Anna woke hanging against her safety belt. When she moved her head hurt and a dark spinning movement began around her, going faster and faster until she was sick. After that she felt a little better and was able to open her eyes.
The Volvo had ended up on its side at the base of the bank. Through the driver’s side window could be seen the greyish, leggy stems of gorse bushes; a patch of sky. The windscreen sagged inwards, frosted and crystalline, surrounded by loose ribbons of rubber. There was a smell of fuel. Anna kicked and wriggled to get her weight on to the transmission tunnel, then undid the safety belt and slithered out through the windscreen. The effort of this caused her to throw up again, so she sat in the wet grass, looking around at the gorse bushes and thinking. I’m all right. I’m alive. The relief she felt was exuberant but distant. She couldn’t quite get in touch with it. Nothing seemed broken, though her upper body was bruised and sore. She looked at her watch. It was quarter to four in the afternoon. Oh my God, she thought. John. John and Eleanor. I’d better get going.
After tearing its way through the hedge, the Volvo had rolled down the bank, turning over once or twice before it settled into the gorse. From up in the lane where Anna stood swaying and holding her ribs, you wouldn’t know it was there. As she turned to go the world spun briefly – she reached out without thinking for something to hold on to – and she had a sudden clear memory of the accident. In it, the woman who had stepped out into the road in front of her seemed to be floating, perhaps a foot off the ground. ‘The things you think,’ Anna admonished herself.
She stared around vaguely. ‘I wonder where she went? At least I didn’t hit her.’ This conclusion seemed to release her and she set out for the house. She had a less than clear idea of where it was from here. Also she was very thirsty, but she could have a drink when she got there.
*
At the back of the chamber in which I had been trapped, a staircase had been cut into bare earth, but it led up to a solid ceiling and I could make no escape that way. I hunted around the room; I even tried to leap for the hole through which the child had reached down to me, but to no avail. It took some finding and a bit of digging, but at last, behind the staircase I finally managed to locate the entrance to the wild road the fox had blasted through to reach me when last I had been here, diverting it from its time into his own. Now it felt musty and abandoned. It had not, I suspect, been used by cats in my lifetime, or probably even that of my grandfather. It was thin and weak, and when I stuck my head into it, the compass winds there were barely more than a chill breeze carrying a haze of souls whose energies had never been redirected. My lion form was slow to come upon me in this place, and my thoughts felt tired and sluggish. It took far longer than it should have done to find my way back into the world.
*
Late afternoon, Nonesuch.
Mark and Oliver Holland emerged from the rhododendrons on to the Great Lawn, where they stood for a moment energetically brushing each other’s Guernsey pullovers and pressed blue jeans. At their feet lay a blue polythene fertiliser bag, inside which something seemed to be making angry but furtive movements. At one point, while they were cleaning the leaf mould off their hand-made Australian jodhpur boots, the bag rolled to one side and became quite violently agitated.
‘Lively little devils,’ said Mark.
‘Yes, they are, aren’t they?’
‘But not as lively as the other one.’
‘No, not that lively,’ Oliver agreed. He stopped what he was doing to watch a magpie fly across the lawn. ‘Was that a jay?’ he asked. ‘Because it certainly looked like a jay to me.’
The last time they came to Nonesuch they had only managed to take the one cat and that one cat had been more trouble than most of the rest put together, since it had bitten and clawed them both, and then howled unmercifully when they had shut it away. Now they had come back for more. As many cats as they could get, that was what they wanted. As many of these cats as they could get, for the product development people at English Lion to work on.
‘We could look over there,’ said Oliver.
‘We could,’ Mark agreed. He picked up the fertiliser bag and swung it over his shoulder. ‘Well, shall we do that?’
‘Yes.’
They were in the centre of the lawn when the earth seemed to rearrange itself in front of them and a woman came out. The lawn bulged and shifted in a sort of optical illusion, just a brief delusory rearrangement of things, and the woman popped out, massive and bone-coloured, to tower above them in her eternal open-thighed squat. Her yellow feet were planted in the earth. They knew her. They knew her of old. They were relieved to see her. ‘Put those cats down,’ she told them. ‘Forget all that rummaging around. You’re not here to poke your noses in. You never were. You’re here because she needs you.’
‘We wondered why we were here,’ Mark said.
‘She needs you now.’
‘We thought,’ Oliver said, ‘she was dead.’
‘Never think, boys,’ she reminded them. ‘Never think, my nice boys.’
