29 November 1994

The magpies are back. It’s strange to think how much I used to hate them, when I first came to the house. I remember coming up the drive in the taxi from the station, seeing them lined up along the garden wall like that, preening their feathers.

Today there was one perched on the frost-rimed branch of yew right outside my window, and I remembered what my mother used to say when I was little and whispered ‘Hello, Mr Magpie’ under my breath, to turn away the bad luck.

I counted them as I dressed, shivering next to the window. One on the yew tree. A second on the weathervane of the folly. A third on the wall of the kitchen garden. Three for a girl.

It seemed like an omen, and for a moment I shivered. Wishing, wondering, waiting …

But no, there were more on the frozen lawn. Four, five … six … and one hopping across the flags of the terrace, pecking at the ice on the covers over the table and chairs.

Seven. Seven for a secret, never to be told. Well, the secret may be right, but the rest is wide of the mark. I’ll have to tell, soon enough. There’ll be no choice.

I had almost finished dressing when there was a rustle in the leaves of the rhododendrons in the shrubbery. For a minute I could not see the cause, but then the branches parted, and a fox slunk quietly across the leaf-strewn lawn, its red gold startlingly bright against the frost-muted winter colours.

At my parents’ house they were quite common, but it’s rare to see one in daylight around here, let alone one bold enough to cross the huge exposed stretch of lawn in front of the house. I’ve seen slaughtered rabbits, and split bags of rubbish left from their scavenging, but they are almost never this bold. This one must have been very brave, or very desperate, to stalk in full sight of the house. Looking more closely, I thought perhaps it was the latter, for he was young, and terribly thin.

At first the magpies didn’t notice, but then the one on the terrace, more observant than the others, registered the shape of the predator easing its way towards them, and it flew up from the icy flags like a rocket, chak-chakking its alarm, the warning loud and clear in the morning quiet. The fox had no hope after that. The other birds took to the sky, one by one, until at last only one was left, sitting on the yew, safely out of the fox’s reach, and like a stream of molten gold, it slunk back over the grass, low to the ground, leaving the solitary magpie on the branch, crowing out its triumph.

One. One for sorrow. But that’s impossible. I will never feel sad again, in spite of everything, in spite of the storm that I know is coming. As I sit here in the drawing room, writing this, I can feel it – my secret – burning me up from the inside with a joy so fierce that I think it must sometimes be visible through my skin.

I’ll change that rhyme. One for joy. One for love. One for the future.

1 December 1994

Today is the first day of advent and the air should have been full of new beginnings and the countdown to a momentous event, but instead I woke up heavy with a kind of nameless dread.

I have not read the cards for over a week. I haven’t felt the need, but today, as I sat at the desk at the window, the eiderdown around my shoulders, I felt my fingers itch, and I thought that perhaps it would comfort me to shuffle them. But it was only when I had spent some time sorting and shuffling and dealing different spreads, none feeling right, that I realised what I needed to do.

There were no candles in my room, so I took one from the big brass candlesticks on the mantelpiece in the dining room, and a box of matches from the fireplace. I slipped the matches into my pocket, but the candle was too long to fit, so I slid it inside the sleeve of my cardigan in case someone met me on the stairs, and asked what I was doing.

Up in my room I set everything out on the table – cards, candle, matches and an empty teacup. I melted the candle a little at the wrong end, and stuck it into the cup to make a firm base, and then I lit it, and I passed the tarot cards through the flame three times.

When I had finished, I blew out the flame and then simply sat, looking out of the window at the snowy lawn, weighing the cards in my hand. They felt … different. Lighter. As if all the doubts and bad feelings had burned away. And I knew what to do.

Spreading the major arcana face down on the desk, I picked three cards and then placed them in front of me in a spread. Past. Present. Future. The questions crowded in my mind, but I tried to clear my head – to focus on just one thing, not a question, but the answer unfurling inside my body.

Then I turned the cards.

The first card, the one that represented the past, was the lovers upright – which made me smile. It’s often a mistake in tarot to take the most obvious reading of a card, but somehow here it felt right. In my deck, the card shows a naked man and woman entwined, surrounded by flowers, his hand on her breast, and a glowing light from above bathing them both. It’s a card I love – both to look at, and to draw – but the words that come with it aren’t always positive: lust, temptation, vulnerability. Here, though, cleansed by fire, I saw only the simplest meaning – a man and a woman in love.

