“Yes, of course. Please, Mrs. Thomas, to follow me.”

“Welcome, Thomases,” a quiet voice spoke from the doorway just behind Papa. We all three turned round, to see the cook of Grange House standing silently there, her arms crossed over her bosom. Mama gave only the briefest of nods before turning to follow Mrs. French, who waited at the bottom of the stairs.

“Cook.” Papa bowed kindly to the woman.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Thomas,” she answered, dismissing him as she leaned slightly back against the door frame and turned her gaze upon me. Papa never seemed to mind the cook’s inexplicable command of their encounters, and I had by now grown accustomed to this woman’s yearly scrutiny. Yet that afternoon, I relished the chance to consider her in turn, and I calmly lifted my eyes to hers and smiled.

For an instant, I thought she shivered.

“Maisie Thomas,” she said, swiftly uncrossing her arms, “how you have grown.” And without another word, she withdrew.

Never mind, I thought, a bit disconcerted, she is not the important one. For though it was Cook who ran Grange House from belowstairs, and Mrs. French who held public sway in the middle rooms and floors, nonetheless it was the topmost figure—she whom I had watched for on our arrival—who was the possessing spirit of the place. I dressed quickly for dinner that evening, descending before my parents to station myself at the foot of the stairs and there await the attic inhabitant of Grange House. And long after the other guests had assembled, passing me by with a nod and a greeting, and after Mama and Papa had issued through to join them, it was she whom I now imagined descending the wooden attic stairs from her room at the top of the House to reach the servants’ hall upon the third floor, then down the next stairs into the regions of the second floor, where the large rooms of her family’s time had been changed to accommodate we summer people come to stay. Then on down the widest stairway, into the bright, hospitable lights of a fashionable hotel shining its face up for the rush and hum of dinner, into the clap and shiver of bodies just cased in new dresses and thin suits, into the soft mayhem of summer evenings—when our lives might suddenly thrill, and open.

“Miss Grange!” I smiled up.

She caught her breath on seeing me and paused in her descent.

“Maisie Thomas.”