Eustace rushed to the doctor’s aid. In one movement he threw his own jacket over the man and tried to usher him from the room, whilst the ravens clawed at his head in a furious frenzy of metal wings and slashing beaks.

The commotion had upset Ada, who started to cry, so Rosa took her back to the day-nursery to soothe her. She spent the remaining afternoon up there, delighting Ada with the collection of clockwork fairies she had made especially for her. Eustace did not bother her and she did not seek him out to see what damage the ravens had done. She dined alone that evening, as usual, before retiring to her bedroom to get ready for Beatrice’s pleasure garden.

Her winter cloak had been brushed and laid out in readiness, the violet-coloured velvet trimmed with ermine fur and finished with silk tassels. She was just fastening the cloak’s jewelled brooch beneath her chin when there was a knock at her door and Eustace spoke her name from the other side. She frowned. Despite what had happened earlier, she hadn’t expected him to come to her room. Indeed she had assumed they would slip straight back into avoiding one another, as before.

‘If you don’t wish to have your eyes pecked from your head, I suggest you remove yourself from my door,’ she called through the wood.

‘Rosa, I must speak with you,’ Eustace said. ‘It is urgent.’

She scowled and threw open the door. She rarely felt any fear of Eustace any more, only a stale sort of loathing, like a wound that refused to heal and had turned fetid. Yet there was something about being this close to him late at night that touched some old, cold sense of dread deep within her.

‘What is it?’ she snapped.

‘I have something to ask you,’ he replied.

His voice sounded oddly hoarse, and Rosa noticed again the alteration in his appearance. When had this happened exactly? How had she failed to notice? The new cuts on his face from the ravens did not improve matters, either.

‘Please,’ he said quietly. ‘Call off the birds. I cannot bear to go on hearing the scrape of their wings inside the chimney, or the rap of their beaks on glass, or their claws scrabbling upon the slates of the roof. For the love of God, enough! I have done all that you asked, complied with every request, no matter how unreasonable. It is enough to quite undo a man.’

After all Rosa’s grief over Esme, her heart was a stone and whatever pity there might have been to spare for Eustace evaporated at his choice of the word ‘unreasonable’.

‘The birds will not disturb you so long as you leave me alone,’ she said. ‘If you behave honourably, then you have nothing to fear.’