The Winter Spirits

by Bridget Collins, Imogen Hermes Gowar, Natasha Pulley, Jess Kidd, Andrew Michael Hurley

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

FROM THE CREATORS OF THE HAUNTING SEASON COMES A DAZZLING COLLECTION OF NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN GHOSTLY TALES.

'Terrific - every bit as good as an MR James collection' ROSIE ANDREWS, author of THE LEVIATHAN

Featuring new and original stories from:

Bridget Collins, author of The Binding
Imogen Hermes Gowar, author of The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock
Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of The Mercies
Andrew Michael Hurley, author of The Loney
Jess Kidd, author of Things in Jars
Natasha Pulley, author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street
Elizabeth Macneal, author of The Doll Factory
Laura Purcell, author of The Silent Companions
Susan Stokes-Chapman, author of Pandora
Laura Shepherd-Robinson, author of The Square of Sevens
Stuart Turton, author of The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
Catriona Ward, author of The Last House on Needless Street

The tradition of a haunted tale at Christmas has flourished across the centuries. These twelve stories - authored by some of today's most loved and lauded writers of historical and gothic fiction - are all centred around Christmas or Advent, boldly and playfully re-imagining a beloved tradition for a modern audience.

Taking you from a haunted Tuscan villa to a remote Scottish island with a dark secret,, these vibrant haunted stories are your ultimate companion for frosty nights.

So curl up, light a candle, and fall under the spell of winters past . . .

'I absolutely devoured The Winter Spirits. Every story is a gem' LAURA SHEPPERSON
'Another dazzling collection. Chilling, moving and incredibly satisfying' AMANDA MASON
'Eerily macabre, hauntingly propulsive' JOANNE BURN

Release date: October 19, 2023

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 90000

Sample

The second candles of Advent burn on the capital’s church altars, though the days are all the same to Mary. Her birthday was yesterday, but she doesn’t know that, no mother nor father to tell her so. Her brother Abel older but not by enough to remember. They are lucky to be together: this is repeated on the Island, where it is common to have breaks in the limbs of your family tree, oozing tender sap.

Jacob’s Island is a sprawl of a rookery, stuck between two confluences of effluence. They were pitched, Abel and Mary, out of the workhouse in Whitechapel and into this new freedom-that-is-no-real-freedom three years before, finding lodgings over a knocking shop on Edwards Street that by day claims to be a grocer with wilted cabbage and goggle-eyed potatoes and at night lays wilted women beneath goggle-eyed men and won’t scrub the tables in between.

It is no longer a bewilderment to her, the Island. She knows it well enough now, where to lift her skirts, where to keep to the middle to avoid slop, where the rookeries’ worst thieves are more active and likely to target even a child, but something is stalking her now, as she weaves with fresh hides in her hands, heading for the small, slumped dock where deliveries carry all the skilled work out to better areas. She cannot see it, nor nose it, but it knows her in some bone-deep, soul-certain way, is relentless as hunger or desire – is hungry, desirous – and so there is no escaping. Poor Mary, head down. If she did not look so much like prey, perhaps she could have been luckier.

It is not all bleakness. Christmas brings some relief, with the rich from across the river feeling a burr of conscience, sending gifts of money to the old leper hospital, the grubby church. Some of it even reaches those it was intended for, and there are clementines, bright orange as lit coals, handed out at Advent services, studded with cloves. Mary had her first clementine at such a service last year, and the memory of its sweetness haunts her still, like a phantom limb.

She is thinking about it now, as she weaves closer to the dock, more than she should. She should have half a mind on her way, an eye on what’s about her. Then she’d notice, maybe, how the man behind her now has boots of shiny leather, at odds with his patched and darned overcoat, the stubble on his face.

Mary is spat by the alleys onto the jetty, once wood rotting underfoot and now slick stone built haphazard from the riverbed, wide enough for a dozen boats to dock and so the busiest part of the Island at any time of day. Teirney’s barge is always moored in the same place. The man drops back here, and watches as Mary carries her hides to the woman smoking on deck. It reminds him to smoke too, the pipe he purchased for when his pursuit would require a watch-and-wait, something to do with his hands and face. He tamps tobacco into the clay and lights it, puffs awkwardly as the girl speaks with Ma Teirney.

