Maude took her time unpacking; not that she’d brought that much with her. One bag only, her dad had said, and it had taken her best efforts to bump that up to one suitcase and a rucksack, nagging him into slipping a couple of extra books into his stuff too.

He hadn’t changed his mind about her laptop, though. They were all going to share his, that was the plan. No unsupervised internet for Maudie. Fine, she’d find a way around that as well; maybe if she asked him when he was on his own. It was always a lot easier to get her own way if Nell wasn’t around.

She lay on the bed nearest the cliff – the bankside, that’s what Nell called it – and a seagull shrieked somewhere up on the roof, sounding a little bit too close. She felt as though she was tucked up in a nest, a crow’s nest, as if they were at sea.

She considered the view, the sloping, whitewashed ceiling and the bare beams that held everything in place. Oak, she supposed, but she wasn’t really sure how a person could tell. It was interesting, the way the beams slotted together, the way the structure of the roof, the house, was revealed, like a skeleton. Especially up here, where it was all so bare.

Elder House was very old, her dad had made a point of telling her that when he’d booked it, because she liked History at school and generally got good grades in it, and apparently that was what they were concentrating on now: the positives. She knew what he was doing, though. It was a sort of bribe, to make her go along with their stupid holiday, and when she’d asked exactly how old the house was, he’d gone all vague. He’d tried to show her stuff online, and that had actually been interesting, but he had spent so much time hovering over her shoulder, reading paragraphs aloud, watching her click on the links, she had begun to feel stifled. It had been easier in the end to close the laptop and pretend she wasn’t that bothered.

Maybe she should ask again, maybe he’d leave her alone this time.

She followed the line of the central beam, tilting her head a little, watching the very last of the evening light from the dormer windows cut across the ceiling, splintering into shadows that shifted and settled in the corner of the room. They could make her join in, she thought, but they couldn’t make her happy about it.

When she noticed the marks, she wasn’t sure what they were at first. A scrawled date, perhaps. Or maybe someone’s initials – the man who’d raised the beams leaving his name behind.

There was a wooden trunk in front of the chimney. Maybe if she yelled for her dad, he’d help her move it and . . .