It grew colder. Winter had come fully and laid its hand everywhere – on the trees, stunted by wind, on the rocks and grasses; even the sea seemed cast in ice. Greer left me alone now – her ghosts had gone, and with them, some of her rage and power. Hettie was not there to instruct, and if she suspected me of banishing her spirits, she did not show it and I rejoiced.

I should have been happy. For a time, I was. The nights brought no fear. No pebbles or dolls were left in my room, but something began to prick at me. And one night as I lay on the sheets with the sound of the wind and the crack of cold in the joints of the house, a new sense crept upon me – a sense that I had missed something. It was as if I had dropped a stitch and now the fault was knitted permanently into the fabric. The doubt lingered, and while the days still passed without event, the nights became defined by uncertainty. Sometimes I would lie alert; at others I would fall into uneasy dreams and wake, skin icy with fear and a voice in my inner ear – wrong, wrong, wrong.

I told myself that it could not be so, that there was nothing left to conquer other than Mary’s own silence, but at the back of my mind there wove something nervous like an anxious finger tap. I tried to examine that tiny bell of alarm but I could not fathom it.

Patches of dried skin appeared on my arms and wrists and tormented me with itches; the bodices of my dresses grew loose.

One night I fell into a vivid dream. A dream of oceans, kittiwakes and cliffs that caught the sun, but the scene soon changed and I dreamed of Hettie once more – a dream with the bloody rip in her belly. This time, I was walking through Gulls Cry behind her, through the sand-strewn hall and up the stairs to the first landing. All the doors stood open, lit by candlelight. Up we climbed, up into the gathering darkness, while below, the candles went out one by one. Hettie paused outside her bedchamber, then made her way to an adjacent room. She stopped and turned, her face a blaze of fury, then she reached out one slim arm that seemed to slither through my skin and reach inside my chest, sending me into sick, shivering wakefulness.

I sat up with a gasp and climbed from the bed. The house was still. She was not there. I gazed out of the window to where the sickle of white moon turned the rim of the sea to silver. Moonlight picked out Gulls Cry too and I remembered the dream; its clarity and how the candles had snuffed to blackness, one by one.