‘And how’s tha t’day?’

‘Good, Ma.’

‘Keepin free of the yellowin, you and your brudder both?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tha’s good, girl.’ Ma Teirney inspects the hides, finds them as always a little wanting, but pays in full nonetheless. It is more than she’d admit to anyone, least of all herself, but Mary is the reason she comes to this godforsaken island for her hides at all. The girl has thick, dark hair, fierce pale skin and dark, liquid eyes. A gentle spirit.

‘Same again next week, Ma?’

‘Closed for Christmastime.’

‘Christmas next week, Ma?’

‘Aye. An’ here’s sommit for the occasion.’

Ma brings out the peg doll from her pocket, dressed in a bright twist of leftover taffeta taken from the sewing floor. Peacock blue, formed by Ma’s skilled fingers into a bodice and full skirt of the current fashion – she has even lined the hem and cuffs with lace. The peg’s face itself is rubbed nearly smooth by cherishing, but the wood is a lovely pine.

‘Ma.’ The word is gasped. Mary has never had a gift before. She can’t even bring herself to reach for it lest it be snatched away. ‘It can’t be for me?’

‘Why can’t it? Take it so.’

Mary does so, in trembling fingers. She sees her fingers grubby against the bright azure of the skirt, but her shame is forgotten by the wonder of the fabric, soft one way and rough the other, and so thick it keeps the dents of her touch. She crushes the doll to her chest in ecstasy.

They part, Ma feeling sadder and lighter, Mary in love with her new and first toy, and the man peels off from the wall and follows Mary, back into the warren.

The yellowing sweeps the Island the next week, and the third Advent candle is lit to half-empty pews as bodies are shipped out for paupers’ graves. Cholera outbreaks are nothing new in places so packed and reeking, but this is especially virulent, coming as it does so hard on the heels of that year’s influenza.

Abel and Mary keep indoors, as Ma Teirney told Mary they must in such times, and survive off boiled peelings from the grocer’s. Mary doesn’t much mind. They have been hungrier. She likes her brother and loves her peg doll, who she has named Clementine. She and Clementine attend balls and brush their lips against knots in the wood of the rotting door frame, that when squinted at could have beards and kind eyes. Abel frets at the work going begging, but he listens to his sister’s pleas to stay put.

No one else stops their business, including the man with leather boots and trimmed nails, whose business is to keep watch over their one way in or out, waiting for Mary to emerge. He leaves the Island only at night-time, takes the boat he has hired west to Waterloo Bridge, where his coach waits to take him across the bustling Strand, skirting St Giles and Soho, those thin ribbons of streets he once frequented, and through Bloomsbury where he was born in a house with high ceilings and crystal lamps. On to their quiet house set before a Regent’s Park that stretches out dark as a sea.

Now the streets are empty, the lampers long left and only the occasional coachman waiting outside houses lit golden with candles and the bright chatter of dinner parties. They used to throw such soirées in their dining room, the walls hung with damask and twelve courses created by their cook, poached from the Corinthian in his prime. Now that room stands stripped to its plaster and the heavy carved table is sold too, alongside its twenty high-backed, silk-cushioned chairs. Heavy draped curtains always drawn, and candlelight: they remain beside shadows, and a round table moved from the unstaffed kitchens with four matchstick-legged chairs of unknown provenance. And it is there that his wife waits for news, with a woman who talks with the dead.

By a system of shadow casting between the gas lamps of the fine street and the smallest chink left in the drapes hung at the leaded windows, Mrs Flint’s assistant Violet can alert her to the exact moment Mr Ezra Griffiths’s coach turns into the square. It is this cue that rouses Mrs Flint from her trance and tells her to turn dark green eyes on her quarry and say, ‘He’s home.’ Mrs Edith Griffiths will go to the window and gasp at the accuracy, adding this to her wisps of evidence, built up frail as a nest, that this is after all the right thing, that this woman squatting in her home is real in her promises. It is easier to sweep aside her unease at the plan.

