Beatrice did not think it could be possible to feel more wretched. She suspected her wickedness had torn right through her soul, ripping her neatly in half – the final page of a story that no longer made sense and could never be finished.

‘She wrote a letter for you.’ Her father held out an envelope with Beatrice’s name written on it in her mother’s elegant handwriting. ‘Although why she should waste her final effort doing so, I cannot for the life of me fathom. Take it. And get out of my sight.’

Beatrice reluctantly took the letter, and the paper felt somehow hot beneath her fingers. Her father dismissed her into the care of a maid, who escorted her upstairs to change into one of the itchy new mourning gowns that had been waiting in the wardrobe for several months. How Beatrice loathed the sight of them. The letter was even worse. Beatrice felt suddenly furious with her mother. If she had wanted to tell her something, then she should not have died.

Once the maid had gone, Beatrice seized the letter, then ran down to the parlour to fetch her mother’s box of keys. Clutching them both close, she went out to the little wishing well in the grounds. It was dark by now, but Beatrice knew the way perfectly. She and her mother had come here often and it had always felt like a special place.

She emptied the keys into the well, listening to them clink and clang as they knocked against the mossed bricks all the way down. Then she looked at the letter still clutched in her hand and threw it in after the keys, as forcefully as she could. Tears filled her eyes as she watched it drift slowly down into the darkness, where she knew it would be swallowed up by the chilled water and would slowly disintegrate. Her heart overflowed with a miserable sense of grim satisfaction at the idea that she had punished her mother somehow.

She trudged back to the house to find that the servants had finished preparing it for mourning and had retreated to their other world below stairs – that boisterous, comforting place, full of busyness and chatter and squabbling and laughter. It was quite forbidden to Beatrice. For reasons she did not completely understand, her realm must forever be the chilly, lonely grandeur of the upstairs rooms – like a cursed princess continually doomed to her frozen tower.

Her nanny had recently returned home for a family emergency and so Beatrice was left quite alone. All of a sudden she found herself frightened by the strange, heavy silence that hung over the house like an angel’s broken wing. She was frightened of the room where her mother’s body lay. She was frightened she would go to hell for refusing to say goodbye to her. She was frightened that nothing would ever be the same again.