Mrs Lenister chatted as she worked, imparting island gossip, and for a while it was as if the rest of Iskar did not exist. Here, there was only the warm bubble of Mrs Lenister’s domestic ordinariness and Mary dipping a finger into the bowl to lick the sweetness from it, and I could have been anywhere.

Evening came too soon, and in the drawing room the clock ticked and there was the occasional snap of Miss Gillies’ scissors. As bedtime drew ever nearer, the night came turning its key upon my fear and all I could hear was the wind on the ridge and how it howled across the graves, graves that had not closed the eyes of those that lay there.

‘You’re very pale, Elspeth,’ Miss Gillies said. ‘I do hope that you have not gone down with what ailed Mrs Lenister and Greer.’

‘I am well,’ I insisted, and returned to the book that could not engage me.

‘Is Skelthsea not suiting you?’ She paused. ‘Or Mary?’

‘Mary is well,’ I said. ‘I mean, I enjoy my position.’

‘Something else?’ She put her work in her lap.

I paused. ‘Iskar can be a strange place,’ I said tentatively. ‘So many noises and creakings. I hear whistling and steps when there is nobody there. I have heard it has a reputation for being haunted.’ I do not know what I expected her to say. Would I have taken comfort, even if she had confessed that she too had experienced ghosts?

‘This does not sound like you. The island likes to gossip and if it can’t find something to say about the living, it will conjure up something to say about the dead. You don’t believe it, do you?’

‘No, no,’ I insisted, but my answer was late coming and an odd expression crossed her face. She rang the bell and Greer brought whisky.

‘You know,’ she said as she took a sip. ‘It is a strange house.’ Her eyes scanned the room reflectively and I could see that her thoughts had wandered from where we were and were roaming the corridors and rooms unused for decades, rooms that now collected only dust and secrets.

‘I was remembering Iskar today – Iskar as it once was,’ she said finally. ‘I was thinking about Evangeline too. We were close as children, or closer. I was listening to you and Mary playing hide-and-seek recently and it reminded me of a game that Evangeline and I played. We called it, “Whistle and I’ll Come”.’ Somewhere beyond, an owl’s screech tore at the night.