She opens the front door, which they keep freshly painted as though that would ward off the street’s gossip, and takes Ezra’s stinking coat, his flat cap, takes in his exhausted eyes, kisses his stubbled cheek and holds her breath against the whiff of poverty that steams off him. She doesn’t know, but the house smells just as bad to Ezra: closed-up misery and waiting.

‘Well?’

‘Still inside.’

Edith turns from him and hangs the coat carefully next to his good cloak, the flat cap atop, and goes dazed back to the dining room. Ezra reluctantly follows, rubbing his eyes and swallowing a yawn.

‘Still inside,’ he hears Edie tell Mrs Flint, and both women look at him as he enters. He feels the now familiar shiver of revulsion when the older woman’s eyes fix on him. She is handsome, strong boned, and the green of her irises is deep as a pond, thick streaks of white hair framing her pale face, the rest a rich brown. She is powerful, so unlike his dear Edie, and it disturbs him quite as much as the fact he believes everything she says. But she is their link, their hope. She has a plan for them.

‘We can’t wait longer,’ says Mrs Flint. ‘Who knows when the sickness will end. Every day we wait now, the threads are fraying. I cannot keep them tethered for ever. And the girl must be willing, remember that.’

‘I know,’ says Ezra, keeping temper from his voice. ‘But she lives with her brother, well built and rough. And you said no fuss.’

‘The woman with the doll. Turner?’

‘Teirney,’ he says, recalling the name on the barge.

‘Can she write?’

Ezra shrugs. ‘I doubt the girl can read.’

‘But a letter may do it anyway. Something signed. A letter, summoning her for work. She is clearly fond, it would not be unusual.’ She looks expectantly at him, and he realises he is being dismissed to look for paper, a pen.

He silently fumes as he leaves the musty room for his study on the first floor. The bare steps creak, and he wishes he could move stealthily, could hear what the witch says when he exits. He hates leaving Edie with her in the day, and when Violet is there it eases him only slightly, for the girl is as under her spell as his wife.

It began at one of their dinners with Alistair and his wife Maude, both devout attendees of electric shows and mesmerists, mentioning a particular establishment in Holborn, where there are no tricks or mirrors, just a woman with green eyes who sees through the veil of life to the other side. When the spiritualist was mentioned – a Mrs Stone, or Mrs Slate – Edie went very still. The muscles clenched in her jaw since that terrible night softened, and her eyes went bright. It was an expression, almost, of ecstasy, one that he had sometimes seen when they lay together. He should have closed down the chatter, but how could anyone who loves someone refuse them such pleasure?

And when she came to him the very next day in his study, him stowing the bottle hurriedly in his bottom drawer, she had the same calm gleam to her, the address in Holborn clutched in her palm. He still did not close it down. The truth was, he needed the hope too.

Through the coachman Thomas, they organised an appointment a week hence. Edie seemed soothed. He drank less, and they moved around the house balancing their secret between them, like the early days of her pregnancy, and when the day came dressed with the care of attending the opera. If Thomas thought their attire strange for a night in Holborn, his face, as usual, gave nothing away.

The house was small and neat, unobtrusive in a way he instantly approved of. It put him in mind of the better sort of bawdy houses, where you could be served tea alongside other services. No signage proclaimed what sort of establishment it was, only a small brass sign engraved Mrs Flint. He knocked twice, Edie hanging from his arm, her breath slightly misted in the cold air.

A girl they would come to know as Violet opened the door. She wore a frilled cap and black uniform, like a scullery maid, unruly blonde curls and unruly twisted teeth tucked out of sight. A pointed, clever face, he’d thought it even then.

‘Mr and Mrs Griffiths.’ It was not a question. She stood aside in the narrow hallway. ‘Come in. Back room, please.’

The corridor was lit softly, a closed door to the left, two to the right, a staircase leading up to second-floor darkness. The shabby wallpaper seemed pleasantly faded rather than squalid, and there was a heavy, floral scent pervading as they approached a door set at the back, where a kitchen would usually be in a terrace such as this.

