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For the next two days Evelyn went about her tasks and thought of little else besides the boy. Thought of his slender hands and sinewed forearms and imagined how they might handle a spade or a hoe. Imagined them making bread, peeling fruit, whisking an egg. It seemed a heretical thought, and she felt her color rise when Lily passed her in the garden, going to and from the gazebo. Sometimes Evelyn would pass through the orchard and hear her sister at the bars of the boy’s prison, throwing pebbles and muttering curses and imprecations that were all but unintelligible. When this happened she would go and stand beside her sister, lead her gently away by the elbow, and Lily would say: “Why is it still alive?” Evelyn just frowned and said she didn’t know, and then, come midnight, she was back in front of the boy’s sad face offering him scraps of their supper and cleaning his wound.

On the third morning after the boy’s arrival, Evelyn turned over and saw that her sister’s side of the nest was empty. Her heart clenched. Lily was rarely the first to wake and never the first to rise. By the time Evelyn was on her feet, knees and ankles throbbing with the effort of it, Lily was in the doorway and hanging off the frame.

“It’s got out,” she said.

“What?”

“It’s got out of the icehouse! God knows how.”

Evelyn staggered across the kitchen and fumbled her feet into her slippers.

“Did you see where he went?”

“No,” said Lily, and then seemed to stop breathing entirely. “He?” she said.

“Yes.”

“What do you mean, ‘he’? I thought we agreed it wasn’t a man. It’s not a man, is it, Evie? Tell me it’s not a man!”

She sounded terrified. Evelyn was frightened, too, but not for the same reasons as her sister.

“It’s not a man. But I was thinking it might be a boy.”

“A boy? Like in the book?”

“Yes.”

“Why? How?”

“I don’t know.”

“Evie!”

“Do you want to stand here chatting, or do you want to go and find him?”

She left the kitchen and went out onto the lawn, shielding her eyes against the bright sun. She scanned the garden and listened, but heard nothing. It was too cruel, to have him delivered to them and then snatched away so quickly. Lily was still trying to talk to her, but she turned away and made for the icehouse.

The gate was wide open, and there were spirals of twine in the center of the floor where the boy had freed himself from his bindings. Also, glinting in the dirt, one of her sewing needles. Evelyn picked up both. The twine was ancient. It would have taken only a few thrusts with the needle before it started to come apart.

“I told you he’s not in there.”

Lily was behind her, silhouetted in the arch. Evelyn closed one fist around the needle and held out the pieces of string.

“Silly of us to think these would hold, I suppose,” she said.

Lily frowned and looked at Evelyn’s other hand, dangling by her waist.

“Why don’t you go round the back of the house and I’ll search here?” said Evelyn.

Lily’s head jerked up. “Split up? So he can jump out and deadhead me with the shears? No thank you, Evie.”

“I don’t think he’ll do that.”

“You seem very confident all of a sudden.”

Evelyn pushed past her and pocketed the needle in her nightdress. “Come on, he can’t have gone far.”

Lily insisted on holding Evelyn’s hand while they wove around the vegetable beds and flower beds and the rows of apple trees. There was no sign of the boy. No footprints in the soil, no broken stems.

They went around to the back of the house. The day was already very warm. Evelyn was so tired from her midnight meetings with the boy and the hours of worry that came afterward that it felt as if there were condensation on the inside of her skull, on the backs of her eyes.

“A boy,” Lily muttered. “Where would a boy have come from?”

Evelyn didn’t say anything. She went to the edge of the lake and saw where some of the long grass had been flattened.

“You know what boys turn into, don’t you, Sissie?”

Evelyn squinted and tried to discern a trail.

“We should have strangled him while we had the chance.”

Evelyn unclasped her sister’s hand.

“We’re not going to cover much ground joined at the hip like this, are we,” she said. “Go round that side and have a look in the grotto.”

“What if he comes for me?”

“He was a feeble little thing when we found him. And he hasn’t been fed for days.”

Lily raised her eyebrows, but Evelyn did not respond to the implication.

They split and skirted the lake on different sides. Evelyn searched among the willows and the pampas and then under the gigantic, leathery leaves of the gunnera. It seemed a likely hiding place for the boy since it was where she and her sister had hidden as children. Under its leaves she’d liked imagining she was tiny, an insect, barely visible, while their mother and father had gone around the lake calling her in for supper.

