‘Wow.’ A shiver runs down my spine, at the thought of Agnes standing over a stove, stirring and muttering under her breath, cursing the people living side by side with her. I think of the herbs sprouting merrily in the border of my back garden.

‘That’s how it was back then,’ Miranda says. ‘Of course, once they found out she was Isobel’s sister it just reinforced their idea that she must be a witch.’ I must have looked sceptical, as Miranda says, ‘They might not have had the internet back then, but news still travelled.’

‘What happened with the landlady’s baby? Why did that make things difficult for Agnes? Surely using herbs alone wasn’t enough to suspect her of being a witch?’

‘You’d be surprised,’ Miranda says drily. ‘Agnes delivered the baby, but it was stillborn. Devastating, of course, but made worse by the fact that the landlady swore she heard the child cry as it was born. She said she saw a black shadow hovering over Agnes’s shoulder as the baby was delivered, and that he uttered a single cry before Agnes handed her a dead baby.’

‘Oh my gosh, that’s heartbreaking.’ I blink rapidly, seeing the flit of a shadow brush past the door the night I thought Rav was downstairs, a knot growing in my stomach. ‘You said she fled Scotland with only two things, what were they?’

‘A baby in her belly – Agnes was six months pregnant when she arrived.’

‘Oh.’ My eyes drop to the baby, sleeping soundly in the pram, his wispy hair just visible above the blanket. ‘A baby?’ A connection. I blink, imagining an invisible cord linking me to Agnes, one that feels rotten and decayed. ‘What was the other thing? You said there were two things.’

‘Isobel’s pearl necklace,’ Miranda says. ‘She hid it under her clothes, close to her skin the day they came to take Isobel away.’

‘What?’ It feels as though the floor has dropped away beneath my feet, and I lower myself gently onto the sofa, my legs suddenly like jelly. I think of the pearls that nestle in my jewellery box in my bedroom at the cottage. Both of them found in and around the house. Coincidence, surely.

‘A pearl necklace, and a baby,’ Miranda goes on blithely. ‘Things got worse. Several years after the birth of the stillborn baby, Agnes’s own child – a little girl – went missing. Agnes blamed the landlord, but the villagers were convinced that Agnes had done something to the child herself, especially in light of the dead baby she had delivered a few years before. Agnes spent weeks roaming the woods behind the cottage, searching for her lost child, telling everyone she knew she was in there, that she could hear her crying for her.’