The next card I turned over was the fool – but upside down. It was not what I was expecting. New beginnings, new life, change – all that, yes. But reversed? Naivety. Folly. Lack of forethought. I felt the smile fade on my lips and I pushed the card away, and hurried on to the third and most important – the future.

It was another card reversed, and I felt my stomach drop away a little, for the first time almost wishing that I had not begun this reading, or at least not done it now, today. I know my deck too well to need to turn the picture upright, but even so I studied it with fresh eyes, seeing the picture as if anew, from upside down. Justice. The woman on her throne was grave-faced, as if conscious of her responsibilities, and the impossibility of finding truth in a world like ours. In her left hand she held the scales, and in the other, a sword, ready to mete out punishment or mercy.

I spent a long time looking at the woman on her throne, trying to understand what she was telling me, and still, as I’m writing this, I don’t know. I hoped that writing in my diary would clarify what the cards were trying to say, but instead all I feel is confusion. Dishonesty? Can that really be true? Or am I reading it wrong? As I sit here I am sifting back through all the other, deeper, subtler meanings, the willingness to be deceived, the traps of black-and-white thinking, the mistaken assumptions – and none of them reassure.

I have been thinking all day about that last card – about the future. And still I do not understand. I wish there were someone I could talk to, discuss it with. But I already know what Maud thinks of tarot. ‘Load of wafty BS,’ was what she said when I offered to do her reading. And when she succumbed, finally, it was with a snort and a cynical look. I could see her thoughts running across her face as I turned over the cards she had chosen and asked her what question she was seeking answers to.

‘If you’re so bloody psychic, shouldn’t you be telling me?’ she said, flicking the card with her fingertip, and I shook my head, trying to hide my annoyance, and told her that tarot isn’t a party trick, the kind of mentalism that cheap magicians practise on Saturday-night TV – telling people their middle names or the inscription on their pocket watch. It’s something bigger, deeper, more real than that.

I cleansed the deck after that reading, upset not just because she touched the cards, but because she touched them with contempt in her soul. But now, thinking back to that day, I realise something. When Maud turned over the future card, I told her something else, something that I should have reminded myself today, and something that gives me comfort. And it’s this: the cards do not predict the future. All they can do is show us how a given situation may turn out, based on the energies we bring to the reading. Another day, another mood, a different set of energies and the same question could have a completely different answer.

We have free will. The answer the cards give can turn us in our path. All I have to do is understand what they are saying.

4 December 1994

I was sick again this morning, skittering down the steep stairs and down the long passageway to the toilet in my nightgown, kneeling on the cold tiled floor to heave up the last remains of yesterday’s dinner.

Afterwards, I brushed my teeth, huffing on my hands to make sure my breath didn’t have any telltale sourness, but when I opened the door to the corridor, Maud was standing outside, her arms crossed over the ratty old Smiths T-shirt that she wears instead of proper pyjamas.

She said nothing, but there was something in her expression that I didn’t like. It was a look of mingled concern and something else, I’m not sure what. I think it might have been … pity? The thought made me angry.

She was leaning against the wall, blocking my way, and she didn’t move as I came out and shut the bathroom door behind me.

‘Sorry.’ I shook my hair back from my face, trying to look unconcerned. ‘Were you waiting long?’

‘Yes,’ she said flatly. ‘Long enough. Are you all right?’

‘Of course,’ I said, pushing past her, forcing her to step backwards against the wall. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ I called over my shoulder.

She shrugged, but I know what she meant. I know exactly what she meant. I thought about the expression on her face, the way her flat, black eyes followed me as I walked back to my attic. And as I sit here in bed writing this on my knees, watching the magpies swooping low over the snowy garden, I am wondering … how far can I trust her?

5 December 1994

Maud knows. She came to my room last night after I had gone to bed, but I knew before that – I knew from her expression as she watched me over the dinner table, pushing the congealing cod and limp broccoli around my plate with my fork, feeling the nausea rise at the back of my throat.

