And so, despite their distrust and mutterings, despite the fact that I was generally left alone, I was called for when Aunt Rosamud lost her door handle. I never liked entering the domain of Aunt Rosamud, and as a rule I should not be permitted in such an uncomfortable pasture, but it suited them that day to have me there.

Aunt Rosamud, truth be told, was old and grumpy, a bit lumpy, and quick to shout and point and pinch. She distributed charcoal biscuits to all us boys willy-nilly. She was apt to trap us upon the stairs and ask us questions about family history and if we got the answer wrong, confusing a second cousin with a third for example, then she should grow itchy and unpleasant and take out her particular door handle (Alice Higgs) and knock us upon the head with it. You. Stupid. Boy. And it would hurt. Exceedingly so. She had bruised, bumped and banged so many young heads with her particular door handle that she had given door handles a bad name and several of us might be cautious when turning such objects, bringing back such memories as they did. It was not a huge wonder then that we school fellows were held especially suspicious that day. There were many among us that should not mourn for the door handle should it never be recovered, and many of us were terrified at how active it should be if it was. But surely all of us felt some sympathy for Rosamud in her loss, never forgetting that Aunt Rosamud had lost something before.

Aunt Rosamud was supposed to marry a man I never met, some sort of a cousin called Milcrumb, but he got caught beyond the wall of the mansion in a great storm and was drowned in the heaps that surround our home. His body was never recovered, not even his particular plant pot. And so Milcrumbless Aunt Rosamud shifted about in her unmarried rooms and hit at the world with her door handle. Until one morning the door handle was, like Milcrumb before it, not about.

Rosamud sat on a high-backed chair that morning, full of misery, and with nothing about her saying Alice Higgs at all, as if she’d been suddenly silenced. She seemed a half thing to me then. There were many cushions stuffed around her and some uncles and aunts hovering beyond the cushions. She didn’t talk, which was unlike her, she only looked ahead, dolefully. The others, though, made much fuss.

‘Come, Muddy, dear, we’re certain to find it.’

‘Take heart, Rosamud, it is not such a small thing, it shall surface soon enough.’

‘Bound to, bound to.’

‘Before the hour is out, I’m sure of it.’

‘Look now, here is Clod, come to listen out for us.’