‘Everything alright, miss?’

She recognised Morris’s voice at once, and felt instantly relieved. He moved the light out of her eyes, and she saw him stand up straight, having stooped down to pass through the low gate. Morris was dressed in a black overcoat and black gloves. He peered at her.

‘Are you alright?’ he said. ‘Just doing my rounds. The back gate is locked at ten o’clock, you should know that.’

‘I forgot. Yes – I’m fine.’

He shone the torch around the bridge. Mariana followed the light anxiously with her eyes. No sign of anyone.

She listened. Silence. No footsteps.

He had gone.

‘Can you let me in?’ she said, glancing back at Morris.

‘Certainly. Go in this way.’ He gestured at the small gate behind him. ‘I often use it as a shortcut. Go along the passage and you’ll come out in Main Court.’

‘Thank you,’ Mariana said. ‘I’m so grateful.’

‘Not at all, miss.’

She walked past him, up to the open gate. She bowed her head and stooped slightly, and went inside. The ancient brick passage was very dark and smelled of damp. The gate shut behind her. She heard Morris lock it.

Mariana cautiously made her away along the passage, thinking about what had happened. She had a moment of doubt – had someone really been following her? If so, who? Or was she just being paranoid?

In any case, she was relieved to be back in St Christopher’s.

She emerged into an oak-panelled corridor, part of the building that housed the buttery in Main Court. She was about to exit through the main doorway – when she glanced back. And she stopped.

There were a series of portraits hanging along the dimly lit passage. At the end of the passage, one portrait caught her eye. It occupied a wall to itself. Mariana stared at it. It was a face she recognised.

She blinked a few times, unsure she was seeing correctly – and then she slowly approached it, like a woman in a trance.

She reached it and stood there, her face level with the face in the painting. She stared at it. Yes, it was him.

It was Tennyson.

But it wasn’t Tennyson as an old man, with white hair and a long beard, as in other paintings that Mariana had seen. This was Alfred Tennyson as a young man. Just a boy, really.

He couldn’t have been more than twenty-nine when it was painted. He looked even younger. But it was unmistakably him.

He had one of the handsomest faces Mariana had ever seen. And seeing him here, close up, his beauty quite took her breath away. He had a strong angular jaw, sensuous lips, and dark, tousled shoulder-length hair. For a moment she was reminded of Edward Fosca, but she banished him from her mind. For one thing, the eyes were quite different. Fosca’s eyes were dark, and Tennyson’s were light blue, watery blue.

Hallam had probably been dead around seven years when this was painted, meaning Tennyson had another long decade ahead of him before In Memoriam was finally completed. Another ten years of grief.

And yet – this wasn’t a face ravished by despair. There was surprisingly little, if any, detectable emotion in this face. No sadness, no hint of melancholia. There was stillness, and glacial beauty. But little else.

Why?

It was, Mariana thought, squinting at the picture, as if Tennyson were looking at something … something in the near distance.

Yes, she thought – his pale blue eyes appeared to be staring at something just out of sight, something off to one side, behind Mariana’s head.

What was he looking at?

She walked away from the painting feeling rather disappointed – as if she had been personally let down by Tennyson. She didn’t know what she had hoped to find in his eyes – a little comfort, perhaps? – solace or strength; even heartbreak would have been preferable.

But not nothing.

She banished the portrait from her mind. She hurried back to her room.

Outside her door, something was waiting for her.

A black envelope on the floor.

Mariana picked it up and opened it. Inside, there was a piece of notepaper, folded in half. She unfolded it and read it.

It was a handwritten message in black ink, in elegant, slanted writing:

Dear Mariana,

I hope you are well. I was wondering if you might care to join me for a little chat tomorrow morning? How about ten o’clock in the Fellows’ Garden?

Yours,

Edward Fosca

16

If I’d been born in Ancient Greece, there would have been numerous bad omens and horoscopes predicting disaster at my birth. Eclipses, blazing comets, and doom-laden portents—

As it was, there was nothing – and in fact, my birth was characterised by an absence of event. My father, the man who would warp my life and make me into this monster, wasn’t even present. He was playing a game of cards with some of the farmhands, smoking cigars and drinking whisky into the night.

If I try to picture my mother – if I squint – I can just about see her, hazy and out of focus – my beautiful mother, just a girl at nineteen, in a private room in the hospital. She can hear the sound of nurses talking and laughing at the end of the corridor. She is alone, but this is not a problem. Alone, she can find a level of peace – she can think her thoughts without fear of attack. She’s looking forward to her baby, she realises, because babies don’t talk.

She knows her husband wants a son – but secretly she prays it’s a girl. If it’s a boy, he’ll grow into a man.

And men are not to be trusted.

She’s relieved when the contractions resume. They are a distraction from thinking. She prefers to focus on the physical: the breathing, the counting – the searing pain that wipes all thoughts from her mind, like chalk scrubbed from a blackboard. Then she gives into it, the agony, and loses herself—

Until, at dawn, I was born.

To my mother’s dismay, I was not a girl. When my father heard the news, that he had a boy, he was elated. Farmers, like kings, have need of many sons. I was his first.

Preparing to celebrate my birth, he arrived at the hospital with a bottle of cheap sparkling wine.

But was it a celebration?

Or a catastrophe?

Was my fate already decided, even then? Was it too late? Should they have smothered me at birth? Left me to die and rot on the hillside?

I know what my mother would say, if she could read this, my search for culpability, my quest for blame. She would have no patience with it.

No one is responsible, she’d say. Don’t glorify the events of your life and try to give them meaning. There is no meaning. Life means nothing. Death means nothing.

But she didn’t always think that way.

There was more than one of her. There was another person once, who pressed flowers and underlined poetry: a secret past I found hidden in a shoebox, at the back of a cupboard. Old photos, flattened flowers, badly spelled love poems from my father to my mother, written during their courtship. But my father quickly stopped writing poetry. And my mother stopped reading it.

She married a man she barely knew. And he took her away from everyone she had ever known. He took her to a world of discomfort – of cold, early mornings and all-day-long strenuous physical labour: weighing the lambs, shearing them, feeding them. Again, and again. And again.

There were magical moments, of course – like lambing season, when tiny innocent little creatures would pop up like white mushrooms. That was the best of it.

But she never let herself get attached to the lambs. She learned not to.

The worst of it was death. Constant, never-ending death – and all its associated processes: marking the ones to be killed, which were gaining too little weight or too much, or not falling pregnant. And then the butcher would appear, in that horrible bloodstained smock of his. And my father would hover, eager to help. He enjoyed doing the slaughtering. He seemed to relish it.

My mother would always run and hide while it went on, smuggling a bottle of vodka into the bathroom, into the shower, where she thought her tears couldn’t be heard. And I would go to the furthest part of the farm, as far away as I could get. I’d cover my ears, but I still heard the screaming.

When I’d return to the farmhouse, the stench of death was everywhere. Bodies, cut up in the open barn, nearest to the kitchen – and gutters running red with blood. There was a stink of flesh, as it was weighed and packaged in our kitchen. Bits of congealed meat stuck to the table, and pools of blood collected on the surfaces, circled by fat flies.

The unwanted parts of the bodies – entrails, guts, and other remains – were buried by my father. He’d throw them in the pit at the back of the farm.

The pit was something I always avoided. It terrified me. My father would threaten to bury me alive in the pit if I disobeyed him, or misbehaved – or betrayed his secrets.

No one will ever find you, he’d say. No one will ever know.

I used to imagine being buried alive in the pit – surrounded by the rotting carcasses, writhing with maggots and worms and other grey flesh-eating creatures – and I would shiver with fear.

I still shudder now when I think about it.