Before they reached it, the door opened though there was no one standing the other side. Edie gave a shiver, of excitement or fear, as beyond was revealed a small round table set with candles, a seated woman framed in the doorway. She could only be Mrs Flint. Perhaps it was a pseudonym, it suited her so well. The hard gaze, the sharp cheekbones, the perfectly pressed widow’s weeds – she was forbidding, far from his visions of floaty scarves and plump, waving forearms.

Violet ushered them inside, and Mrs Flint offered them the seats either side of her.

‘Please, sit. It is good to meet you both.’

They sat, and Ezra scanned the room. There were, as Alistair and Maude had said, no mirrors. It had once been a kitchen – that was obvious from the size of the hearth, the cupboards, the smoke stains on the wall – but there were no cooking smells any more, only that floral heaviness everywhere. A large curtain concealed a window, and another longer curtain covered a door through which leached some of the September night’s chill.

‘Tell me,’ said Mrs Flint, ‘why you are here?’

‘Our daughter,’ said Edie, her voice already cracking, at the same time Ezra said, ‘Our friends—’

‘Well, yes,’ he continued, as Edie fell silent. ‘Both. Our friends told us about you. The Wallaces?’

‘Oh,’ said Mrs Flint, and there was little warmth in her voice. ‘They thought it all a great game.’

‘They said you were the real thing. That you really can speak …’

He couldn’t bring himself to say it.

‘But you must say it,’ said Mrs Flint. ‘The time for hesitation is past. Leave it at the door. Here, you must believe. Your daughter?’

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘This winter past. Influenza.’

‘Her name?’

“Eleanor.’

‘Age?’

‘Seven,’ said Edie. ‘And two months. And ten days.’

Mrs Flint clucked her tongue. ‘A great shame, a great waste. Children, though, they are often harder to coax out. The transition – it frightens them. Like a game of hide and seek they have taken too seriously and convinced themselves of danger.’

‘We do not want to frighten her,’ said Edie, mortified.

‘Transition?’ asked Ezra.

‘The place between. The mist. Children often get stuck there, waiting. So you are doing the right thing to contact her, guide her. And you will have brought what I asked?’

‘Her hair,’ said Edie, slipping off her mourning ring. ‘And her favourite doll.’

This Ezra drew from his overcoat. A china-faced, glass-eyed girl the length of his forearm, with tight chestnut curls and a sage green hat, a sage green umbrella hanging from a plump cloth arm.

‘Pretty,’ said Mrs Flint damningly. She took both objects and placed them carefully on the table where they cast strange umbras. ‘Violet?’

Ezra stifled a start as her assistant moved out from the shadows by the door. She had closed it unnoticed, and now the room felt very small, any sounds from the street very far away. Violet extinguished the lamps around the walls, moving close past the chairs, and brought a black candle from a high shelf, placing it in front of Mrs Flint.

‘I prefer not to explain too much, but there are some rules. We do not break the circle. One knock, yes; two knocks for no. We keep our focus on Eleanor. Do not dwell on darkness, but on light.’ She struck a match, lit the black candle. ‘The candles are for that, to bring you back. This place is where what we think is made manifest, and that is perilous. When Violet tells you, you may ask questions. Otherwise please do not speak out of turn. I may fit, or shake, and you must not be alarmed. Keep hold of my hand – you are my tethers. Understood?’

‘Yes,’ breathed Edie, but Ezra felt a swell of misgiving. She had not told them what to expect, not really. Will they hear Eleanor, see her? He was not ready for any of it.

But Mrs Flint was holding out her hand to him, and Violet, seated his other side, was too, and Edie already had tight hold of them. He complied, noting how strong Mrs Flint’s grip was, how cool Violet’s skin. It was strange to hold women’s hands like this.

Violet began to count, very slowly, down from ten. ‘Ten … nine … eight …’

Ezra fixed his gaze on the candles, but at ‘five’ Edie’s sharp gasp pulled his attention up. His wife was staring at Mrs Flint. The woman was unnaturally still, shoulders lifted close to her ears, green eyes wide as the doll’s on the table.