I knew then, from the look she gave me, and the way she shoved her plate away and stood up, that she had guessed.

‘Sit down,’ her mother snapped. ‘You do not leave this table without asking permission.’

Maud gave her a look close to hate, but she sat back down.

‘May I leave the table?’ she said, spitting each word out as if it were one of the stray bones from the cod, arrayed around the edge of her plate.

Her mother looked at her, and I saw a flicker of something pass over her face – a desire to thwart, mixed with the knowledge that one day she was going to push Maud too far, and that if Maud defied her, there would be nothing she could do in the end.

‘You … may,’ she said at last, though the last word was dragged out. But then as Maud stood, she added, ‘When you have finished your fish.’

‘I can’t eat it,’ Maud said. She threw her napkin on the table. ‘Nor can Maggie. Look at it – it’s disgusting. Nothing but bones and tasteless white shit.’

I saw the tip of my aunt’s nose go white, as it always does when she is furious.

‘You will not speak about the food in this house that way,’ she said.

‘I won’t lie about it either – God knows there are enough lies in this house already!’

‘What does that mean?’

Her mother stood now too, and they faced each other, so alike, and yet so different – Maud is hot where her mother is cold, passionate where her mother is contained, but the bitterness and anger in each face made them look more alike than I ever realised before.

‘You know what it means.’

With that, Maud picked up the flaccid piece of cod with her fingers and crammed it into her mouth. I thought I heard the bones crunch as she chewed, and I felt the nausea rise up in my throat, making me sweat with the effort of containing it.

‘Happy?’ Maud said, though the word was barely comprehensible through the suffocating mouthful.

Then, without waiting for an answer, she turned on her heel and left, slamming the dining-room door behind her so that the china rattled on the table.

I bent my head over my plate and, trying not to let my shaking hands show, I speared a potato on to my fork and put it into my mouth, my eyes blurring.

Don’t look at me, I thought desperately, knowing how my aunt’s white-cold anger could redirect on to whoever was unlucky enough to catch her attention. Don’t look at me.

But she didn’t. Instead I heard the screech of her chair legs on the parquet, and the slam of the door on the other side of the room, and when I looked up I was blessedly, entirely alone.

It was much later that Maud came to my room. I was sitting in bed in my dressing gown, a hot-water bottle at my feet, sorting my cards. I heard feet on the stairs, and at first my stomach clenched, not sure who it was, but then there came a tap on the wooden door, and I knew.

‘Maud?’

‘Yes, it’s me.’ Her voice was low, and I could tell she didn’t want anyone to hear. ‘Can I come in?’

‘Yes,’ I whispered back. The handle turned and she came into the room, ducking her head beneath the low attic doorway. She was wrapped in a huge cardigan and her feet were bare. ‘God, aren’t you freezing?’ I asked, and she nodded, her teeth chattering. Without speaking I pushed over in the narrow bed, patted the pillow beside me, and she climbed in, her feet like ice as she slid them down past my legs.

‘I hate her,’ was all she said. ‘I hate her so much. How can you stand to be here?’

I have no other choice, was what I thought, but I knew that I had as many choices as Maud, maybe more.

‘She acts like it’s the 1950s,’ Maud said bitterly. ‘No TV, you and me shut up here like fucking nuns, Mrs Warren toiling away in the kitchen – does she realise people don’t live like this any more? Other people our age are out there going to gigs, getting drunk, screwing each other – don’t you care that we’re shut up here in Mother’s postwar fantasy-land?’

I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t tell her that I had never wanted to get drunk or go to gigs. That I never had – even when I had the chance.

‘Maybe I fit in with it better than you,’ I said at last. ‘Mum always said I was an old-fashioned little thing.’

‘Tell me about your mum,’ she said quietly, and I felt a lump rise in my throat, thinking of Mum as she always is in my mind’s eye – digging in the garden, with Dad alongside her, humming along to Paul Simon, hoeing the onions or planting bulbs. I tried not to think of those last nightmare months – Mum gasping her last on a ventilator, and Dad’s heart attack a few weeks later.

‘What’s to tell?’ I said, trying not to sound as bitter as I felt. ‘She’s dead. They’re both dead. End of.’

