Eventually, I returned downstairs and found Mrs Lenister cleaning the kitchen and pleaded a headache, and a little later she came with a bitter drink. I must have fallen asleep because when I came awake, the room was in darkness and I was still fully clothed.

A draught razored in from the door which now stood open. My head was thick. But under the sleepy weight of what I had drunk came the awareness that something was wrong, very wrong. I wanted to retreat back to the world of dreams but consciousness ripped me full awake. There was a pressure on me and a scent that stifled my nostrils. Whatever Mrs Lenister had given me slowed my reaction and it was a second or two before my brain unravelled my senses, and when it did, my heart leapt out of my chest: she was there, across my body, a weight of dead skin and bone that lay along my own.

32

Terror robbed me of all reason, robbed me of movement, and I could barely struggle against the burden of her weight. The room was too dark to see, but the smell of her was suffocating: sea and rot and rage.

I opened my mouth to scream but the scream that was in my head came out only as a choke.

Standing, I fled breathless into the corridor, the imprint of her body burning my skin. My heart could not manage such terror. It was only as I regained reason that I saw that Mary’s door was ajar and discovered her bed was empty, her sheets cold. Fear struck deeper than a blade.

The house was stamped with silence; all sound seemed sucked from the air, leaving a twist of something abhorrent. I ached to hear Mary, to hear her in the trap of a nightmare somewhere beyond, but her absence rung in the shadows. She was not here.

My heart hammered harder and I tried William’s wing, but it was locked. In my own room I lit a candle. Upon the bed lay Bobbity – the new dress half torn from her body and soiled in moisture and mud.

All I could hear was Greer’s warning. I fled to the main hall where a drift of dead leaves lay across the tiles.

Oh God. What had my actions caused? Greer had said that I would regret what I had done forever. Hettie had taken her. Too late, too late. Grabbing lantern and boots, I rushed into the night.

It was icy. Sleet burned my cheeks. Below me, the sea glittered like a half-closed eye and the vision I had had that day in the valley returned to me: Mary falling through the darkness, suspended by gravity, hair twisting in the pull of the tide. Was she destined to be found as Hettie had been, washed up later, if at all?