‘Four … three …’

Her shoulders slumped, her head flopping forward like a puppet with cut strings.

‘Two …’

Ezra found himself fearing the final number, but it came anyway.

‘One.’

A gust of cold wind filled the room, guttering the candles and causing all but the black one to extinguish. Mrs Flint’s grip was iron, Violet’s ice. Edie whimpered as Mrs Flint slowly, slowly raised her head.

‘Mrs Flint?’ asked Violet. Her voice did not so much as waver. A knock, definite as his own had been on the front door, echoed around the room. His heart was beating, galloping, racing. A second knock.

‘Eleanor?’ asked Violet.

Knock. Ezra held his breath. Surely it could not be so easy? His little girl could not have been waiting so long for them to come for her, stepping so simply forward from death? Knock. No.

‘Who are you?’

‘A guide,’ said Mrs Flint, and her voice was a man’s.

‘Are you of God?’

‘Light only.’

‘Do you know Eleanor?’

‘I know the girl you seek. Dark hair, like her father. Small hands, like her mother. Loved horses and her china doll. Clary – the doll? Clary.’

‘Clary, yes!’ exclaimed Edie, but Violet threw her a warning look.

Wait, she mouthed, and then, aloud, ‘Can you let her through?’

‘Do you mean to bring her home?’

Violet’s voice was troubled. ‘What do you mean, guide?’

‘She wants to come home.’

Tears sprang into Ezra’s eyes, and he fixed his gaze on the ceiling, to stop them falling.

‘Let me speak with her,’ said Violet.

‘Let her come home, poor lamb.’ Mrs Flint’s voice had something uncomfortably close to malice in it. Lit by the trembling candle, her eyes seemed full of flame. ‘Little lamb, soft and taken so soon.’

‘Are you of God?’ repeated Violet, and there were definite nerves in her now. Her hand was vibrating in Ezra’s, and he resisted the urge to stroke it, to soothe her. What was she, sixteen? Barely more than a child.

Mrs Flint leant forward, pulling Edie’s and Ezra’s hands closer to her, hovering over the candle. Her breath made it dance. ‘Light, only.’

‘Let Eleanor through,’ said Violet. ‘Let her past.’

Mrs Flint rocked back violently onto two chair legs, hauling Edie and Ezra sideways, yanking Violet across the table. Ezra’s arm strained, he felt his grip slipping, and then the chair legs banged square onto the terracotta tiles once more.

‘Mama?’

Ezra’s body began to shake, and somewhere deep within his sternum a white-hot point of pain opened and spread – longing, sharp enough to cut. The voice was not a child’s parody, but a child’s. His child’s. Their child’s.

Edie convulsed. She was weeping silently, her face frozen in anguish, and Ezra opened his mouth to speak but Violet shot him a warning look.

‘Is that Eleanor Griffiths, of Cambridge Gate?’

‘Is my mama there?’

‘Your mama, Edith?’

‘Edie. Mama.’

Violet nodded at Edie, but she shook her head. Ezra understood – he felt a lump in his own throat. Violet looked instead to him, and he swallowed it down.

‘Eleanor, it’s Papa.’

Mrs Flint cocked her head towards him, like a dog listening to its master.

‘Papa?’

‘Here, sweet girl. I’m here. Me and your mama both.’

‘I’m cold, Papa.’

‘My girl. You mustn’t be afraid.’

‘Will you come and fetch me?’

Edie choked on a sob, and for the first time Ezra realised what a fool he’d been, allowing this. What possible good was there in any of it?

‘It’s all right, dear one. You can go. You can cross over.’

‘I don’t know the way.’

‘The guide.’ He tried to keep the question out of his voice, looking at Violet. ‘Can they show you?’

There was a long, long pause.

‘Eleanor? Are you still there?’

‘Papa?’ It was a whisper, and of such urgency Ezra was catapulted back to the previous Christmas, their last together, her hot breath on his cheek. Papa, can I open one more gift?

