I pump, transferring the milk to the fridge and then pull out the laptop from the cupboard. If I have some time to myself for a few hours, there is no way I am going to waste it sleeping. Moving into the sitting room I falter for a moment, sure that I will see the grit and dust, the tiny bones from the chimney scattered all over the floor, but it seems that Rav has been busy this morning. There is no trace of the filth that covered the hearth last night. I type Agnes Gowdie into the search bar on the computer, but it doesn’t bring up anything new. I try different variations, using her name, the village, Pluckley legends, but there is nothing that I haven’t seen before. Thinking for a moment, my fingers hover over the keyboard before I type in, ‘Elsie Sparks, Gowdie Cottage, Pluckley, witch.’ The usual sites come up, and I scan down them quickly bypassing all the links marked in purple that I have already clicked on. On the third page, I find a link I haven’t seen before. It’s to a small, badly made website that hasn’t been updated for a long time by the looks of things. There is a picture of the house, my house, in black and white. The roses around the door aren’t as tangled and thick as they are now, the roof not quite so covered in moss, and I realize I am looking at the house as it was years ago, when Elsie was a child. The article accompanying it is brief, and there is no author name attached, but I hold my breath as I read the scant article. It says that in 1949, a young family by the name of Sparks was one of the last to live in the cottage before it was abandoned.

Despite claims made by Elsie, the Sparks’s eldest child, that the house was haunted by an entity known as ‘the Pluckley Witch’ there was never any evidence of this. Following the death of baby Christopher, Lillian Sparks, the child’s mother, was removed and committed to a psychiatric hospital, after local police arrested her for the death by smothering of her youngest child.

Pressing a hand to my mouth I sit back, my limbs suddenly feeling heavy and numb. A child died in our house – not just a rumour, it really happened. I think of Elsie, how she had been watching Mina as she told me about the charm. How she had warned me about replacing it to keep the children safe. She doesn’t believe her mother did this, she believes Agnes is responsible.