The unfairness of it still makes me gasp – but there’s a kind of rightness in it too, that’s what I’ve realised. I was the child of two people completely in love. They were meant to be together – in life, and in death. I just wish that that death hadn’t come so soon.

‘I want to understand …’ Maud said, her voice very low. ‘I want to understand what it must be like not … not to hate your mother.’

This time, it wasn’t the chill of her feet, but the venom in her voice that made me shiver.

My aunt isn’t an easy woman – I know that – I knew that before I even came to live here. The fact that she had managed to fight with my father told me everything I needed to know. He was the most mild-mannered man you can imagine. But nothing had prepared me for the reality of what I found here.

‘I wish I could get away.’ She spoke with quiet venom, into her knees. ‘She let him go.’

She didn’t say who – she didn’t have to say. We both knew who she was talking about. Ezra, away at boarding school. He had escaped.

‘Is it the boy thing, do you think?’ I asked.

Maud shrugged, trying to look unconcerned, but I wasn’t fooled. Her cheeks were wet where she had cried after supper.

‘Girls aren’t worth educating,’ she said, with a bitter little laugh. ‘Or not worth paying to educate, anyway. But whatever she thinks, I’ve got twice his brains. I’ll be at Oxford while he’s still sitting retakes at some shitty crammer in Surrey. I’m going to show her, this summer. Those exams are my ticket out of here.’

I didn’t say what I was thinking. Which was – what about me? If Maud leaves, what will I do? Will I be imprisoned here, alone, with her?

‘I used to hate this room,’ Maud said softly. ‘She used to lock us in here as children, for punishment. But now … I don’t know. It feels like an escape from the rest of the house.’

There was a long silence. I tried to imagine it – tried to imagine having a mother who would do that, and what it would do to you as a child to suffer through that – and my imagination failed.

‘Can I sleep here tonight?’ she asked, and I nodded.

She rolled over, and I switched out the light. I turned on my side, my back to her, we lay in the darkness, feeling the warmth of each other at our spines, the shift and creak of the mattress whenever the other moved.

I was almost asleep when she spoke, her voice a whisper so soft I wasn’t sure at first if she was speaking, or sighing in her sleep.

‘Maggie, what are you going to do?’

I didn’t answer. I just lay there, staring into the blackness, feeling my heart beating hard in my chest at her words.

She knows.

6 December 1994

I couldn’t sleep last night. I lay awake, my hands over my stomach, trying to press it back to flatness, and I thought about the night it happened. It was late in August, when the days were longer and hotter than I could ever have imagined, and the sky was that fierce Cornish blue.

The boys were back from school and university, filling the house with an unaccustomed noise and energy that felt strange after the stifled silence I had grown used to these last few months. My aunt had gone up to London for some reason – and Mrs Warren had gone into Penzance to see her sister, and without their dark, crow-like presence the atmosphere felt light and full of happiness.

It was Maud who came up to find me in my room where I was reading – she burst in, holding a towel and her bright red swimming costume in one hand, and her sunglasses in the other.

‘Get a move on, Maggie!’ she said, plucking the book out of my hand and tossing it on to the bed, losing my place, I noticed with a flash of irritation. ‘We’re going swimming in the lake!’

I didn’t want to – that’s the strange thing to remember. I don’t mind pools or the sea, but I’ve never liked lake swimming – the slimy reeds, and the mush at the bottom, and the mouldering branches that catch at your feet. But Maud is a hard person to say no to, and at last I let her pull me downstairs to where the boys were waiting, Ezra holding a set of oars.

In the crumbling boathouse Maud untied the rickety flat-bottomed skiff, and we rowed out to the island, the lake water dappled and brown beneath the hull of the boat. Maud tied the boat to a makeshift jetty and we climbed out. It was Maud who went in first – a flash of scarlet against the gold-brown waters, as she dived, long and shallow, from the end of the rotting wooden platform.

‘Come on, Ed,’ she shouted, and he stood up, grinned at me, then followed her to the water’s edge and took a running jump.

I wasn’t sure if I would go in – I was content to watch the others, laughing and playing in the water, splashing each other and shrieking. But the sun grew hotter and hotter, and at last I stood, shading my eyes, considering.