He looked for the first time since she started speaking with his daughter’s voice at Mrs Flint, and immediately wished he hadn’t. Her staring eyes, the crags of her lined and handsome face were as far from Eleanor’s smooth cheeks as it was possible to be.

But she jerks her head to move him closer, and he obeys. ‘Papa,’ she whispers. ‘I don’t like him. He’s trying to keep me here.’

Terror floods Ezra’s belly. ‘He?’

‘Help me, Papa. Bring me home.’

Another terrible gust of cold, and the black candle goes out.

They saw Mrs Flint weekly after that. Each time, they had to go through the guide, Violet asking if he was with God, and he claiming light, only. But once Mrs Flint’s trances ended and they discussed what was said, the parents and spiritualist and her assistant all agreed that something had a hold on Eleanor, and it was darkness.

Constant, jittery anxiety seized Edith and Ezra, a deep and endless terror of what their child was experiencing. Was she in a struggle for her soul, lost in purgatory? Was this guide a demon? It was possible, even likely. Though Mrs Flint explained Eleanor had no body to corrupt, it was the fleshy possibilities of what may be happening to his daughter that consumed Ezra day and especially night. In those days he still could afford his weekly visits to the oriental dens of Harley Street, but he found himself unable to perform or enjoy the enticements of these young women, girls really, thinking of his daughter stuck in the inbetween with her hellish guide. For the first time, he considered his effect on these women with clear eyes, heard the emptiness of their laughter and saw his casual, even gentlemanly caresses as something tolerated, not invited.

Things took a desperate turn at one session, their eighth, when Mrs Flint as Eleanor had her head knocked forward against the table with a vicious and unnatural force. A red welt appeared, and with his own eyes Ezra saw something move within the rapidly swelling lump, like a burrowing insect rippling its way into the spiritualist’s brain.

‘This cannot stand!’ he howled, forgetting himself. ‘This cannot stand!’

It was Edie who suggested the spiritualist and her assistant move in, so they could talk daily with their daughter. The rates were steep, but they could afford to host them easily, at least at first. And when they began having to sell first some ornaments, then some rugs, a couple of solid gold and ugly old rings Edie never wore – what did it matter? Eleanor was afraid, and stuck with a low-voiced man none of them trusted in a place only Mrs Flint could reach. There was no price her parents would not pay.

Mrs Flint took the best guest rooms, and Violet the servants’ floor. Violet was a queer fish, her narrow body slipping through their cavernous house. Her gold head dipped whenever they passed each other, but he sensed no true coyness in her, only the performance of it. When his brain allowed him brief relief from nightmares, he dreamt of her instead and woke hot and throbbing, repulsed by his desire.

It did not take long, after the cook and the maids and the manservants were dismissed, and the weekly Fortnum and Mason food deliveries cancelled, and the dining room stripped, and Ezra’s father’s desk carried away to a pawn shop, for them to lose any sense of what the value in anything at all was, even a stranger’s soul.

Mrs Flint had been living with them two months before she acquiesced to discussing their options beyond speaking with Eleanor. She had Violet go to their house in Holborn and return with a small red-bound book embossed with a symbol that seemed inherently unholy. A book, she said, brought from Germany where it was seized from a witch’s estate hundreds of years before. It was block-printed in byzantine script that Ezra understood only parts of despite being trilingual, but it was enough to convince him that it was genuine, or at least written by someone who believed what they wrote to be genuine.

The thought that Mrs Flint may not be genuine herself had long since vanished if it had been there at all. She knew too much, was as wise about their daughter as they were, and the voice – it was Eleanor who came to them, of that there was no doubt. Any scepticism was replaced by awed respect in Edie, and something close to loathing in Ezra. He hated that this woman was their only channel with Eleanor, that without her they would never have known of her torment. He even sometimes resented knowing about it at all, though that was a heartless thing to feel. What was a parent for, if not to feel their child’s pain as keenly as the child themself?

