She turned the corner and bumped straight into Angela Hartley, and it was hard to say who was the more surprised as each of their wash bags clattered to the floor. The vicar’s wife looked older without her make-up, an impression only emphasised by her pale mauve dressing gown and the anxiety etched deeply on her face. ‘I’m sorry to startle you,’ Josephine said, when her own heart had slowed a little. ‘Is everything all right?’

‘Yes, I’m sure it is,’ Mrs Hartley said, with an artificial certainty that implied exactly the opposite. ‘I was just trying to find my room. It’s silly of me, but …’ She tailed off, looking bewildered, and Josephine knelt down to gather up the soaps and toothbrushes that had been dropped, restoring everything to its rightful bag and noticing that the hem of Mrs Hartley’s dressing gown was soaking wet, as if she had been outside in the snow. ‘Richard went to speak to someone, you see, and I was waiting to say goodnight to him, but he 143was longer than he said he’d be, so I went to the bathroom while he was gone. I thought I knew how to get back, but now I’ve no idea where I am.’

‘It’s not silly at all,’ Josephine said. ‘I’ve been lost myself so many times today. One corridor looks much the same as the next in a strange house, especially when it’s as big as this one.’

Mrs Hartley smiled, grateful for the reassurance, and Josephine gestured back the way she had come. ‘I think your room is near mine. Shall we try down here?’

She led the way, relieved not to have to explain what she was doing in a completely different part of the castle, and they were soon outside the vicar’s door. ‘My husband’s gone to speak to someone,’ Mrs Hartley repeated, ‘so at least he won’t have been worrying about me. Thank you, my dear. You’ve been very kind.’

‘Not at all. See you in the morning.’ She waited until the vicar’s wife had gone back into her room, then retraced her footsteps yet again along the corridor. The lull in the wind should have been soothing, but the sudden quiet was somehow more unsettling, and Josephine was glad when it was filled by a peal of now familiar laughter. She paused, then took a short detour to the corridor that Archie shared with Marlene, stopping outside the film star’s door. Marlene was talking, although the words were indistinct, and every now and again a man’s voice, low and muffled, said something in response. Smiling to herself at the thought that Archie’s Christmas had arrived an hour before everybody else’s, she made her way to Marta’s room.

144

11

Never in all her life had Nora been so grateful to finish a shift. The blizzards had blown themselves out by the time she left the castle, but the sea was still high, and she could hear the familiar dull thud of boats knocking against the harbour wall as she made her way down to the village. The Mount’s dense canopy of fir trees had protected the higher paths from the worst of the snow, but by the time she reached the old dairy, any shelter had dwindled and the only thing in front of her was a vast lawn of white, exposed and radiant under a three-quarter moon. Something in its cleanness saddened her.