“I’m going to get help.” I stroked her hand and stood up. “You shouldn’t be abandoned here like this; I’m sure there are things they could do to help you . . .”

The candle flame shrank to an orange dot with a blue halo. The last thing I saw, before it went out, was the wet and watchful glint of an eye.

“Everything will be fine,” I whispered, although it sounded absurd in the total darkness of that room.

Part Three

PART THREE

Stella: October 2009

STELLA

October 2009

When Cory’s hands meet around her neck, Stella finds she can’t contemplate death anymore. It’s come too close; her mind sheers away and fixes on other things.

She wonders what that noise is. That whispering, rustling, pattering? It isn’t just the rain. Clouds flit over the moon and she glimpses ghosts in the corner of her eye. The attics at Byrne Hall must be full of them—flocks of consumptive housemaids and tragic governesses from the olden days. One of the maids is wearing her hair in a braid, like Freya used to wear hers for school.

“I loved that painting.” Cory is so grief-stricken he can hardly get the words out. “It was the best one I’d ever done. It captured your soul.”

The painting in question is a drift of stained snowflakes at their feet.

“Why did you tear it up?” Cory presses his thumbs into her throat. “Why, Stella? Why, why, why?”

He is startled into silence as the door opens.

His mother?

But Diana is meant to be away; she’s not due back until tomorrow.

Stella knows it really is Cory’s mother, and not another ghost, when the light comes on with a rickety click and the bare bulb gives off a smell of singed dust. A few seconds pass before anyone moves or speaks.

“What is all this?” Diana says at last. “What’s happening?”

She removes her smart gloves, folds them, places them in her handbag. Cory’s hands fall to his sides and he retreats to the corner of the room, where he turns his face to the wall. Diana helps Stella sit on the edge of the bed and drops a handkerchief—ironed and scented—onto her lap. Stella is in a daze. She blows her nose and bursts into tears.

“I’m so thirsty I could die.”

A bottle of sparkling mineral water materialises from Diana’s bag and Stella glugs it down.