I lay in bed, trying not to look at the supercilious stare of the man in the portrait, and tried to calm my racing thoughts. Too much had happened since I set out from London. There had been the man watching me on the train, the man who had tried to come into my compartment. Then that same feeling of being watched on the station platform. Then the creature crawling up the wall, the young man from the portrait bending down over my bed, his teeth bared, Matty with blood running down her chin and now a dead field marshal. Miss Deer-Harte had called it a house of horrors and it seemed she wasn’t wrong. But how did they link together? What possible reason could someone want for following me on a train? If the place was really populated with vampires, why kill someone with poison? Nothing made sense. I curled up into a little ball and wished I had never come. I also wished I knew which room was Field Marshal Pirin’s because Darcy was there and all I wanted was his reassuring arms around me. It did cross my mind to wonder what he was doing here. Had Nicholas really invited him to be part of his wedding party or had he pulled off another spectacular wedding crash? After all, when I first met him he had dragged me to crash an important society wedding and he made it clear that he did this kind of thing on a regular basis. It was his way of ensuring that he had a good meal once a week, and, I suspect, he liked the thrill of it too.

At last exhaustion overcame me and I must have drifted off to sleep because I awoke to an almighty crash, and not of a wedding. I leaped out of bed so fast I almost levitated, instantly awake and regretting that I hadn’t slept with the candlestick beside me this night. All I could make out from the glow of the fire was a large, bulky figure in white, standing just inside my door.

“Who’s there?” I demanded, trying to sound fierce and confident and realizing that whoever it was stood between me and the light switch.

Then a voice said, “Sorry, miss.”

“Queenie?” I said, anger taking over from fear. “What on earth are you doing? If you came to undress me, you’re about two hours too late.”

“I wouldn’t have disturbed you, miss, and I didn’t mean to knock anything over,” she said, “but I had to come down to you. There’s a man in my room.”

“At any other time I would have said that was wishful thinking,” I said.

“No, miss, honest truth. I woke up and he was just standing there, inside my door. I was that scared, miss, I didn’t dare move.”

“What did he do?” I asked, not wanting to hear the answer.