Because I lost the candles from the basement, I have had to borrow my mother’s white candle from her reading room. The mirror is another matter. The one in my bedroom is immovable from its place on the wall, and my sister’s vanity includes a mirror as part of the furniture. The seven bathrooms—only three of which are in any state of use—all have mirrors affixed to the walls. In my search, I find myself stepping into the Rose Room with a shudder at the floral carpet that imbues the room with a kind of unpleasant saccharinity, at the air that is warm and stuffy, like a fever.

What would life be like without mirrors? Imagine the course of history in which identities must develop without ever glimpsing themselves reflected in a pane of glass. Who am I but that I know what I look like?

I wonder if Julian will be made to live without mirrors. Perhaps I will smash all the mirrors in the house, and then he will never know his own face. And then the house will never know his own face.

In digging through the drawers, I come across a hand mirror with an ornate silver handle carved into floral designs. The dusty surface reflects my prying eyes. I try to wipe it clean with the sleeve of my shirt, but the mirror nearly slips from my grasp at the sound of a cough very close to me.

Carefully I hold it up and use it to peer behind my shoulder. I think to myself, There is no one else in this room. There is no one else in this room. Yet the sensation persists—the feeling that someone is standing right behind me. If I turn around, they will vanish as if they were never there. What is this sense that we all have, this sense of knowing when we are being watched?

When I look into the mirror, I am certain I see a shadow standing just there—Julian, murderous Julian, come to slit my throat—but when I turn my head, it is gone.

The cough comes again, wet and wretched.

This was the sickroom of Frances Wakefield, many years ago. Her illness clogs the air with remembered disease, that peculiar feeling that must linger in disused hospitals and abandoned sanitariums. It is her history that lives here.

Each room in this house has its own peculiar history—the yellow nursery, which I avoid for the ghosts of babies whose cries resonate along the patterned walls; the stone tower, accessible only from a spiral staircase tucked away in a black hallway and seemingly instilled with the spirit of Gothic castles; the library with its memory space of books; and on and on.

Is it my imagination, or do I hear the death rattle of Frances Wakefield just to my left?

If I should run into my mother or Elizabeth right now, I think I would go mad from the shock. But it is late, and dark, and they must be in bed.