Nobody came.

That night my face ached from where David had hit me and my stomach growled and I couldn’t sleep and lay awake all night staring at the clouds passing over the moon, watching the dark shapes of birds in the treetops, listening to the house creaking and gasping.

I went a little mad, I think, over the course of the week that followed. I scratched marks into my walls with my fingernails until my nailbeds bled. I banged my head against the floor. I made animal noises. I saw things that weren’t there. I think David’s idea was that I would emerge from my imprisonment feeling subdued and ready to start afresh. But this was not the case.

When the door was finally unlocked a week later and I was once more allowed to roam around the house, I did not feel subdued. I felt monstrously consumed with righteous ire. I was going to finish David off for good.

There was something else in the air when I finally got my freedom back, a huge secret wafting about in the atmosphere, carried along by the dust motes and the sun rays, stuck in the strands of the spider webs in the high corners of the rooms.

As I joined everyone at the breakfast table that first morning out of isolation I asked Phin, ‘What’s going on? Why is everyone acting so weird?’

He shrugged and said, ‘Isn’t that how everyone always acts round here?’

I said, ‘No. Weirder than usual. Like there’s something going on.’

Phin was already ill by now, it was clear to me. His skin, once so smooth and flawless, looked grey and patchy. His hair flopped greasily to one side. And he smelled a little off, a little sour.

I mentioned it to Birdie. ‘Phin seems ill,’ I said.

She replied prissily, ‘Phin is absolutely fine. He just needs more exercise.’

I would hear his father through the door of the exercise room imploring him to try harder. ‘More – you can do it. Push back. Really push back. Come on! You’re not even trying!’ And then I’d see Phin leaving the exercise room looking wan and agonised, taking the steps up to the attic floor slowly as if each one caused him pain.

I said, ‘You should come into the garden with me. The fresh air will help.’

He said, ‘I don’t want to go anywhere with you.’

‘Well, you don’t have to come with me. Go into the garden alone.’

‘Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘Nothing in this house will make me well. The only thing that will make me well is not being in this house. I need to leave. I need’, he said, his eyes boring into mine, ‘to leave.’

The house, it felt to me, was dying. First my father had faded, then my mother, now Phin. Justin had abandoned us. The baby was dead. I couldn’t really see what the point of any of it was any more.

And then one afternoon I heard the sound of laugher coming from below. I peered down into the hallway and saw David and Birdie leaving the exercise room. They were both glowing with health. David swung an arm around Birdie’s shoulders and drew her to him, kissed her hard on the lips with a sickening mwah noise. And it was them; I knew it clearly. It was them, draining the house, like vampires, of all of its decent energy, of all of its love and life and goodness, draining it all for themselves, feasting on our misery and our broken spirits.

Then I looked around myself at the bare walls where the oil paintings had once hung, at the empty corners where the fine pieces of furniture had once stood. I thought of the chandeliers that had once sparkled in the sunlight. The silver and the brass and the gold that had gleamed on every surface. I thought of my mother’s wardrobe of designer clothes and handbags, the rings that used to adorn her fingers, the diamond earrings and sapphire pendants. All gone now. All gone to so-called ‘charity’, to help the ‘poor people’. I estimated the value of all these lost possessions. Thousands of pounds, I suspected. Many thousands of pounds.

And then I looked down again at David, his arm circling Birdie, the two of them so free and unburdened by the things going on in this home. And I thought: You are not a messiah or a guru or a god, David Thomsen. You are not a philanthropist or a do-gooder. You are not a spiritual man. You are a criminal. You have come to my house and you have plundered it. And you are not a man of compassion. If you were a man of compassion, you would be sitting now with my mother while she grieves for your lost baby. You would find a way to help my father out of his living hell. You would take your son to the doctor. You would not be laughing with Birdie. You would be too weighed down by everyone else’s unhappiness. So, if you have no compassion then it follows that you would not have been giving our money to the poor. You would have been keeping it for yourself. And that must be the ‘secret stash’ that Phin had told me about all those years ago. And if that is the case, then where is it? And what are you planning to do with it?

51

CHELSEA, 1992

Two weeks after David released me from my room, he announced my sister’s pregnancy around the dinner table. She was barely fourteen.

I saw Clemency recoil from my sister, spring apart from her as though burned with hot oil. I saw my mother’s face, the blank death look, and it was clear that she already knew. I saw Birdie. She smiled at me. And at the sight of those tiny little teeth I exploded. I leapt across the table and threw myself at David. I tried to hit him. Well, in fact, I tried to kill him. That was my main intent.

But I was small and he was big and Birdie of course came between us and I was somehow pulled away and back to my side of the table. I looked at my sister, at the strange smile playing on her lips, and I could not believe that I had never seen it before, had not seen that my stupid little sister had fallen for the whole thing, that she saw David as my mother saw David, as Birdie saw David. That she was proud that David had chosen her, and proud to be carrying his child.

And then it hit me.

David didn’t just want our money. David wanted the house.

That was all he’d ever wanted from the moment he’d first set foot in it. And having a baby with my sister would secure his stake in it.

I went to my parents’ bedroom the next day. I opened the cardboard boxes into which all their non-valuable possessions had been emptied when the furniture was given away. I could sense my father’s eyes on me.

‘Daddy,’ I said, ‘where’s the will? The will that says what happens to the house when you die?’

I could see the suggestion of words forming in the base of his throat. He opened his mouth a millimetre or two. I moved closer to him. ‘Dad? Do you know? Do you know where all the paperwork is?’

His gaze went from my face to the bedroom door.

‘It’s out there?’ I asked. ‘The paperwork?’

He blinked.

He did this sometimes when he was being fed. If Mum said, ‘Is that nice, darling?’ he would blink and Mum would say, ‘Good. Good,’ and give him another mouthful.

‘Which room?’ I asked. ‘Which room is it in?’

I saw his eyes move to the left a fraction. Towards David and Birdie’s room.

‘In David’s room?’

He blinked.

My heart plummeted.

I could not possibly go into David and Birdie’s room. They kept it locked, for a start. And even if they didn’t, the consequences of being caught in there were unthinkable.

I referred once again to Justin’s enormously useful book of spells.

‘A Spell for Temporary Stupefaction’.

That sounded like exactly what I needed. It promised a few moments of general befuddlement and sleepiness, a ‘small and unnoticeable fugue’.

It involved the use of deadly nightshade, Atropa belladonna, the poisonous plant that Justin had told me about all those months before. I’d been growing it, secretly, after finding some seeds in Justin’s apothecarial chest. The seeds had needed to be soaked in water in the fridge for two weeks. I’d told the grown-ups I was experimenting with a new herb for Phin’s ennui.

Then I’d taken the seeds and planted them in two large pots. It had taken three weeks for the seedlings to show and the last time I’d looked they’d been in full bloom. According to the literature, Atropa belladonna was very difficult to grow and I’d felt incredibly pleased with myself when the first purple flowers had blossomed. Now I snuck to the garden and plucked a couple of sprigs, tucked them into the waistband of my leggings and ascended quickly. In my room I made up the tincture with chamomile leaves and sugar water. It was also supposed to contain two hairs from the back of a red cat and a puff of breath from an old woman’s mouth, but I was an apothecary, not a wizard.