“Yeah, well.” He scuffed the gravel with his shoe. “What with one thing and another, I can’t say it was the best night of my life.”

Everything I said, when I was talking to Tom, seemed to come out mean or obtuse. I started trying to explain myself, but he cut me off. He said, “It’s fine, Freya, it’s fine,” and got into the car, and closed the door.

Chapter 10

10

At the top of the stairs I stopped and listened for Cory’s voice—or Dad’s—but there wasn’t a sound; even the breezy trees and the distant sea had gone quiet. We didn’t get silences like this back home. It was a silence with character and colour; it was the wakeful mind of Byrne Hall, brimful of history and intent. I wanted to run away, but I set the suitcase down instead, as if I’d been told to wait.

If the silence had a focal point it was up on the third floor, with Diana. I wrapped my fingers round the bannister and climbed the first three stairs—and nobody stopped me. There wasn’t even a squeak of protest from the old wooden floorboards. I moistened my dry lips and carried on, and the closer I got to Diana, the more the house seemed to breathe down my neck.

There was one window above the bend in the stairs, but it was clogged with ivy, which made the daylight meagre and green. All I could hear was the drumbeat inside my head. The others must still be outside; perhaps they’d gone down to the sea.

I walked halfway along the landing and stopped. Stella had never been here; the empty outlines that haunted this house had never held the shape of my fleeting, flighty sister. I told myself that I would know about it if she had stayed at Byrne Hall. One way or another she’d have left me a sign. A scent. A whisper. A message scrawled in dust. I would know. Diana had nothing new to tell me.

The first door opened onto a narrow, twisting staircase. An inconstant draught came whistling down from the attic, and I remembered those fallen tiles lying broken in the long grass at the back of the house. I climbed a couple of steps and drew back straight away, peeling cobwebs off my lips. There would be nothing to see up there except grey shadows and films of dust.

I twisted a different door handle and found myself on the threshold of a bedroom. It had to be Diana’s—I knew it before I saw her—because it was the only lived-in room I’d come across, apart from Cory’s studio.