When she opened the door she found Eustace on the other side. The colour had returned to his face, which meant that his headache had gone. Rosa’s, on the other hand, throbbed and throbbed within her skull.

‘I am sorry I frightened the child,’ he said quietly.

Rosa was startled to hear him apologise. He had never done so before, in all the time she had known him. But it was too late for such words.

‘I don’t care about your apologies.’

His remorseful expression soured instantly, as she had known it would. ‘Mother thinks that the children need a firmer hand.’

‘They are not children. They are babies.’

‘You coddle them, Rosa. They should not even be in the downstairs rooms at all; it is not natural for them to spend so much time with you. We have an excellent nanny with the most perfect references, who sits upstairs doing nothing. Mother says you will spoil the twins if you continue that way.’

‘She ought to know, I suppose!’ Rosa shot back. ‘Since she did such an excellent job of mothering you!’

Eustace looked baffled. ‘Of course she did.’

Rosa felt that chill once again as she was reminded that Eustace didn’t realise he was a boar at all, but truly thought he was a gentleman. Suddenly she felt tired down to her bones, hollowed out by all the hours of crying she had endured with Ada. Sometimes it felt like she wasn’t even a person at all, only a husk filled with dust.

‘We are leaving this house tomorrow,’ she said. ‘And nothing you say will change that. If you attempt to stop us, the ravens will tear you to pieces.’

She braced herself for the raging and remonstrance that were bound to follow, wondered whether he might even threaten to set the law on her and have her dragged back to the house like a dog. But instead his face seemed to crumple.

‘Please,’ he said, so quietly she could barely hear him. ‘Don’t go. I will be a laughing stock.’

‘I cannot even tell you how much I do not care about that.’