So they dropped the fertiliser bag and trailed off across the lawn towards the front of the house, their voices rising and falling as they went.
‘I’m sure it was a jay.’
‘I don’t think it was, you know.’
The fertiliser bag heaved for a moment or two, then disgorged two female tabby cats who, barely able to believe their luck, exchanged a single puzzled glare before running off in opposite directions.
*
I became so disorientated that I followed the old highway for miles as it doubled back on itself like a dying grass snake and when at last I regained the presence of mind to abandon it I found myself way out past the northern side of the village and had to enter two further highways in order to make my way back to familiar territory. Within minutes of using wild roads that were kept powerful and clear by regular use, my head had cleared and I navigated my way back to the lane in front of Nonesuch. I was just about to enter the gates when a fleeing tabby cat almost bowled me over. I dodged out of its way and turned to watch it scurrying down the road, its ears flat to its head and its hind legs bunching and leaping like a scared rabbit’s, and when I looked back again I was confronted by the sight of Grizelda, making her own urgent but rather more stately progress down the drive towards me.
‘I’m leaving,’ Griz informed me matter-of-factly. ‘So don’t try to stop me.’
‘On your own? Where will you go?’
‘Anywhere away from here is good enough for me. This place is becoming far too strange for an old cat like me to stand it any longer. Nightmares all the time; people stealing cats; great white figures rising out of the ground. I’ve had enough of it and if you’d got any sense you’d not be coming back while you have the chance to get away with your skin intact.’
‘Griz – I have to see the Besom. Do you know where she is?’
Griz shook her head sadly. ‘Silly old mog. I tried to persuade her to come with me, but she wasn’t having any of it. Said she was too old to move again and that if you weren’t there to sort out the White Lady she’d have to do it herself. So I said to her, “Pol Tregenna, I’ve known you most of my life, which is far too long for most cats to remember, and you’ve always been as stubborn as a mule. Have it your own way.” And off I went.’
‘But where is she?’ I asked, suddenly chilled.
‘She and Caterina were on their way to the knot garden when last I saw them—’
Without another word I fled up the driveway.
*
Anna sat at the side of the road with her legs tucked up and her arms clasped round her knees. Every so often she applied her dampened handkerchief to the bruises round her right eye. It’s so ridiculous, she thought.
She had wandered into the shadow of the downs, where the tangled lanes slipped down the escarpment before fanning out into the valley like the veins on the back of a hand – a maze of ancient greenways resurfaced with tarmac in the 1920s but still following the vanished commercial logic of the Middle Ages. Little clear identical streams ran beside them. Every barn, hazel coppice, or intimate fold in the hillside looked the same as every other.
I’m lost. I don’t know what they’d all think of me.
She was too dizzy and disorientated to be quite sure whom she meant by they, but the thought made her feel she wasn’t doing enough. After a minute or two she got herself to her feet again and began to walk. She was too far north now and it was late in the afternoon. John was one of them. Francis was, too. They were all depending on her. Poor old Francis, she thought. Eleanor will have worn him to a shred.
After she had been walking for some minutes she heard a dull whining noise, intermittent and indistinct, somewhere off towards Ashmore. It grew rapidly louder, turned from a whine into a roar and a bright-red motorcycle burst round a bend in the lane in front of her, front suspension bumping and boring as its rider fought the understeer. Anna shrank away; then, understanding what she was seeing, stepped back into the road and waved her arms. ‘It’s me!’ she cried. ‘It’s me!’
There was a shriek of brakes, a strong smell of burning rubber. The machine slewed past her, mounted the grass verge, from which its enormous rear tyre tore great clods of earth, then, fishtailing wildly, disappeared round the next corner.
‘Oh dear,’ whispered Anna.
There was a silence. After a moment, the motorcycle came back into view, moving much more slowly. It stopped in front of her. ‘Bloody hell, Anna,’ said Alice Meynell with a grin.
Alice had been back in the country for two hours. She was in love, she admitted, and jet-lagged, and the only cure she knew for either of those things was motorcycling. ‘Best fun in the world, these lanes, as long as you keep your wits about you.’ She was pleased to see her friend – though, as she put it, ‘a bit arse-over-tip’ to find her wandering about concussed like this in the middle of nowhere. She had no idea what was going on and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. But – love or not, jet-lag or not – she was still Alice Meynell, who at the age of eight had driven her father’s Land Rover into Ashmore Pond. So when she heard Anna’s garbled tale, she only shrugged and revved her engine. ‘Hop on,’ she commanded.
