I burned with loss then. I missed so wholly my father’s voice and Clara’s touch – the way her fine hair fell through my fingers as I dressed it. Grief returned and battered me. Perhaps, I thought, mourning could never be fully emptied.

It was later than usual when Mary went to bed. Downstairs, Miss Gillies was not in her usual place. Instead, she was standing at a far window staring into the blackness. She turned and we sat in our customary seats, although she made no attempt to lift the embroidery from her workbox.

My heart began to beat harder. ‘I visited the graveyard today,’ I said.

She met my gaze steadily, showing that she already knew as much.

‘Yes, I was told of that. I’ve not been to his plot myself but I suppose that much is obvious, as it has not been tended.’

I wondered if she knew about the desecration. For a few moments she struggled with her words.

‘There is no more use pretending that all was right with William.’ Her expression grazed mine, looking for sympathy, but I had witnessed her lack of affection for Mary and was not moved. ‘I was not brave enough at first to give you the truth I owe you. I hoped that all that was unpleasant had passed but I was naïve. You would always have learned it sooner or later. The fact is: he was not as other children.’

The anticipation of some further shock left me chilled.

‘There were whispers about him. He was not a good boy.’ She gave a humourless laugh. ‘Why can’t I just say how it was?’ She looked to me as if for an answer, and I felt finally that I would hear the truth. She put a hand to her high lace collar as if she might find an explanation there.

‘How was he not like other children?’ I recalled his face from the photograph, the curve of his long lashes, the boyish kink to his hair.

‘They were beautiful babies – but then, this past year – the rumours about him. They were terrible. He liked to be cruel.’

Cruel? And I thought of Mary. Was he cruel to her? ‘What were the rumours?’

‘That he had gone bad. That he was unkind, brutal even – that he had unnatural interests.’ Her voice flattened with dislike, ‘Things happened here on Skelthsea. Strange and horrible things.’

‘All is not well at Iskar.’ Ailsa’s words slipped inside me again. ‘Horrible things?’

‘Things that you would not expect of a Christian child,’ she said tightly. ‘An interest in exploring other gods, if you understand me, Elspeth.’

Her statement was issued almost as a challenge, a dare that I might deny. I thought of the pebbles and the stone circle. ‘You mean like witchcraft?’

She gave me a dark look and a darker laugh. ‘As ridiculous as that sounds, yes, that is precisely what I’m saying.’