“Please. Please…” Celeste’s tiny hands were clasped like those of the devout.

“Just for a few minutes.”

“I’ll go get the matches!” cried Celeste.

“No, you will not. I will get the matches and I will light these candles. You will eat your lunch.”

“You sound exactly like Mother.”

Desdemona found her sister’s observation oddly insulting. She slipped into the scullery and collected the matches and lighted the finger-thin tapers, and sat down and ate. Their meal nowhere near equalled the fullness of the harvest carvings on the serving cart, whose figures had now become faintly animated in the guttering candlelight.

Now sated, they spent a few silent moments watching the tapers spit hot wax onto the tablecloth. Desdemona set her empty teacup down onto its saucer. “We shouldn’t have buried it. We had no right,” she uttered. Her words lacked the full wind of conviction and thus travelled jerkily at half-sail.

“We did it, so that must mean we have the right.”

“That’s a very childish way of looking at things.”

Celeste threw up her hands breezily. “The only things you shouldn’t do are the things you can’t do.”

“It’s that simple, is it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not. Is there any cake?”

Desdemona nodded. “It just so happens that Mother left a bit of slab cake in the parlour.”

Celeste moved from her chair, from the dining hall. In her absence the room grew strangely brighter and far warmer. Desdemona looked sourly at the bands of golden light that brightened the edges of the heavy drapes. The dining hall had become a great oven, airtight and stifling. Today’s drizzly respite was now being overcome. It was turning into the kind of day she detested; breathless and gnawingly still. Days like this enabled her to see the dust on the windowsill, hear the thick tongue-cluck of the grandfather clock on the landing. Days like this were awful because they squeezed her through the tedium of a day in the life of a young woman with no purpose.

“Aw, it’s not working anymore,” Celeste said mopily from the doorway.

Desdemona flinched. “You startled me,” she confessed.

Celeste made a “tsk” noise with her tongue and said, “It doesn’t look like night in here anymore. It’s all bright and hot.”

“The sun’s back out,” Desdemona said. She was looking at her sister, who stood in the archway of the dining hall, a small plate from Mother’s tea set balanced on her chubby palms. A wedge of slab cake sat ringed in crumbs. Desdemona then noticed the manner in which Celeste’s expression began to change. She had drawn her lips back and her cheeks blushed. It was the kind of face she’d seen the child make when she’d been embarrassed or been caught being mischievous.