Tanenwod released her. ‘I understand. Your fellows. Kit, he will need help. And Thomas Swinton …’ She didn’t finish her thought, though the silence hung heavily between them. ‘But when you need me, you have the flute. And we will be watching, always.’

She kissed Zita. Tom ran to her, and then, uncertain whether to hug her or not, simply bowed. Kit remained further away and just touched his fingers to his forehead.

Tanenwod returned the bow, became a hare and bounded away, and the three were left together, the house’s solid red brick behind them, and they stood in a circle, holding hands. Tom looked at each of them and could not decide which one he loved the most.

There were things to do. There were dinners to make and clear away. The horse needed to be fed and exercised. But they no longer had to do the bounds.

Kit was exhausted. He could not, or would not, go very far from the house, and Tom helped him back and, having made some hot tinned tomato soup for him, discovered for the first time where he slept, in a small white-washed room with a single bed tucked up next to the library, a single book on the bedside table. It was a prayerbook, ancient, its pages browning. Kit went for it and held it, muttering under his breath.

‘He’s gone, Kit, he’s gone!’ Tom said.

The boy, though, was shattered, and when Tom closed the door, Kit cried out as in a nightmare. Leana crept up the stairs and sat protectively in front of the room.

‘Give him time,’ said Zita when Tom came to her. She too was drifting from room to room, opening windows into the gathering dusk, lighting candles and setting flowers in vases. The gramophone was on, playing a gentle trumpet tune. ‘He was with Jack for longer than any of us. All those hundreds of years as Jack’s bondsman…’ She let the sentence drift away.

She was right. And Tom found himself rushing around the house, as if he might find some avatar of Jack hidden away. He turned on all the electric lights. Zita had placed flowers in every room. There were no hidden spaces, no extra rooms, no sense of bending time and space.

Gingerly, he entered the attic and found there only one large empty room with an initialled trunk in one corner, cobwebs and dust everywhere. The seven doors, the wraiths and all trace of Jack Swinton, it seemed, had vanished.

Kit appeared an hour or so later, when they were cooking dinner, Leana at his heels. Tom and Zita had opened tin after tin of tuna and sardines and olives and were boiling pasta. He stood and hovered in the doorway. Zita was wearing a black sparkly dress and had woven a feather into her hair. Her eyes were still shadowed. Tom himself was immensely hungry, and his jeans hung loosely on his waist.