I lit a fire in the sitting room, but it could do little to dispel the aura of dejection that had descended over the place. It was a house abandoned. Dust gathered by the wainscoting, cobwebs hung from the rafters. Papers and notebooks were strewn carelessly over the furniture and the floor. Whatever heat and cheer the hearthglow afforded was soon lost, swallowed by the lofty ceilings or transformed into a threatening phantasmagoria by the sombre tapestries hanging on the wall and the thick drapes around the narrow, arched windows.

When I stood from the grate, I found Quentin had sunk into an armchair. Open-mouthed and silent, he sat as if transfixed by the shadows now darting and receding across the complex patterns of the oriental rug. The light from the grate, the light from the candle he still gripped loosely in his hand, dragged at his sallow cheeks like red fingers, like a premonition of hellfire. I removed the taper from his slack grasp and used it to light a lamp on the table beside his chair. Standing over him, I contemplated his macabre transformation with bafflement and with sorrow.

Sorrowful indeed it was and more sorrowful yet for my memories of what he ‘d been not half a year before. Then, in my rooms in town, we had sat, like the schoolfellows we lately were, casually flung over chair and settee, debating long into the night with all the gay ferocity of old. A churchman with a lucrative Sussex living, Quentin was, as he had ever been, a fervent defender of the faith, an apologist for Newman, a supporter of Pusey, an ardent advocate of the high ritual and the deep mysterium. I, a physician with a small but growing practice in Harley Street, was equally determined to ride out upon the lists for science, to preach Reason and Experiment as the keys to comprehending the internal mechanisms of this clockwork life. How well I remembered the passion with which Quentin opposed me, the brightness of his eyes, the vibrancy of his voice as he proclaimed the miraculous and supernatural as our surest guides to the truth.

Now—not a fortnight since he had returned to Ravenswood to settle the affairs appending to the sudden death of his elder brother and sister-in-law—his strong, open face was lined and sunken, his lean, manly frame as much a ruin as the fragments of the old abbey that stood without the Grange’s walls. For all my physic, I could think to offer him nothing better than a dash of brandy. This, my hand supporting his wrist, he raised unsteadily to his lips.

The medicine had its effect. Coughing slightly, he set the empty glass beside the lamp, blinked and looked up at me as if for the first time.

“Neville,” he said. “Thank Heaven, you’ve come.”