Clutching the yelping creature to my chest, I mutter soothing words into his ears, scratching him in just the right place so that he settles down to enjoy the fuss, only occasionally casting yearning looks at Mother.

“We will discuss this another time, Beatrice,” she says tightly. She has obviously decided that the party is the priority at the moment, and that fact has earned me a reprieve. “The most important thing is to try to get you looking vaguely respectable.”

Her eyes travel over me with a look of exhausted despair and a shudder passes through her fine-boned body. I can only assume that the addition of a mud-splattered terrier has done little to improve my appearance but at least he has distracted her from the matter of the glow-worms. It’s important to look on the bright side in these situations.

“The guests will be here soon,” she continues, an edge of panic creeping into her voice. “Go and clean yourself up right now.”

“Of course,” I murmur obediently. I tuck Eustace under one arm and, while her back is turned, scoop up the jam jar, following her meekly inside.

“Evening, Hobbs,” I sing out to the stony-faced butler who stands looking creakingly proper in the great hallway. It is, I notice, looking slightly less shabby in here than usual. There are several large vases dotted around, full of blooms offered up by the garden, and hiding the worst of the peeling paint and mouldering woodwork.

“Good evening, Miss Beatrice,” he intones gloomily. Not by so much as a flicker of one winged white eyebrow does he register my dishevelled appearance.

“Did you adjust the seating plan, Hobbs?” Mother asks anxiously, and while they are both distracted I slip up the sweeping stone staircase, a wriggling Eustace still gripped firmly in my arms.

Langton Hall is my family’s ancestral home and you would be hard pressed to find a more crumblingly Gothic monstrosity in all of England. One particularly dissolute member of the family tree gambled away the Langton fortune a few hundred years ago and the following generations have survived on increasingly tight purse strings. This means that there are whole sections of the rambling old building that are completely uninhabitable – by humans anyway, although we’ve got our fair share of bats and mice. We also have the cobweb-filled hallways, glowering gargoyles, and ominously creaky floorboards that add up to make a storybook-worthy ghostly pile. As a matter of fact, the first time I read Northanger Abbey, I wondered if Jane Austen had ever been a guest at Langton Hall herself.