The difficulty, Mrs Flint explained, was that even when they spoke with Eleanor directly, it was clear the guide was listening. Ezra envisaged a man in a dark coat and beard standing at his daughter’s shoulder, his skin fearsomely pale, eyes feverishly intent.

‘So whatever the plan, Eleanor cannot have knowledge of it.’

‘But there can be a plan?’ asked Edie, twisting her handkerchief, soiled with many days of tears. ‘We can move her on.’

‘We can.’ Mrs Flint paused, eyes flicking between husband and wife. ‘Or we could try … it is perhaps possible …’

‘To bring her back?’ croaked Ezra. Edie looked startled a moment, then hungry.

‘We can have her back?’

‘She is not yet a year gone. I have never done it,’ said Mrs Flint, as uncertain as he’d ever seen her. ‘I have never seen it done. But it has been done, in America, in Central Europe.’ She tapped the blood-red book. ‘In Germany.’

‘That book tells you how?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then we must try it,’ said Edie.

‘But it is of course not without risks,’ said Mrs Flint, eyes darting to Violet, who looked wan and strained. ‘There is a reason we do not attempt such work. It takes expertise, an incredible level of knowledge and preparation—’

‘We can pay,’ burst out Edie, and Mrs Flint held up a hand and inclined her head in an of course.

‘Most delicately, there is the requirement of a host.’

‘Here,’ said Ezra stupidly. ‘We can host it, do whatever you need to, here.’

Mrs Flint looked at him pityingly and he hated her even more. ‘A host for her soul, Mr Griffiths.’

A silence.

‘I’ll do it,’ said Edie.

‘It must be a child, around her age.’

It was a mark of how deep they were inside that black pit that Ezra did not so much as flinch.

‘Willing, too. Or at least not unwilling.’

‘How would we find such a child?’

‘Perhaps tell them a half-truth?’ said Mrs Flint. ‘Not five miles from here are a dozen slums filled with children barely surviving. There are children who would like to live in this sort of luxury.’

Ezra avoided looking around at his hollowed-out dining room, shuttered and thick with their dust.

‘But what do we do with them,’ said Edie in a whisper. ‘Does it … would it hurt them?’

‘No,’ said Mrs Flint with unearned certainty. ‘Possession only pushes the individual aside. Buries them deeper. Or else we could move them over.’

‘Move them?’

‘Encase them, in an object. Such as a doll. Many of those coarse sorts barely have will as it is.’

Violet twitches, but only Ezra sees.

‘A workhouse then,’ said Edie. ‘Say we are hiring a maid? Or adopt a child, from an orphanage?’

‘There are paper trails, with both those routes,’ said Mrs Flint. ‘There is no law that addresses this directly, as there was in the witch’s day. But it concerns the occult—’

‘Is it Satan’s work?’ said Edie, who is true in her faith, believing every word when she prays each Sunday.

‘Of course not. We are saving her, aren’t we? It can only be to the good.’

Her voice echoes in the empty room, and none of them answer.

He begins his work. It is silently agreed that no one else can know, that their group of four is where the plan must stay, and so it is out of the question that anyone but Ezra can find the girl. He buys a jacket, a cap from a pedlar, lets his stubble grow.

Thomas, the coachman and last of their staff, takes him to Waterloo Bridge, where Ezra hires one of the various boats and takes it to one of the slums lining the river like rotten teeth. He has no luck in the snake pits behind Bankside, nor the congested gullet between Paradise Street and the water. His view of the poor, in keeping with others of his class – pity and a near-fondness for their strange ways of talking and dressing – becomes something calculated and disturbing, not that he recognises it as such. He assesses with the eye of a merchant, weighing wares, and finds no one suitable.

He passes over Jacob’s Island four times, the bustling dock keeping him at bay until he asks that day’s boatman, with calculated ease, where the worst of London can be found. The boatman does not think it an odd question, is well used to the poverty tourists come from the north and west. He is as happy to take their money as he would be to drown one of them.

‘The Island, sir, no doubt. A cesspit. Venice of the drains.’

Ezra heads there the next day with a different boat, and he sees Mary within a half-hour of wa