Pearl always wonders what would have happened if Private West hadn’t been killed in action. With a different father, she might have been born with Myrtle’s lustrous eyes and widow’s peak. Or maybe not. Maybe Mother wouldn’t have birthed a second child at all. She’d still be on this side of the veil and it would be Pearl’s soul wandering in that mist, without a home.

‘I’m not saying the séance weren’t good.’ Myrtle wipes her forehead with the back of her hand. She’s rolled her sleeves to the elbow and there are purple splotches all down her forearm. ‘She was pleased as you like, that Mrs Boyle. But we can make it better for when the Society come. Can’t we?’

‘I don’t know,’ Pearl mumbles.

‘Well, we can. People want a show. Don’t matter to them you’ve got a genuine gift. They won’t believe us unless we dress it up in tinsel.’

‘But I can’t control it! How am I meant to make it better? I don’t even know what’s happening to me.’

Sighing, Myrtle drops a blackberry into a bowl and crushes it beneath her spoon. ‘I’ll rig something up, won’t I? I’ve been reading Missives from Summerland. Some places in London have these things they called apports.’

A cow lows from the street. Pearl turns to look. It’s a dun-coloured beast, objecting to a man running his fingers down her legs. Does he want her for milk, or food? She’s surely too pretty to be made into beefsteak.

‘Pearl? Are you listening?’

She blinks, draws her eyes away from Walcot Street. ‘Yes. What’s an apport?’

‘You drop them from the ceiling. Fruit, feathers, petals. Like a gift from the spirits. I could make that happen.’

‘You don’t think …’ Pearl wobbles on her chair, struck by a terrible thought. ‘It won’t just happen, will it? They won’t just start giving presents through me?’

Myrtle considers this while she inspects a blackberry. ‘I dunno, Pearl. Don’t think so. Seems to me real ghosts are more subtle than that.’

Pearl recalls the way the spirit matter flowed from her mouth and it makes her stomach cramp in panic. What else might come on that luminous tide? She might vomit forth objects. Manifest limbs. Anything could spew from between her lips and she wouldn’t be able to stop it. She wouldn’t even know it had happened.

‘What about the fire?’ Myrtle pounds into the bowl again. ‘I could toss some coloured dust into it. That would go down well.’

‘I hate it when you do that! It hurts my eyes.’