She was lost in this memory when she heard Lily cry out. Evelyn came to the edge of the water and saw her sister’s nightdress drifting ghostlike into the artificial cave at the far end of the lake. She hitched up her own dress and walked quickly through the long grass, and by the time she got there the lakeside was echoing with the sound of a scuffle.

The grotto had once been empty, but since the storm, their mother had used it as a repository for the garden’s old statuary: stone limbs and heads and torsos, remnants of some ancient and forgotten pantheon. Young men, bearded men, men on horseback, men holding invisible swords or bows and arrows, face down in the soil or peering out of the heap under brows of thick moss. The boy had crawled up to the top of the pile as if to claim it as his own. He was high enough that the wet ferns dangling from the grotto roof brushed against his white forehead. Lily was grasping vaguely at the boy’s ankles.

“Get off there! Horrible thing!”

Evelyn met the boy’s eyes. “He’s all right, Lily,” she said. “Easy does it.”

Lily didn’t listen to her, and she got her fingers entangled in the laces of the boy’s boots.

“Got you!” she said, as if she had snared a stray pigeon that had found its way into the house.

“Careful, Lily,” said Evelyn.

Lily dragged the boy down. Evelyn watched as his limbs clattered slackly over the broken stones and onto the floor. Lily straddled him and beneath the curtains of her hair clasped her hands around the boy’s throat. One of the boy’s legs twitched.

“Lily, stop that! Leave him be!”

Evelyn hurried over and attempted to prize her sister’s fingers free.

“We’ve tried leaving him be, haven’t we,” said Lily. “Hasn’t got us very far, has it?”

“He can’t breathe!”

“That’s the point, Sissie.”

“Lily, if you don’t release him this minute, I shan’t let you wear the Marigolds.”

Lily looked at her, and her fingers loosened. The boy gasped.

“You can’t say that,” she said. “It’s not up to you.”

“I mean it. I’ll go back to the house right now and I’ll cut the fingers off with the shears and then nobody will get to wear them.”

“You wouldn’t dare!”

“I would.”

Lily seemed to consider this for a moment, and then resumed her efforts on the boy’s neck.

“I said stop it !” Evelyn shoved her sister with her hip.

As soon as she made contact, she realized quite how badly the two of them were put together. Not of an age for scrapping. Lily released the boy and fell sideways, banging her head on the broken elbow of one of the statues. She lay on her back wheezing for a few seconds and then sat up, prodding at her temple, her expression more one of surprise than pain. Her nightdress was smeared with dirt and algae from the floor of the grotto.

Evelyn got down beside the boy and brushed the hair out of his eyes.

“You’re all right,” she said. “She didn’t mean it.”

“Yes, I bloody well did!” hissed Lily.

“Let’s get you sitting up.”

Evelyn raised the boy by his armpits and leaned him against the pile of broken statues. He lay there like a doll, impassive as ever, accustomed to injury and to suffering. Lily watched them with disbelief.

“What’s wrong with you, Evie?”

Evelyn didn’t answer. She tried to get the boy to stand, but his injured leg buckled beneath him. Lily pointed.

“You stitched him up, didn’t you?”

Evelyn pulled the boy’s arm over her crooked back, and they hopped and staggered toward the mouth of the cave. Lily began patting her sister’s pockets while she was occupied with supporting the boy. She thrust her hand into one, and when she withdrew it she was holding the needle between finger and thumb. She raised it to the light, the thread Evelyn had used still knotted through the eye.

“I knew it! You’ve gone doolally, Evelyn!”

“He was hurt.”

“I know he was hurt, I was the one who hurt him!”

“Well, we didn’t want him bleeding everywhere, did we?”

“Didn’t we?”

They glared at each other, Evelyn sagging under the burden of the boy, light as he was.

“Have you been feeding him?” Lily said. “You have, haven’t you? I’m not stupid, Sissie! Don’t think I didn’t notice!”

“It was only leftovers.”

“Why? What were you thinking?” She paused. “What would Mama say?”

Evelyn felt sick at the suggestion. She did not reply. She had no answers for her sister, or for Mama. Not yet.

“Talk to me, Evie.”

“Later,” she said, and she hauled the boy out into the sunshine and back toward the house.