‘Away from here,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, and I just hope you’ve snapped out of it by then.’ As she spoke she rushed for the door, pushing Ellen out ahead of her, then slammed it behind them, turned the lock and put the key in her pocket. ‘Come on, love. It’ll take him a minute or two to find the spare key.’

Philip was hammering on the locked door and shouting like a madman.

Dora and Ellen switched on their torches and hurried up the path to the lane, their breath coming in gasps of fear.

‘Oh, Mum, where are we going?’ asked Ellen, anxious to get away before her father unlocked the door and pursued them. She suddenly had a monstrous vision in her mind of him hunting them down and beating them both senseless in the dark of the lane.

‘To the farm,’ Dora answered.

Oh, how she wanted to say they would go to Tom, but she knew if once she sought his protection, then she would never go back to the cottage again and her marriage would be over.

But wasn’t it over already? What was left of the promises she’d made when these days she seemed to be married to a madman? Where was the love? It had long since died under a battering of sulks and black moods, anger and violence.

For a moment she hesitated outside the cottage, but Ellen took her arm and steered her to the left.

‘Quick then, Mum, before he comes after us.’

Holding their torches before them in the pitch-dark, they ran as fast as they could manage towards the safety of the Beveridges’ farm.

This was the first spell Gina had tried since she came to work at the Hall. In the quiet of her sitting room off the downstairs corridor, the house all silent around her with Mrs Bassett long gone home and the Stellions in bed, the act of casting the spell took on a solemnity and importance that it had never achieved while she was hastily and surreptitiously conjuring her magic in her shared bedroom at the cottage.

She read the words very carefully – the language was old, the spelling unfamiliar – and lined up on her table the artefacts and ingredients she had gathered ready: various plants, which she suspected might be poisonous, a kitchen knife and a saucer, the inevitable candle, a charcoal pencil and some writing paper. She lit the candle and wrote her father’s name on a piece of paper, then folded it with some sprigs of the plants inside and burned it in the candle’s flame, dropping the glowing remains into the saucer, where the flames died and it finally smouldered into ash. Some of the words in the book she recited aloud, others she customised into a wish in her head.