“Doesn’t count,” said Lulu. “I was deliberately smearing dust on her. I didn’t find the book, Mom, but the thrill of the hunt is on me now. I think I’ll come back during the week and take another look.”

“You don’t have to do that, honey,” said Fee. “It was just a thought that Aunt Amy had.”

“No, I’m interested now to see what the recipes are like.” Lulu paused. “Grandma Cissie was Grandma Jo’s daughter, right?” she asked then.

“Right.” Fee eyed her daughter warily, waiting for a sarcastic comment. To her surprise, it did not come.

“And Bethie-who-died-young was Jo’s sister?”

“Yes,” said Fee. “Why the interest in Grandma Jo all of a sudden?”

“Well, Charlie was asking about her. How old was she when she died, anyway? Bethie.”

“Quite young, I think. I don’t really know. It was a big family tragedy.”

“People were always dying young in those days,” said Emma. “They always were in Dickens, anyway.”

“You didn’t read that in this house,” said Fee darkly: she had strong feelings about Dickens’s treatment of his female characters. “That man set the women’s cause back by a hundred years.”

“Someone in the family once liked him,” said Lulu. “There are lots of old copies of his books up in the attic, and they look pretty well read, too.”

In fact, the books looked as if they had been not so much read as devoured, with cracked spines and pages crumpled and spattered with stains by someone untidy a hundred years ago and more.

“They can stay in the attic,” said Fee, who did not share her ancestor’s admiration for the writer.

“I’m Great-Great-Great-Aunt Beth! I’m dyyyying!” Sophie cast herself dramatically on the worn green sofa in the corner of the room, one arm flung to the floor, and looked up for Lulu to join the charade.

Lulu looked coldly down on her younger sister.

“You have no heart, Sophie,” she said.

“What?” From her prone position, Sophie stared up at Lulu in surprise; making fun of Grandma Jo’s family had been an entertainment the two of them had cherished since their childhood.

“Someone died,” said Lulu. “Did you ever think how hard that must have been for the rest of them? What would you do if I died, just lie on the sofa imitating me and thinking it was funny?”

Astonished into silence, Sophie looked over at Emma, who only shrugged. Lulu crossed the room to the wall by the window to examine a photograph of all three sisters, laughing and windblown in their teens, on a family holiday in Scotland. “When are you moving in to ruin my life, anyway?” she said.

“On Saturday.” Sophie sat up and pushed at her hair. “It’s all sorted. I phoned my friend Jamie while you were upstairs—he’s got a van and he’s going to help me. I haven’t got much stuff, being a wandering gypsy player and all. But there are all those stairs at Charlie’s, and he’s going to help me carry it all up.”