Locked. But it couldn’t be locked, she thought. Emma certainly hadn’t opened it with any kind of a key, and she didn’t remember seeing a keyhole.

She hauled again, harder. The door remained obstinately closed, without a hint of movement.

Alice let the ring slip from her numb fingers, and it fell against the door with a clack. For a long moment she stared at the unyielding portal, not quite ready to believe how easily she’d been thwarted. A particularly fierce gust of wind tore through her nightshirt as though it weren’t there and made her shiver violently. Alice sank into a crouch, hands jammed in her armpits and teeth chattering, and felt tears springing into her eyes.

It’s just the cold, she thought. She hadn’t cried when they’d told her her father was dead. I won’t cry just because of a stuck door. I won’t.

All she had to do was walk back to the house, climb back into her warm, scratchy bed, and work things out in the morning. Get Emma to tell her the trick to getting in. She turned, wiping her eyes with the back of one shaking hand. The path back looked even darker and more forbidding than it had from the house, barely a glitter of moonlight penetrating the canopy to show the way. The trees shivered and shook in the wind, like something alive, leaves and branches rustling with a hollow, skeletal sound.

Something else was moving too, low to the ground, visible for just an instant as it crossed a patch of moonlight. It was a cat, a calico cat, whose white patches glowed like shining silver until it slipped back into shadow. It was heading along the wall of the library, back through the underbrush and into the trees.

Cats, Alice thought. There are cats in the library, quite a lot of them. Are they cooped up in there all the time? Or is there a way for them to get in and out?

Before she was quite aware of it, she was crashing through the bushes at the corner, following the cat back along the overgrown side of the building. It was, she had to admit, a stupid thing to do. She lost one slipper almost immediately, and branches snatched and tore at her nightshirt and left long welts and scratches on her legs.

At one point her ankle got stuck on a snag, and she had a sudden, horrid vision of being trapped there till morning, when Emma or Mr Black would stumble across her frozen, half-naked body. All this flashed through her mind in less than a second, as it took her only that long to free herself, but it left her heart hammering. The only thing that kept her moving forward was the thought of all the brush behind her; going back would be just as painful as keeping on.