‘Come in!’ Abel yelled. ‘It’s glorious.’

I walked to the end of the jetty, feeling the damp wood fraying against my bare toes, and I dipped – just dipped – the tip of my toes in the water, watching with pleasure the scarlet polish I had borrowed from Maud glowing bright beneath the water.

And then – almost before I knew what had happened – a hand seized my ankle and I felt a tug, and I stumbled forward to prevent myself from going over backwards – then I was in, the golden waters closing over my head, the mud swirling up around me – and it was more beautiful and terrifying than I could ever have imagined.

I didn’t see who pulled me in – but I felt him, beneath the water, his skin against mine, our arms grappling, half fighting. And in that moment when we both surfaced I felt it – his fingers brushed my breast, making me shiver and gasp in a way that wasn’t just the shock of the water.

Our eyes met – blue and dark – and he grinned, and my stomach flipped and clenched with a hunger I had never known – I knew then that I loved him, and that I would give him anything, even myself.

After we rowed back, we walked up to the house and we had tea on the lawn, wrapped in towels, and then we stretched out to bask in the sunshine.

‘Take a photo …’ Maud said lazily, as she stretched, her tanned limbs honey gold against the faded blue towel. ‘I want to remember today.’

He gave a groan, but he stood obediently and went to fetch his camera, and set it up. I watched him as he stood behind it, adjusting the focus, fiddling with the lens cap.

‘Why so serious?’ he said as he looked up, and I realised that I was frowning in concentration, trying to fix his face in my memory. He flashed me that irresistible smile, and I felt my own mouth curve in helpless sympathy.

Later, long after supper, when the sun was going down, Mrs Warren had gone to bed and the others were playing billiards on the faded green baize, laughing in the way they never did when my aunt was home. Ezra had brought his stereo down from his room and the tape deck blasted out James, R.E.M. and the Pixies by turns, filling the room with the clash of guitars and drums.

I could never play billiards – the cue never did what I wanted, the balls flipping off the cushions with a life of their own. Maud said I wasn’t trying, that it was perfectly simple to match up cause and effect, and work out where the ball would end up, but it wasn’t true. I had some gene missing, I think. Whatever it was that enabled Maud to see that if a ball were hit from this angle, it would ricochet over there, I didn’t have.

So I left them to it and wandered out on to the lawn in front of the old part of the house. I was sitting, watching the sun beginning to dip towards the horizon, and thinking about how beautiful this place was, in spite of it all, when I felt a touch on my shoulder, and I turned, and saw him standing there, beautiful and bronzed, his hair falling in his eyes.

‘Come for a walk with me,’ he said. I nodded and followed him, across the fields and through sunken paths, down to the sea. And we lay on the warm sand and watched as the sun sank into the waves in a blaze of red and gold, and I didn’t say anything, because I was so afraid to break this perfect moment – so afraid that he would get up and leave forever, and that everything would be back to normal.

But he didn’t. He lay next to me, watching the sky in a silence that felt like the breath you take before you say something very important. As the last streak of sun disappeared beneath the horizon, he turned to me and I thought he was going to speak – but he didn’t. Instead, he slipped the strap of my sundress down my shoulder. And I thought – this is it. This is what I have been waiting all my life to feel, this is what those girls at school used to talk about, this is what the songs mean, and the poems were written for. This is it. He is it.

But the sun has gone now, and it’s winter, and I feel very cold. And I am no longer sure if I was right.

8 December 1994

Abel came home from Oxford today. Term ended last weekend, but he came home the long way, via a friend’s house in Wales, trailing his feet. I don’t blame him for his reluctance. Harding, who I still haven’t met, sent a brisk message saying the accountancy firm he works for in London couldn’t spare him, and that he would not be returning for Christmas. And Ezra’s school doesn’t break up for another week.

The first I knew of his arrival was Maud pricking up her head, like a collie that has caught a noise. We were sitting in the drawing room, the only warm room in the whole house apart from my aunt’s sitting room. We were huddled close to the fire, me playing patience, Maud reading and listening to something on her Walkman. I was frowning over a particularly knotty spread, when suddenly she pulled off her headphones.

‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘We must look like something out of Little Fucking Women. What –’

She broke off abruptly, and listened for a moment. Then, before I could ask what she had heard, she was running out of the drawing room, down the corridor towards the front door.

‘Al!’ I heard, and his answering shout, and I followed, in time to see her rush into his arms. He picked her up, spinning her round in a giant bear hug while she screeched out laughing protests.

‘Hi, Abel,’ I said, suddenly shy, and he nodded at me over the top of Maud’s head as he deposited her down on the hallway rug.

‘Hi, Maggie.’

And that was it. The kind of greeting you’d give a stranger, or a passing acquaintance. He picked up his case, slung one arm around Maud’s shoulders, and went back to talking to her about his term, about some girl he was seeing, and I felt … I don’t know what. A kind of furious grief, I suppose. Disappointment that after all that happened over the summer, he couldn’t bring himself to ask how I was, or what was happening in my life. It had felt like we were so close, all of us, in those lazy summer days. And over the weeks and months that followed, Maud and I had become even closer – closer than sisters. But now, it was very plain, to Abel at least, I am an outsider in this family. Perhaps I always will be.

The thought was unsettling, and I turned away, back down the chilly corridor to the comparative warmth of the drawing room, turning over possibilities in my mind.

Soon, the truth will come out whether I want it to or not. The question is, when it does, will they close ranks against me?

I thought, when I came here, that I was finding a second family, a replacement for the one I had lost. But now … now I’m no longer sure. Seeing Maud in Abel’s arms like that, laughing together, excluding me even without meaning to … well, it was a reminder of a truth I should never have forgotten: whatever else we have shared, blood is thicker than water. And if they close ranks against me, I have nowhere else to go.

11 December 1994

My aunt knows. I don’t know how – but she knows. Did Maud tell her? It seems impossible – I’m as certain as I can be that she wouldn’t say anything, not after her promise. Lizzie, perhaps? From the way she looks at me, I have a horrible feeling she may be putting two and two together, but I can’t believe …

In the end, it doesn’t really matter. She has found out.

She came to my room as I was getting ready for bed, bursting in without knocking.

‘Is it true?’

I was half undressed, and I clasped my shirt to my chest, trying to cover my swollen breasts and stomach, under pretence of shyness. I shook my head, pretending I didn’t know what she meant, and she drew back her hand and slapped me, making my head jerk backwards, leaving my ears ringing and my cheek flaming with the shock of the smack. The shirt fell to the floor, and I saw her looking at me, at my changed body, and her lip curled, as she realised she didn’t need to ask the question.

‘You disgusting little slut. I took you in, and this is how you pay me back?’

‘Who told you?’ I said bitterly. I picked up the shirt and put it back on, wincing against the stinging pain in my cheek.

‘That’s none of your business. Who is he?’ she demanded, and when I didn’t answer straight away, she grabbed my shoulders and shook me like a rat, making my teeth rattle. ‘Who’s the boy who did this?’ she shouted.

I shook my head again, trying not to cringe away from her fury, trying not to show my fear. My aunt has always intimidated me – but I had never seen her like this, and suddenly I understood why Maud hated her so much.

‘I w-won’t t-tell you,’ I managed, though it was hard to speak. I can’t let her know. Her anger would be unspeakable and I would never see him again.

She stared down at me for a long moment, and then she turned on her heel.

‘I can’t trust you. You’ve shown that. You’ll stay in your room and I will have supper brought up to you. You can stay here and think about what you have done and the shame you’ve brought on this family.’

She slammed the door shut, and I heard a kind of scraping sound, as if someone were scratching something across the top and bottom of the door. It took me a minute to understand, and even when the truth dawned on me, it was with a kind of cold disbelief. Was she – was she locking me in?

‘Aunt Hester?’ I said, and then as I heard her heels click away down the corridor I ran to the door, rattling the handle, banging on it with my fists. It didn’t open. ‘Aunt Hester? You can’t do this!’

But there was no answer. If she heard me, she said nothing.

Still in disbelief, I tried to force the door, leaning against it with all my strength, but the bolts held.

‘Maud!’ I screamed. ‘Lizzie?’