Anna, awash with relief and affection, hugged her and hopped on. ‘Oh, Alice. Thank God.’
The motorcycle bellowed. The world erupted into speed lines and began to rush past her on either side. Alice Meynell was in charge now. Things would be all right, at least for a while. Then the ice-cold airstream blew Anna’s headache away and her sense of urgency returned. ‘Can you get me to Nonesuch before dark?’ she shouted.
‘This is a Ducati 916, Anna. It could get you to Edinburgh before dark.’
*
Nonesuch, late afternoon.
Joshua Herringe’s courtyard was an empty well, its ancient shadows drawing away from the walls with the onset of evening.
Three figures, bulky-looking yet difficult to identify in the milky, rather beautiful greyish light, squeezed through the hole in the Painted Room wall and made their way to the centre of the littered space. Ahead of them, somewhat more than life-sized and leaning forward like someone walking into the wind, floated the woman who called herself Izzie.
Francis Baynes’s progress was slow. He held his head at a strained, reluctant angle, as if he were trying to dissociate himself from his own actions.
In his arms Eleanor Dawe chuckled gleefully to herself. There was the faintest flicker in the air above her. She stared up at it, transfixed. ‘Aaah,’ she said, in a voice more like a child’s. She kicked her legs to be let down, and as soon as Francis Baynes had unwrapped her from the pink blanket and set her on the ground, she began to burrow. Her plump little arms and legs made energetic swimming motions. A dimple of sour dry earth formed quickly around her, slipping away like sand pouring through an egg timer. Then she was gone.
The three remaining figures stood about vacantly, staring at one another, then down at the disturbed earth. One by one, they settled on to their hands and knees and followed the child. As they swam into the ground their expressions wavered between distaste and puzzlement. Mark Holland got his mouth full of soil.
The woman called Izzie hung in the air above them. Then she wrapped herself in a kind of dark bubble and she too vanished like a dream.
*
There was a clammy mist wreathing around the house and no sign of any cats. When I called out, all that answered me was a weak and muffled echo of my own voice. I was just about to round the corner to the back of the house where the knot garden was situated when there came a suddenly mechanical, rumbling sound ahead of me and, a few moments later, a higher-pitched roar from the vicinity of the road, which grew ever louder in volume as it approached. I hurled myself into some bushes, and landed on something soft and warm.
There was a yelp, then, ‘Where have you been? I’ve been looking everywhere for you,’ a voice hissed.
It was Caterina and behind her, half hidden by the shadows and the mist, was the Besom.
It transpired that Loves A Dustbin had been looking for me, too. Instead, he had found the Besom, who had been half frightened to death by the sound of a large dogfox addressing her. She had been trying to face him off with a show of spiked fur and a terrifying spread of toothless gums, when Caterina had intervened to explain he was not there to eat her.
‘He said some pretty weird stuff,’ Caterina finished, ‘then he went to look for you.’
‘I’m glad to see you. Cat,’ I said, licking her swiftly on the cheek, ‘but I have to ask Ma something. Something important. Anna’s and John’s child,’ I went on quickly. ‘Have you noticed anything odd about her?’
The Besom froze. She batted her eyes rapidly, as though the question had confused her so much that she was unable to focus. ‘The child,’ she said slowly. ‘Ah, yes. The child. With the eyes…’
‘Green,’ I prompted.
‘Her eyes.’
‘Whose eyes?’ Cat stared from Ma Tregenna to me and back again.
‘She’s got her eyes all right. And soon she’ll have the rest of her.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Caterina was almost bouncing with irritation.
‘She kept collecting these… objects,’ I said. ‘The baby, I mean. Strange objects; not what you’d expect a child to want to play with. And every time a new one appeared the dreams came…’
The Besom nodded wisely. ‘Ah yes. Witch must have stuffed them things full of herself and buried ’em around the house for when all her lives ran out and she needed to find other ways back. Must have called on the dream maker when she died to send her dreams, help her retrieve her memories.’
‘Stuffed herself into the objects?’ I frowned, bewildered.
‘Aye, I reckon. Seen it before, I have. Previous life, though. ’T’ain’t really her self, as such,’ the Besom continued. “Tis her spells and craft. Her memories and the like. To keep other folks’ thieving hands off them, apart from anything else. I knew a witch once kept all her childhoods in a little blue egg. Weasel ate it in the end and she went quite mad. Forgot how to speak and such…’ She mused on this for a moment. Caterina and I exchanged glances. A little later she said, ‘Tell me what she got. I need to know how many.’
