She has a strange sensation of passing outside her body; of watching events unfold from her sister’s point of view. What would Mr Dudfield have made of Agnes, had she sat at that table for dinner instead? If he had witnessed her delusions in action, watched her talking to the empty chairs that she thought housed Mamma and Cedric?

Two inspecting physicians.

A voice within whispers, ‘How long before Simon turns on you?’

He would not. Could not; he loves her. He has tended to her in a deluded state for two years. He will have a good explanation for these letters – she will ask him as soon as he comes home.

Shakily, she returns the other correspondence to the drawer. Two silver items glint at the bottom of it. One is another key, tied upon a red ribbon; the other is a pair of surgical scissors.

Agnes takes them both.

Maybe she can calm herself by cutting practice waves in sable paper; rolling out onto that ocean of black …

But there is something else that will help her do that much more quickly: laudanum. She came here for laudanum. Everything will look better after she has drunk it, slept, and talked over the troubling letters with Simon.

She glances around the room, but it is still unclear where the medicine is kept. The key on the red ribbon must open something besides the desk; perhaps one of the various cabinets?

Her eyes fall upon a heavy leather trunk beside the window that she has not noticed before. It makes her feel … odd. The surface looks worn with much travelling. She imagines it tied to stagecoaches, trundling up the cold roads towards Edinburgh. The people and places it has seen have left their mark, and not just on the leather.

The trunk has an aura, like Miss West spoke of: a tension in the air around it.

Agnes does not want to go near it, but somehow she finds herself kneeling down, trying the key in the lock.

It clicks.

A low growl rumbles from Morpheus’s chest.

He watches her intently as she pulls up the lid. The hinges creak like the timbers of a ship.

Inside are two large hooks.

She puts a hand to her forehead, trying to hold things in place. These are the hooks tied to ropes, which Simon used to fish coffins from their graves. Cedric told her about them.

But Cedric was dead.

She imagined that conversation. Unless it really was the ghost of her nephew …

It feels like she is peering into a coffin now: she has the same sensation of fear and disgust. Her fiancé has robbed the dead, sliced up cadavers … She endeavours to remember it was a duty of his employment a long time ago, and he was forced to do it.

There are other items in the box. Surgical tools – or perhaps implements for prising open coffins: a crowbar, a mallet, a saw. Her stomach sours.