I waited. There was no answering call, only the slam of a door. I wasn’t sure which one, but I thought it could be the door at the foot of the attic stairs. A sense of complete hopelessness stole over me as I realised. It was almost eight. Lizzie would have gone home, long since. And Maud – I don’t know where she was. In bed? Downstairs? Either way, it wasn’t likely my voice would carry all the way through two sets of doors, and down the maze of corridors of this rambling house.

I didn’t call for Mrs Warren. There would be no point in that. Even if she heard, she wouldn’t come.

I went to the window, looking out into the quiet, moonlit night – its tranquillity a terrible contrast to my raw throat, and my fingers, bruised from hammering.

And a realisation came over me.

I am trapped. I am completely trapped. She could send Maud away to school, sack Lizzie, and keep me here for … for how long? For as long as she wants – that’s the truth. She could keep me until the baby comes. Or she could starve me until I lose it.

The truth of this makes something inside me turn weak and soft with fear. I should be strong – strong for myself and strong for my child. But I am not. This house hides secrets, I know that now. I’ve been here long enough to hear the stories, of the unhappy maid who hanged herself in the scullery, and the little boy who drowned in the lake.

My aunt is someone. And I am no one. I have no friends here. How easy it would be to say that I simply … left. Ran away in the night. No one would raise a fuss. Maud might ask questions, but Mrs Warren would swear to have seen me leave, I’m sure of it.

If she chooses to, she can simply lock the door and throw away the key. And there would be nothing I could do.

I sank to my knees by the window, the moonlight flooding the room, and I put my hands to my face, feeling the wetness of tears, and the cool hardness of the ring I still wear, my mother’s engagement ring. It’s a diamond – just a very small one. And as I knelt there, in the moonlight, something came to me, a desire to leave a mark, however small, something she cannot erase, no matter what she does to me.

I took off the ring, and very slowly I scratched upon the glass, watching the moonlight illuminate the letters like white fire. HELP … ME …

13 December 1994

I have to get away.

I HAVE to get away.

The words I scratched on the window are like a taunt, now. An admission of defeat. Because no one is going to help me except myself.

It is three days since I was locked in here, and apart from a hurried, whispered conversation with Maud, I have seen no one except my aunt. She brings up trays at odd times, and sometimes not at all, leaving me terrified and hungry.

And always – always the same question. Who is he? Who is he? Who is he?

Today, when I shook my head, she hit me again, so that my head snapped back with such a force that I heard my neck crunch, and the hot flare on my cheekbone blossomed across my face and into my ear, making it ring with pain.

I staggered backwards into the bed frame and I looked up at her, holding on to the metal with one hand, the other pressed to my face, as if to hold the bones together. For a moment she looked almost frightened – not of me, but of what she had done, what she might have done. She had, I think, lost control – perhaps for the first time since I had known her.

Then she turned on her heel and left and I heard the scraping of the bolts before she clattered down the stairs.

I sank down on the bed. My hands were shaking and I felt a wave of cramps in my stomach, followed by a wash of sickness. At first I thought I might be losing the baby, but I sat quietly, waiting, and the pains subsided, though the heat in my cheek and the screech of tinnitus in my ear remained.

I wanted to write in my diary, to do as I always do when things get too much – let it out on to the page, like a kind of bloodletting, letting the ink and paper soak up all the grief and anger and fear until I can cope again.

But when I got the book out of its hiding place under the loose board, I looked at it with fresh eyes.

I can’t tell her the truth. Not just because if I do, I will never see him again. But because I am seriously beginning to fear that if I do, she may kill me for real. And for the first time, after today, I truly think she is capable of it.

She can’t make me tell her – but if she searches my room, she doesn’t need to. It’s all here.

So after I’ve finished this entry, I’m going to make a fire, and then I’m going to rip out every single page about him, score out his name, tear out every reference and burn them.

Because, whatever she does to me, she can’t make me confess. I just have to hold on until I’ve seen him – and after that we’ll decide what to do, together. Somehow, I will get word to him. I can pass a letter to Maud, perhaps. After all, I have paper here, and pens. And I can trust her – at least … at least, I hope I can.

He will come, when he gets that letter, surely? He’ll come. He has to. And then – we’ll go somewhere, run away – together. We’ll figure it out.

I just have to hold on to that thought.

I just have to hold on.