On nights like this, the windows rattled in their frames as the darkness pressed up close against them. The flagstones beneath Rosa’s feet were slabs of ice that drove blunt blades through her legs, slicing at the skin of her aching thighs. Her damp nightdress seemed to freeze into a single sheet, stiff as a paper doll’s dress. The beating heat of her family’s plantation in Georgia seemed a million miles away. She hadn’t known such cold could exist in the world. Even the inside of her mouth was cold – her tongue, and her cheeks, and the roof itself. There was blood on her nightdress and she felt unlike herself – an actor in a play who has forgotten their lines, a tapestry that has been unpicked thread by thread. For the first time in her life, she simply had no idea what on earth she ought to do next.

To make matters worse, she soon became hopelessly lost. It was almost as if the rooms moved when she wasn’t looking. As if the mansion was against her, taking spiteful pleasure in her confusion. Too late, she recalled how the housekeeper had revealed that she still went about her day with a map of the mansion tucked into her apron pocket, despite the fact that she had worked there for years. And there were several maids who, in their first days, had been driven to despair and had to ring servants’ bells in order to be found and rescued from whatever part of the house they had wandered into. Rosa thought of this and her smoulder of panic quickly turned into a blaze of horror inside her chest. Time was moving on and she simply could not be found like this in the morning, sweating into her bloodied nightgown, freezing and frightened as a lost child.

It did not help that the house was full of clocks – hundreds and hundreds of them – their round faces peering out at her from every shadow, shining like miniature moons. When the servants had been presented to her upon her arrival, she recalled how there had been one footman whose sole duty was to wind and maintain Raven Hall’s many timepieces. The task of getting their mechanisms all to strike at precisely the same moment proved to be impossible, however, and Rosa found that the bells and chimes clashed on, at war with each other, for a good five minutes after the hour had passed.