Did I excuse it still? she asked me. Did I call it a sport for a summer’s day and excuse it because those summer days were long ago? I would have given anything I possessed to make her cease, but she murmured on, wandering back through the years of her life, rambling sometimes in what she said, but always returning to the red-haired child.

‘What did they do to him that summer, Sarah?’

‘Please don’t talk like this, Mrs Rolleston. Please. I beg you.’

She paid me no attention. She had no interest in my answers, even though she asked me questions. She was aware of little in her bedroom except that someone of my name was there.

‘What monstrousness was bred in him that summer, Sarah?’

It was I who had seen the children returning to the garden with the shotgun. I had run towards them in agitation, knowing the weapon should not have been taken from the study in their father’s absence. ‘Don’t tell Grandmamma,’ Villana had pleaded, and then Hugh appeared and I knew he had been with them. ‘Sarah, we were only playing,’ he said, but none of them told me what their game had been. It was Haverty, afterwards, who did that, asking me to speak to them. Later, when my remonstrances proved ineffective, he complained to Mrs Rolleston that their game was continuing.

She murmured from her sleep and soon afterwards her eyes opened. She sighed, a whispering exhalation that hardly stirred the silence. A moment later she said:

‘How convenient revolution is for men like Cornelius Dowley! What balm for the bitter heart!’

I did not understand, and when I tried to think I felt my mind oppressed. Cornelius Dowley had to do with the tragedy on the avenue, and with the bridge that was being built. We had been talking about the children.

‘There are moments you cannot ever forget, Sarah. No matter how long you live. I stood there in the dawn, waiting for them to return from their party, and heard their voices on the sea. When I spoke they guessed immediately. “Dowley,” John James said.’

No one had ever told me this. No one had ever even faintly hinted. I heard her saying that Linchy’s murder belonged in a thread of carnage that was unbearable even to think about. She mused to herself. I could not hear, until she said:

‘I don’t know why I send that woman money except, perhaps, to buy more pain. For what on earth would it matter if people knew that a childhood cruelty has turned around and damned a household?’

‘I did not ever know.’ I meant to continue but did not do so. Instead, again, I asked her to rest, repeating my offer to fetch her cocoa or warm milk. I begged her to say no more tonight. She paid me no heed.