I had sensed from the first that the reaction to his death was unnatural and I realized that this act of desecration must have been accepted by the whole island to remain, as it was, in plain sight. It came to me then – William was not beloved. Miss Gillies did not miss him and perhaps Mary neither. He had been disliked, disliked with such force that even his grave did not deserve the respect reserved for those who had passed. What could he have done to earn such loathing? It was only then that I noticed it. I crouched low, pushing at the object half buried by earth. But there was no mistake; it was a pebble such as the one in Mary’s pocket.

Shock left me stunned and my eyes slid back to Iskar; mist shivered above its roofs, and shadows crawled into the recesses.

The building stood so quiet, so solid, and yet it carried things inside its skin, things so dark that nobody dared speak of them – and I knew in my bones that something was amiss. It was as if I had been led up some false path.

And then it came – that thin whistle, sounding like the wind but not so earthly.

But around me there was no one, nothing. My mind went back to the times I had heard it before and nausea rolled in my belly. There was menace and intent to the sound, yet the landscape was empty of a cause. I stumbled out of the gate and back to the house, because I had nowhere else to go and because the rain had begun in earnest, leaking in through my collar and on to the clothes beneath.

12

As I entered the hall, Iskar felt different. The resonance of Mary’s grief was replaced with something else – the mute unacceptability of William’s life and the acceptance of his death. And Mary, where was she in all of this? What had William done to deserve such censure and was Mary implicated in some way? I had witnessed how Miss Gillies looked at her.

As I passed the morning room, the door was open a crack. Miss Gillies and Greer stood together at the window, their backs to me. Miss Gillies was leaning down and saying something into Greer’s ear. There was an intimacy to their pose that did not conform to the mistress-and-servant template and something, too, that spoke of long-held affection.

I made my way up to my room where the fire was not yet lit and pulled one of the bed covers around me. My hands trembled with dismay.

Never on those nights when I had imagined Mary and the new life here had I considered that something might be so amiss, something beyond the distress of my charge, something harnessed to the very air.