The boy looked up with eyes that seemed huge in the dimness. She could clearly see her candle’s flickering flame reflected back in each dark pupil. There was a sunken, sallow look about his face and one of his arms was withered.

‘I live here,’ he said. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Why, I live here too,’ she said, surprised that the boy didn’t recognise her accent, if nothing else. ‘I’m the new duchess.’

The boy narrowed his eyes at her. ‘No, you’re not.’

‘But I am. Look, you’re sitting underneath my portrait.’

The boy shook his head vehemently.

‘Why are you crying?’ Rosa asked, trying a different approach.

‘I’m trying to find the carousel,’ he said. ‘Do you know where it is?’

His eyes were suddenly bright with an odd hunger Rosa didn’t understand.

‘I’m not sure what you’re talking about,’ she said. ‘What carousel?’

But the boy only scrambled to his feet. ‘I have to go. I’m not supposed to be here.’

Rosa called for him to wait, but he ran off into the shadows of the gallery and his footsteps faded away. She assumed he must have gone back below stairs.

The next morning she questioned her lady’s maid, Jill, about him, but the girl only looked baffled.

‘None of the servants have children, miss.’

‘But then where did that boy come from?’

Jill only stared at her. ‘Raven Hall is no place for children.’

When Rosa questioned the housekeeper, Mrs Wright, she received the same answer.

‘Well, someone must know who he is, if he’s living here in Raven Hall,’ Rosa said, frustrated. ‘He was quite small, with a greyish tinge to his skin, as if he’d been ill. He had a withered arm.’

‘I’m very sorry, your grace,’ Mrs Wright replied. ‘I don’t know what you want me to say.’

Rosa knew that the boy had been there. One did not have conversations with wraiths. The most likely explanation seemed to be that whichever servant he belonged to did not have permission to have him in the house, and so Rosa didn’t mention the boy to Eustace, in case she got anyone into trouble. Besides which, the thought of seeing her husband that morning made her feel literally sick.

She didn’t see the boy again, but as the days went by, she often heard him, crying quietly during the night. And it seemed to her that he was perhaps the only other person at Raven Hall who was as unhappy as she was.