible bird of hands, the fingers stretched in broad, bent wings.

“But one night, I heard the footsteps in the passage stop outside my door, and then saw the door swing open, and Nell stood there for a minute, a wide and staring half sleep upon her face. Without waking, she advanced to the room and took her child from where it slept beside me, though I do not know how she knew where to find the baby—she had not shown a flicker of interest all the many days since the birth.”

Cook stopped speaking suddenly. There came again a crack, another small snap between the trees. We both turned in the direction of the sound and listened. But it was nothing after all. I turned round.

“And then?” I prodded.

“I followed her at a distance, out into the woods, keeping to the edge of the old rock wall.”

Cook kicked softly at the blade of the fallen shovel and would not venture forward, even as the picture of Miss Grange’s night walk crossed in the air between us.

“And when she arrived here—” Cook sighed, stopped abruptly, and looked at me.

“Yes?”

“She set her baby carefully down and took from her pocket a teaspoon.”

I stared. But now Cook rushed forward with the tale. “And she began to dig with her spoon, steady as a workman, into that rocky ground.

“At that, I stepped forward, for I feared her, even sleeping as she was. ‘What are you doing?’ I whispered to her. But she did not look up. She did not pause. ‘I must find her. I must find her,’ she cried. ‘Hush.’ I replied. ‘She is gone.’”

“Who?” I interjected.

“Her mother,” Cook burst forth, anguished.

“The Widow Grange?”

“Aye,” she whispered, and closed her eyes. “You would call her that.”

Tears started up in my own eyes at the vision of Miss Grange’s misery there in the dark, her baby asleep beside her as she dug to find her own mother in the ground.

“What did she mean to do, do you think?”

Now Cook looked directly at me and did not quail. “To bury her own child.”

I stepped back, horrified. “Never.”

“Aye, Maisie Thomas, she did. Nell Grange—your Miss Grange—intended to bury her own child.”