‘Do you understand what I’m telling you, Beatrice?’ her father had said that morning in the parlour. The circles beneath his eyes looked like bruises, the smallest sound made him wince, as if he were the one who was ill, and he gazed through her with raw, unseeing eyes. ‘Your mother is at the end,’ he went on. ‘She wishes to see you. To say goodbye.’

Beatrice did not understand, not truly, but thanks to her recent operation, she could not utter a word and so the questions piled up in a smouldering heap at the end of her useless tongue. The end of what?

She wished she could simply remain in the parlour, playing with her mother’s key collection. Beatrice loved the keys. Some were larger than the palm of her hand, whilst others were tiny enough to open a fairy door. They were made of brass, and silver, and iron, and gold. Her mother had said she liked to imagine there was a story that went with each key, and that the key itself still knew what that was, even if everyone else had long since forgotten.

Instead, a maid was summoned and Beatrice was hurried away so quickly she did not even have time to replace the silver key she’d last been playing with. She slipped it into her pocket unnoticed. She was taken upstairs to have her hair combed, her hands cleaned and her dress brushed free of wrinkles. For some reason, it seemed to be important that she look her best before being presented to her mother.

After months of not being allowed anywhere near the sickroom, it felt fearsomely strange to be ushered over the threshold into the moist, sticky sickliness of its walls. Beatrice gripped the key in her pocket as a sort of talisman. The curtains were drawn and the windows tightly closed, so as not to allow in any harmful sunlight or fresh air. Beatrice suddenly longed to be outside, hunting for mushrooms. It was a pulsing hot day, and the smell within the room was dreadful. It reminded her of the time her nanny had shown her the sticky black stem-bleeds upon a majestic old oak’s trunk and told her it meant the tree was rotting from the inside out. Knowing that Beatrice had a fascination for plants and animals, her nanny probably thought she would find this interesting, but instead Beatrice had wept at the news, and grieved for the tree as it slowly declined.

‘Go on,’ her father said now, giving her a little push. ‘She’s waiting for you.’

Beatrice walked slowly towards the four-poster bed, which had all its curtains drawn. Her indoor shoes seemed to creak too loudly on the floorboards and the room appeared to stretch and stretch ahead of her, so that it took an eternity to reach the bed.