‘An old doll’s head.’ I remembered the horrid thing with the flickering blue eyes I’d dug up in the knot garden.
‘A black metal box thing,’ Cat offered, ‘that made a noise when you opened it.’
‘A black shiny object full of old hair,’ I added, ‘and then there was a long silver spoon.’
‘I remember that thing,’ the Besom said with a grimace. ‘Come at me with that, she did, just like her ladyship. Stirred the pot with that spoon, the witch did, stirred the pot and supped from it most like.’
I closed my eyes. ‘A small doll made of bone, too.’
The Besom puffed out her chest. ‘Witch’s mannikin,’ she declared sagely.
‘And a tiny picture that changed when I looked at it.’
‘Six objects.’
I nodded.
‘There’ll be seven,’ Ma Tregenna stated. ‘There’s always seven. Numbers matter in magic, you know. Some numbers are stronger than others. The last object will be the oldest and the strongest: the first thing she started with. And when she’s found that one and offered it up to the White Lady the babe’ll be hers and that’ll be the end of all of us.’
‘Whatever it is, we must find it before the child does.’
‘That’s what the fox said!’ Caterina piped up. ‘ “I must find it before she does” – that’s what he said before he went.’
‘So where did he go?’ I asked with a sinking feeling. I had hoped he would be here to advise me. I did not much want to be responsible for a situation that bewildered me so thoroughly.
‘I don’t know. He said he might be gone a while, and then he just… disappeared.’
‘He did say one other thing before he went,’ the Besom added almost as an afterthought.
‘What?’ My tone was sharp; I couldn’t help it.
The Besom looked affronted. ‘No need for rudeness. The young are so impatient. Wait till you get to my age,’ she rambled on, ‘then you’ll see how annoying it can be.’
‘None of us will have the chance to reach your age at this rate,’ I grumbled.
Luckily she was too deaf to hear me, though she gave me a hard look. ‘He said something about “the power of three”. That it would take three of the old blood to stop her, three who became great cats on the highways; three who guarded the world from dreams.’
‘And now you’re here!’ Caterina cried happily. ‘So there are three of us, three dreamcatchers.’
I regarded her dubiously. ‘That’s all very well,’ I said. ‘But what are we supposed to do?’
The mechanical clanking that had been going on in the background all this while came to a sudden halt and I could hear voices. My ears pricked up. ‘Anna’s by the knot garden,’ I declared with some relief. ‘She must have the baby with her.’
The three of us made our way through the mist to the back of the house. But what we saw there gave us no reassurance at all.
*
When Anna arrived at Nonesuch the light was fading. A few of the upper windows reflected the faint eggshell colours of the western sky. The rest were like shutters, and whatever lay behind them remained as uncommunicative and dark as the cedars in the grounds. The roar of the Ducati blatted back off the front of the house, then turned itself off like a tap. In the silence that followed, Anna took a few unsteady steps across the gravel to ease the trembling in her legs, staring up at the curiously angled roofs and gables.
Alice Meynell, meanwhile, propped the motorcycle on its stand, prised off her helmet, ran her fingers through her cropped hair. ‘I’d kill for a cup of tea,’ she said. ‘Anna?’
‘Shh,’ said Anna absently. She tilted her head to listen.
She had heard the sound of machinery moving backwards and forwards somewhere behind the house. She looked at her watch. The builders would be long gone. It’s the knot garden, she thought. John’s going to grub up the knot garden, on his own in the dark. Her heart went out to him suddenly. She couldn’t bear the thought of him there on his own in the fog of sunk cost error, throwing good money after bad, hoping to turn his life round by doing something which had never worked anyway. Out loud she said, ‘Alice, will you do me a favour? Will you wait here while I go and talk to him? Then you can make us all a cup of tea.’
Alice rubbed at an imaginary mark on the fuel tank of the Ducati. ‘You go and give him hell, ducks,’ she said.
‘I’ll do my best.’
