Wearily, I raised my head. There was a rumbling noise on the driveway—quiet and faraway, but growing.

“What’s that?” we said at the same time.

We listened and waited. Tyres crackled across the gravel, brakes squeaked, metal doors clanged. Cory and I stared at one another in equal alarm; it was so long since anyone had come.

“A van?” I kept my voice small, as if we were both in hiding. Cory went to the window.

“Oh, bother,” he said. “I’d forgotten about them.”

“Who?”

“The wedding canopy people; they always come around now to take it down for the winter. I suppose I’d better go and have a word.”

I laid the ruler across the pencilled line and sliced briskly with the point of the craft knife. I needed to change the blade; it was getting blunt.

“Go on, then,” I said. “Don’t worry about me; I’ll just carry on here.”

But he sighed and lingered.

“What’s bothering you, Cory?” I unscrewed the handle and slotted in a fresh blade. “Are you worried I’ll run away again? That I’ll make an unsupervised phone call?”

“No, of course not. Don’t be like that.”

The canopy men were talking loudly among themselves, and one of them banged on the front door.

“I’ll be as quick as I can.” He touched his hand to his lips as he passed, and mussed my hair with a kiss.

The attic comprised a long central corridor with doors to either side and daylight seeping through the broken roof. The first few doors opened onto mouldering floorboards and cobwebbed windows. One of them housed a wardrobe; one a broken packing case and a pile of dust sheets; most contained nothing at all. I’d grown used to living in bare rooms since I’d come to Byrne Hall, but the attics were bare in a different way from the downstairs—not so much faded grandeur as inbred desolation.

The furthest room was a bleak little hovel, much like the rest—a servant’s room, I suppose, with an iron bedstead, a chipped washbasin on the floor, and a matching jug on the windowsill. The ceiling was low and there were long, sad drips down the walls where the rain had come in. A bird must have fallen down the chimney once and got trapped, because there were droppings all over the floor, and tiny bones and feathers in the grate.

I don’t know why I went in; none of the other rooms had lured me. Perhaps I wanted to look more closely at the bird’s skeleton; perhaps I was drawn by the footprints in the dust. I can’t remember. I went slowly—wary of the weak floorboards—and there she was, to the right of the fireplace, leaning with her back against the wall and staring straight through me.