There is no light in the room, but she knows the color of its walls. A pale shape looms. She looks twice before she knows that it is a statue covered over in a dust sheet.

“Open more shutters if you want. I’m just in the library next door. Don’t worry, if you see a ghost, I’ll hear you scream.”

The shutter is stiff, but she manages to pull it back far enough to see it all. The chairs are stacked now, the tables pushed back, and the chaise longue covered with sheets, but it is the walls that most strike her as different. Where the paintings once hung, where there were all those purple mountains and blue cliffs, there are now just darker rectangles of red paint.

“They’ve all gone,” says Edie.

Bowen turns in the doorway. “The paintings? Yes, all sold off last year. So much of it went out of the door, bit by bit, but not enough to settle the bills.”

Edie puts her hand to the cool marble of the mantelpiece. For a moment he is by her side, steering her around the walls again.

“It’s all downhill from now, isn’t it? This might just be the best day of my life,” says Harry’s recalled voice.

The plasterwork ceiling has come through in places. Older wooden panels show beneath. Could it have been that bad back then? Surely this decay must have already set in. Had she just not seen it?

“If I cling on to you, will you help me not to bounce back down?” she hears Harry say.

Music suddenly swells, and she gasps. Is Bowen right about the ghosts? Jazz music is playing somewhere in the house. She steps into the library as he looks up from the gramophone.

“I didn’t scare you, did I?”

“Briefly. Momentarily. Bravo, if that was your intention.”

The gramophone crackles through “Crazy Blues.” It is the same instrument, she recognizes, that they had out on the steps. She shivers and pulls her coat around her shoulders.

“Mamie Smith and her Jazz Hounds.” Bowen shuffles his papers and smiles. “I find it cheers the place up a bit. Drags it into the twentieth century. I’m sorry. I won’t be much longer.”

“I wouldn’t like to be in here on my own.”

“Do you wonder why I jumped at the chance of your company?”

There are books all over the floor in the library. Bowen apologizes for the mess. She steps between stacks of Shakespeare and estate accounts and thinks of Francis and Harry in a looted house, his feet picking between sonnets and maps of Abyssinia.

“If you wish to take a souvenir, I’ll turn a blind eye.” Bowen nods to the stack of gramophone records. “No one will know and I won’t tell on you. There’s actually some decent stuff here.”

“It’s quite all right. But thank you.”