I thought we must go down to the bottom of Heap House, that we must get closer to the outside. I thought that there might be some way along the tunnel, to walk along that dark route, then at least we should not be here in Heap House; that was the first thing, not to be in this place that shook and wailed and protested at the weather. Heap House, our mansion, was built as I saw it finally not with bricks and mortar, but with cold and pain, with malice this palace was made, with black thoughts, with aches and cries and sweat and spit. Other people’s tears stuck the wallpaper on our walls. When our house cried it cried because someone else in the world remembered what we had done to them. How the house wept and screamed and howled that terrible night, how it pitched and groaned, how it cursed and blamed, how it hurt in that terrible storm, as the heaps hit it and hit it and hit it again. We must get out.

Down below, we’d go down below where Lucy Pennant’s birth object was. We’d need that. Somehow we’d make it live again, and James Henry too. If Rowland Collis could, well then there must be hope.

‘We’ll go down, Lucy. We’ll find the tunnel.’

‘It’s probably flooded, Clod. It was pouring in when I was last there.’

‘But still the central part of the cellar was safe?’

‘It was a while ago.’

‘Then we’ll go down, Lucy. We’ll try it. And, most of all, please to remember, your birth object is still down there.’

‘A box of matches, I’m not going to drown for a box of matches.’

‘It’s not just a box of matches, you must believe me. My own plug, here, is a person, truly, a person trapped in the shape of a plug. And I don’t know what will happen to you if we don’t get your box of matches. You’ll get ill, I think, you won’t last long.’

‘I’ll take my chances if it’s all the same to you.’

‘I saw my own aunt turned into a bucket because she didn’t have hers.’

‘But the Grooms are down there, and Piggott, all of them! They know me down there.’

‘No, Lucy, no, they won’t be there any more, they will have come up, no one will stay down there, it isn’t safe.’

‘Then it can’t be safe for us either. I shan’t go back down.’

‘And, Lucy, there’s something else.’

‘I’m not going, you cannot persuade me.’

‘I think that Florence Balcombe is down there.’

‘Florence is?’