Sadie was the only person connected with the family that Olivia hadn’t written about in her poems. He’d noticed that omission last night, and now he understood it. He’d been right to look behind the facade.

He followed the old woman through the low doorway and took out his notebook. She gestured for him to sit, and the cat on the window ledge stared at him through slitted eyes as he took the chair Sadie indicated. In silence she put the kettle on, got out cups and the tin of tea.

He waited, giving her space and time.

When the small teapot was set on the table and she began to pour, he asked his first question. She handed him his cup before she answered.

And in the next hour, he was very glad after all that she hadn’t come to the Hall to be interviewed by Constable Daw-lish.

Her voice was shaking when she started. A thin, frail thread of sound that worried him, made him careful neither to overwhelm nor overtire her. He could see, too, when it became a catharsis, like confession before a priest. A deep and emotional release that welled up slowly, and yet brought with it waves of intense feelings. She wasn’t retelling an old story, she was quite literally reliving old and very bitter griefs. Buried so long they were part of bone and sinew, and a sense of failure. She was—he’d been told it early on—by nature and profession a healer.

“No, we none of us suspected Anne had been killed,” she replied slowly to his first question. “But Miss Olivia, she fretted herself near to death over it, and Mr. Adrian—her grandfather, that was—said it was because they were one flesh, Anne and Olivia. But it was deeper than that. The child had nightmares and sometimes I’d be called in to sit beside the bed, a lamp in the corner with a shawl thrown over it, to hold her hand. Mr. Nicholas was only a wee thing, but he’d stand at the door and watch his sister with those deep dark eyes of his, and it was as if he knew what she was suffering. But Miss Olivia, she never spoke of what was in her heart. Not even to her mother. After a time she was better, and yet not the same ever again. She’d sit with a book in her lap, and not know a word on the page. She’d be standing by the window, looking out, and never see what was beyond the glass. I’d tended wounded soldiers in my time. This was a wounded child.”

“When did she first mention the Gabriel Hound to you? Or was it you who told her?”