She was biting at a fingernail.

Fairfax tried to calm her. ‘Why don’t you sit down? Come on. Join me.’

She did so, keeping her gaze away from the mirror.

‘It must have been a shock for Adeline, finding out?’

‘Yes, dreadfully so. Dreadfully. At first she was angry and wouldn’t stop screaming. She kept threatening to run away all the time, to tell people the truth, people outside the family. But she didn’t have the courage for such things. Adeline was a fragile girl, very thin by this time, and weak. She was depressed, saddened beyond hope. You left school at fifteen back then, and she just remained indoors, keeping to her room. She was never a popular child, with few friends, if any.’

‘Except yourself?’

Camilla looked at Fairfax. ‘We grew apart, I’m afraid. I was a member of the family, the people who had created this drama, this terrible tragedy. She took to her room and would stay there for hours, sometimes for days on end. Weeks. She would lock the door, and refuse to open it. I’d leave a tray of food for her, a drink, and she would take that, but only after I’d gone away. I would try to talk to her through the door, but she never answered, not at first.’

‘Later on she did?’

‘Yes. Sometimes she’d come out to use the bathroom on that floor, the top floor of the house. But she always did that when she was alone. I imagined her peeping out, checking the corridor. So the conversations we had would always take place through the closed door. I’d pull up a chair and sit there, listening to her voice, and telling her tales about what people had been up to, or items from the newspaper. Little things. Tittle-tattle. Anything to keep her connected to – to life, I guess. Yes. To life.’

Fairfax spoke quietly. ‘Did Adeline let you in, at all? Did she open the door?’

A nod in reply. ‘It took a while. I had to be very gentle with her, and not push her. But yes, eventually, the door was opened. She was sixteen now, maybe seventeen. She hadn’t left the house for a long time, not even for the doctor or the dentist.’

‘What did you find?’

‘The room was clean, tidy. I was glad of that, to see that she’d made an effort. But she wouldn’t look at me, not directly. She sat at her dressing-table, staring at her reflection in the mirror. As though she couldn’t see herself or was staring at a stranger. You know, like a cat will treat a mirror?’

‘I know.’

‘It was like that. Like she had no sense of herself. And we talked for a while, in that manner, with her never looking away from the mirror.’

‘That must have upset you?

‘It did. To see someone you love, someone who has been hurt, to see them lose all sense of what’s real and what’s unreal, yes, it’s painful. But Adeline had a way of fighting back. Around that time she started to dress up. She liked to take the costumes that Mary Estelle had worn on the stage – there were a number of them around the house – and wear them, taking on one role after another, becoming someone new each time, as she whispered the lines from the playscripts to herself.’ Camilla smiled, remembering this. ‘There was one particular costume she liked above all others, the dress worn by the character Anna Kreeley in The Moon Awakes.’