It was colder behind the house. White mist pooled in the knot garden. The digger, a yellow JCB hired for the day, clanked and roared, sawing backwards and forwards in short, ungainly bursts. Its black energetic outline loomed up against the afterglow, ramming into a line of hedge, reversing away with a festoon of box roots hanging like severed electrical cable from its raised scoop. Diesel smoke poured into the clear air. Anna could see John hunched up in the cab, wearing his precious site helmet. She called, but he couldn’t hear. She waved, but he didn’t notice. What was new? In the end she waded knee-deep into the mist – it was as white and cold as milk from the fridge – and stood in front of the lumbering machine, waving her arms until it jerked to a halt so suddenly that the engine stalled.
John sat there for a moment, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. Then he opened the cab door and stuck his head out. ‘That was a bit stupid,’ he said.
She smiled back. ‘Wasn’t it? And it’s the second time I’ve done it today.’
He frowned. ‘I was going to try to get this job done before the light went.’
‘But will you come down and talk to me? Just for a moment?’
‘I don’t know what we’d talk about.’
‘About Eleanor. I thought we’d talk about Eleanor.’
This brought him out of the cab and they stood looking at one another awkwardly in the hot, oil-smelling gloom by the engine. It was hard to judge his expression. She wanted to put her arms round him, but she knew she must keep a clear head. Perhaps he wanted that too. In any case, neither of them could think of anything to say.
Then he narrowed his eyes, reached out to touch the bruises on her cheek. ‘What on earth have you done to yourself?’ he wanted to know. ‘And where’s Eleanor?’
Anna told him what had happened. ‘Eleanor’s all right,’ she said. ‘But the car’s a write-off.’
‘I can’t believe this. I just can’t believe it.’
‘John, we have to talk.’ Anna tried to make eye contact with him, but he wouldn’t look at her. ‘Please?’
‘You left your daughter with someone we hardly know,’ he accused.
‘It isn’t quite like that, John.’
‘What is it like?’
‘I don’t want her here, I told you that. And Francis Baynes is perfectly reliable.’
John shrugged. He turned away abruptly and swung himself back up into the cab. ‘I’m sure he is,’ he said. ‘It’s you I have my doubts about.’
Anna bit her lip. ‘John, Eleanor’s your daughter.’
He gave a quiet laugh. ‘I remember that.’
‘So won’t you come away with us? For her sake? Don’t you want this sorted out?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Then—’
‘It’s just that I have my own view of what needs sorting out. Do you see, Anna? I won’t have you take my decisions away from me by presenting your view of the world as the only correct one.’
‘John!’
He did something in the cab; then, when the engine of the JCB burst into life, revved it until the ground shook and the air stank of burned diesel. As soon as he was certain it would keep running, he let it idle and stuck his head out again. ‘What I want to do is get this job done. What I don’t want is to have my choices made for me. Can you understand that?’
‘Nonesuch is making our choices,’ Anna said. ‘Not us.’
‘You just won’t give up, will you?’
He put the digger into gear. It coughed, hesitated, then lurched forward suddenly, its rear wheels throwing up earth.
‘You won’t either,’ Anna whispered. ‘You won’t give up either.’
With her arms folded under her breasts and her shoulders hunched against the cold, she walked away. When she stopped to look back, the JCB was still visible, rolling busily about like a Tonka toy in the low white mist. She stood watching until the darkness swallowed it, and she could follow its progress only by the irregular squeak and clank of the shovel, the hiss of the hydraulics, the snarl and groan of the exhaust. Eventually she wiped her eyes and turned away.
At that, a comforting arm went round her shoulders and Alice Meynell said, ‘Don’t cry, love. Don’t cry.’
‘Oh dear. Have you been here all the time?’
‘No,’ Alice said. But she had clearly heard most of the exchange, because she added, ‘Come on. He’s not worth it.’
Anna sniffed and wiped her eyes. ‘He is, Alice. That’s the problem. He is worth it. Will you take me back to the village? I want to see Eleanor.’ Then she said, ‘What’s that?’
*
The JCB had shuddered to a halt. On his last pass, John had set the angle of the shovel too steeply and instead of peeling up the remaining hedge it had buried itself in the earth. Anna and Alice heard the cab door open as he got out to look at the damage. Torchlight skittered across the knot garden to reveal white mist, churned earth and uprooted vegetation, then the front of the vehicle itself, which seemed to have sunk into the ground. John moved forward cautiously and dropped the torch. For a second he was visible in its yellow beam, his face a pale, drawn blur under the site helmet. His whole body looked puzzled.
‘Are you all right?’ called Anna.
