Each step I took to my room was laboured, and once I was in my bed, even with so many candles, fear kept tapping at me. I thought of Greer’s mother dying at Iskar. The sound of the whistle. I could no longer deny it. A widows’ whistle to summon the dead – to draw souls from their graves. Miss Gillies, hearing the whistle in the servants’ attic, and not long after, the ghost of Greer’s mother being witnessed. And had I not heard that very sound? Had I not heard it on occasions when Hettie came? Perhaps the dead needed to be called from more than the heart – maybe they could only be pulled from the grave with magic.

I sat up, shivering in my nightgown. Hettie and William had not just returned at a whim – no, they had been summoned. Something in me shattered then. It was too terrible a reasoning to contain. And who had been the one to call them? Was it Mary? Or was it Greer? She had been Hettie’s best friend. Had she called her back because she loved her? I thought of that presence and the feelings it sucked from me – and knew that no comfort could be found in such a creature, and I was thankful that Clara had not sought me from death. If Hettie had not been called for love, then for what? I knew now that Greer’s grandmother had older beliefs. Did she teach them to her granddaughter? And if she did, and it was Greer who called them, for what purpose? But even as I asked myself this, I knew in my heart it was to do ill.

I recalled the rage that blistered the air when Hettie’s ghost had stood before me, embroidered from the very darkness itself. This was beyond anything that I could ever have imagined – too far beyond wicked.

I must have fallen asleep because I woke from a dream. I had been back at Swan House. At first, it had been as it once was – sunshine patterns on the walls, busy fires and comfortable, fraying sofas. I had walked from room to room, past pictures and tables, but at some point, the scene had changed and I was pacing not a furnished home but a blackened shell. The sunny walls dripped with soot and charcoaled furniture lay in ruinous heaps and I began to run. ‘Clara,’ I screamed, ‘Clara.’ And then I dreamed that I was in the corridor outside Hettie’s bedroom.