Johnny was watching her closely. “It broke in your hand,” he said. “You must have touched it.”

“You weren’t there when that happened,” Lizzie said. “How did you know?” The scar on her palm itched suddenly, fiercely.

“I heard about it,” Johnny said with a grimace. “The whole house heard. Amelia was screaming loudly that you’d deliberately broken her gazing ball.”

“It wasn’t deliberate,” Lizzie said. “OK, yes I did touch it, later, after Arthur had taken you away. I couldn’t help myself. I reached out and just touched it lightly with my fingertips. I didn’t pick it up. And I did see something: I saw Amelia buying it in a shop in Glastonbury. That’s all.” She stopped. She could feel Johnny’s gaze on her as though he was trying to gauge if she was telling the truth. She could also feel the insistent throb of the scar, like a heartbeat.

Johnny was frowning. “I thought you must have seen something frightening and accidentally cracked the glass,” he said.

Lizzie shook her head. “I’d have been a lot more badly injured if I had,” she said. “As it was there was only a little cut where some of the splinters caught me.” She curled her fingers unconsciously over her palm. “I think I must have knocked the stone angel somehow, and the ball was dislodged,” she said. “Why do you ask? It was a long time ago.”

Johnny didn’t answer directly. “That carved angel was very old,” he said. “Unlike the ball it was a genuine antique. It had been in the family for years and there have always been stories about, how it was unlucky, or cursed.” He hesitated. “Millie didn’t believe them, obviously. She adored it. But I always wondered—” he looked at Lizzie very directly “—whether it was the angel that had sent you a dark vision rather than the gazing ball.”

Johnny’s words seemed to shiver in the air just like the cascade of notes Lizzie had heard when the crystal had called to her. Or she had thought it was the crystal. Perhaps Johnny was right. She shuddered convulsively. The memories repeated, the sense of falling, tumbling through space, plummeting into the void, terrified... She remembered the nightmare she had had only a few nights before and how she had wondered whether Amelia had also experienced that sense of terror when she had fallen to her death. She told herself fiercely that it had been a coincidence. Her gift of psychometry enabled her sometimes to look back to the past. She had never had the gift of foresight. Yet if Johnny was right and her psychic powers were greater than she had thought, perhaps she had underestimated what she could do.

She pushed the idea away. She could not accept that she had foreseen Amelia’s death on her wedding day. The idea was unbearable. The horror and panic suddenly clogged her throat. She could not tell Johnny that he might be right, that she had experienced a falling sensation akin to what his sister would go through ten years later, a vision of death. What good would that do?