He made an irritated gesture, as if to say ‘Don’t bother me now’, then, as he picked up the torch, vanished again. Shortly after that, Anna heard a low cry. The torchbeam bobbed about meaninglessly, settled on something she couldn’t quite make out, some movement at the base of the silent vehicle. Then she understood. All around him the ground mist had begun to move. It was flowing across the knot garden at an unhurried pace, rippling and parting here and there like shallow water over stones, speeding up a little towards the centre where the JCB had stranded itself, then pouring smoothly and silently over the edge of the hole which had opened up there. The knot garden was emptying itself like a bath.
‘Anna, come and look. Come and look at this!’ He bent down and peered into the hole. ‘I can see something down there,’ he said. ‘I’m just going to have a look—’
‘John, no!’ called Anna. ‘Wait!’
But by the time they got there he was gone.
Standing at the edge of the hole, they watched the mist slipping over and into the darkness. Alice Meynell – wondering aloud how much harm a bit of fog could do – knelt down to have a closer look. ‘I can see what he meant,’ she said. Her voice echoed back from the hole. ‘There are stairs in there. Steps. Can you see?’
Anna shook her head. ‘I don’t want to see.’
But she knew she would be made to in the end. She waited miserably for the last of the mist to drain away and vanish. A cold, stale smell filled her nostrils. It was the smell of history – the headless doll, the twist of hair, bad dreams in the night. Old photographs she couldn’t understand. Lives she had already lived, which, though she remembered nothing of them, would never let her be.
‘Why did he have to go in there?’ she whispered, more to herself than Alice. ‘It’s just one more horrible bit of the past.’
She looked up at Nonesuch, looming above her, its queer gables and gambrel roofs black against the sky, then down again into the hole – from which issued suddenly the hollow, echoing cry of a baby.
‘My God,’ said Alice.
They stared at one another. A noise came out of Anna’s mouth, a kind of muffled whimper in which you could barely discern the word ‘Eleanor’. What’s happened? she asked herself. I can’t cope with this, I won’t be able to cope. The thought made her instantly calm. ‘I can see the steps,’ she told Alice quietly.
‘Anna—’
‘I’ll go first.’
*
It wasn’t far.
The stairs were narrow and steep. Worn into John’s beloved curve of use, slick with moisture on every tread, they had an acoustic of their own, which fetched up echoes and refractions of voices, and what turned out to be music. Near the bottom a faint light wavered on the damp walls. There was a smell of candle-wax. Anna paused and felt behind her until she found Alice Meynell’s hand.
‘I’m still here,’ Alice reassured her.
‘Alice, listen!’
It was the ‘Für Elise’.
Anna shivered. With the old melody dripping a reluctant sweetness into the air around her, she stepped into the candlelight.
The room in which she found herself was circular in plan, perhaps twenty feet in diameter. Useless to ask yourself who had built it, Anna thought. Something had already convinced her this was the wrong question. It was as old as Dr Russell’s paleolithic finds on the downs, just another temple to that malformed Iceni goddess, a chamber of worship echoing with her groans of loss and defiance in the face of time. It’s been here from the beginning, she decided. Since before the beginning. Successive Herringes, locked into the past yet somehow unable to cope with the idea of a time before themselves, had rebuilt it to try to obscure this obvious fact. Even now, sugary Victorian plaster was falling off the uneven walls to reveal rough limestone blocks, thick with calcium deposits, eroding at their unmortared joints. There were dozens of niches and recesses at head height, waist height, and niches you would have to lie on the floor to reach. In them were objects collected to no good purpose by the same Herringes; and older things which Anna did not wish to look at. Here and there great thick grey cobwebs swept up, like net curtains layered three or four inches deep, towards a ceiling which seemed too far away.
There was no furniture.
A knot-shaped design took up most of the floor.
On the other side of it, in a loose, shifting group in the candlelight, she recognised the Holland brothers and Francis Baynes. Mark and Oliver were busying themselves about, moving from niche to niche like shop assistants searching for a difficult item. Francis looked ill and exhausted, and under some appalling strain. He had her daughter in his arms. ‘Francis?’ Anna said. ‘Francis?’ At this, the baby chuckled; the candles flickered (was that another figure, there in the shadows? If it was, it had vanished in the instant she saw it); and Francis stood forward of the others. Awkwardly, he raised Eleanor Dawe up in his arms, as if presenting her to the room.
‘Oh, you bastards!’ Anna shouted. ‘Eleanor, stop this!’