Black Annie. The name—uttered in such awful tones by my companion—was not entirely unknown to me. There was, I remembered, a legend attached to the old Grange concerning such a figure. Quentin himself had related the tale to me on one of those evenings at school after lights-out when we attempted to disturb each other’s sleep by whispering scare stories across the space between our beds.

I rose from my chair and went to stand before one of the windows on the far wall. Looking out between the dented leaden cames, I saw that night had now drawn down around the place completely. A gibbous moon, sporadically visible in the gaps between the racing clouds, cast a pall of faltering and sickly light over the sere expanse of grassland to the east. In that field, now visible, now vanishing as the moon went once again behind its shifting cover, there stood an ominous and melancholy apparition: the ruins of Ravenswood Abbey—the broken wedge of a chapel wall, the slanting monuments of its ancient churchyard.