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The light coming through the kitchen window was very pale and Evelyn’s first thought was that snow had fallen, though it had been a lifetime since she’d seen any. There seemed an ashen patina on everything, and she worried, briefly, if a storm had passed through in the night. Or was about to descend on them in the days to come. Just the thought of it made Evelyn tired. What a cruelty it would be, for the garden to go under when she and the boy were just getting on top of things.

The thought of the boy brought with it the dim memory of early morning. She was not sure if she had dreamed it—his skulking return from some unknown errand. She sat up and looked around for him. He was not in the kitchen. She got up and opened the back door, and there was no bucket on the doorstep, no eggs. It was midmorning by now, the day overcast and the sun bright white where it broke through the clouds.

Evelyn took a stick that was leaning in the corner by the door and went on a lap of the house’s exterior. She called out to him as she walked along the gravel path, but the boy did not come.

She rarely took in the full extent of the house, and when she did, it always seemed so much larger than she expected. There were always more windows and doors, more nooks and corners in the complex geometry of its circumference. Something haphazard about the way it had been built, with rooms and annexes and whole wings added by successive generations, seemingly on a whim. All contributions to Evelyn and Lily’s vast and desolate inheritance.

She rounded the east wing and passed the servants’ quarters, looking for ways into the house she might have missed or which might have appeared recently. She came to what had once been the main entrance. On either side were stately columns that had once sprouted acanthus leaves, and on top rested a pediment, like the atrium to some ancient temple. All concealed and crumbling now. She probed feebly with her stick but could not reach the doors. Thick weeds had made a barricade around the house as high as Evelyn’s shoulder, and beyond that was the web of ivy and clematis, the branches strong and clutching and bone-hard. Only a very few places where the brickwork still showed through, pale pink like exposed skin. The foliage went all the way to the roof and softened the edges and angles of the house, so that from a distance it looked as if the whole place had been draped in a thick green dust sheet.

Something came to her. She’d posed for a photograph here. Lots of people had. The facade of the house bright and clean, the smell of hot stone in the sun, as if the whole thing had been freshly hewn that morning. A party? A wedding? But whose? It couldn’t have been her parents’, not if she was there to witness it.

She coughed and spat as if to dislodge the recollection. She didn’t understand why such visions had started to arise in her so readily, after all this time.

She rounded the sunroom at the western end of the house, the glass panes all replaced with a mixture of chipboard and chicken wire so it admitted no sun whatsoever. Where there had once been French windows, their mother had nailed two wooden doors removed from the interior of the house, horizontally, one on top of the other. In front of these Evelyn found the grass and weeds were flattened. It looked as if some vagrant had spent the night on the doorstep.

She came to the edge of the undergrowth and prodded at the broken stems. Her heart suspended and still in the cavern of her chest. She raised the stick and rapped on the door with its curved handle.

“Nobody home?”

Lily came around the corner, piling her hair up on her head. She looked gray and bleary-eyed but was grinning nonetheless. She was still wearing their mother’s tracksuit but was barefoot and hobbling, her skin white and veined like quartz.

Evelyn felt guilty for some reason, though of the three of them she had the least cause.

“No,” she said. “I suppose I’ll have to call back later.”

There was a pause in which one of them might have laughed, but neither did.

“What are you doing, poking around here?”

Evelyn didn’t dare voice her suspicions out loud. On the evidence of the card game, and the conversation they’d had in the early hours, she wasn’t even sure who Lily would side with if Evelyn were to accuse the boy of any transgression.

“I think this is where the animals are getting into the house.”

Lily shrugged and said: “I’m sure they’re getting in everywhere.”

“Maybe we could find some time to firm up some of these boards,” said Evelyn, and she knocked again on the barricade to the sunroom. Lily laughed and then started coughing.

“You’re joking,” she said. “Yes, why not, we’re only twiddling our thumbs around here, aren’t we.”

“I mean it,” said Evelyn. “I don’t think I like the idea of things just coming and going. We don’t know what they’re picking up from inside.”

Lily seemed to wince with her whole body. “Can’t we just have a break today?”

“A break?”

“I’ve got a splitting headache.”

“That’s your own fault. Come on. No time like the present.”

Lily sighed. “Let me ask the beast of burden. He’ll know his way around a hammer.”

“We can do it ourselves, I think. He’s got enough on his plate.”

“Don’t be silly, Evie, he’ll do it in half the time and you know it. Where’s he got to, anyway?”

Instead of turning to look at the wilds of the back garden, Lily looked up at the house. Evelyn’s head throbbed hot and cold. Was her sister hiding something? No. She was mischievous but not outright deceitful. But then, Evelyn knew from her own experience, it was quite possible for them to keep secrets from each other.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t seen him all morning.”

“We should have him tethered,” said Lily, turning back. “Stop him wandering off like this. Come on, then. Shall we go and find him?”

Lily held out her hand expectantly, but Evelyn did not take it. An uncomfortable moment passed.

“You can go,” Evelyn said. “I’m going to stay up here and do a bit of sewing. My back is still not right.”

“Oh,” said Lily. She let her hand fall. “Well. If you like.”

“Bring him straight back, please.”

“As you wish.”

Lily glanced up at the house again and then wandered off in the direction of the lake, hollering for the boy as if he were a lost dog.

Evelyn waited until she could no longer see or hear her sister and then tapped again on the higher of the two wooden doors. Then she pushed on the lower one, and it rocked slightly beneath her stick. She looked for the nails that attached it to the frame of the sunroom and found them lacking in all but one of the corners. She stuck her walking stick in between the door and the frame and levered it gently. The last of the nails gave up and the door fell into the weeds.

She looked behind her and listened. At first all she could hear was the sound of her own blood throbbing in her ears. Then a distant echo of Lily, still calling for the boy. Then her mother’s scolding voice, accompanied by a hot flush that reached her fingers and toes.

“Well, you would do something about it, wouldn’t you?” she said. “We can’t just have him coming and going willy-nilly.”

She listened again for Mama, but there was no reply. She got down on her hands and knees.

“Evelyn, you are a stupid girl,” she said.

The frame of the French windows was completely broken, and Evelyn found smears and handprints on the dirty tiles within. The boy had been here. Squirming through the hole like it was a cat flap. Through the gap she saw the dim shapes of things. A carpet of dead flies that shifted in the draft. The bleached legs of a wicker chair. A wineglass.

Evelyn’s heart hurt. She shut her eyes and looked away. The smell came to her, the same one she had noticed when the boy had returned that dawn. Dust and rot and beneath it something spiced, barely there at all. Tobacco, was it? She had forgotten her father had smoked. It got into everything. Evelyn put a hand over her nose and mouth. The scent made her sick and drew her in at the same time. It made her want to crawl on her belly like a worm, into the rank and comforting darkness of the sunroom and then on into the rest of the house, the sitting room, the drawing room, and what came next, the playroom? No, no, no, it did not exist; none of those rooms had ever existed.

She heard Lily’s voice again, lower this time, as if leaving space for another to talk. She was about to stand when she risked another glimpse inside and saw a shapeless bag on the tiles just inside the door. It was notable only for the fact that it stirred no memory in her at all. The canvas was stained, and there was a loop at the top and two straps that were badly frayed. The object seemed wholly alien to her and the family and the house. Evelyn looked around for her sister and the boy. When she saw no sign of either, her arm snaked through the frame almost against her wishes and she wrestled the bag out through the hole.

Evelyn replaced the door and stood cradling the bag for a moment. Then she took it to the toolshed and tucked it under a workbench, but did not have time to search its contents. She hurried back to the kitchen and found her sewing kit, and when Lily came around the side of the house, the boy in tow, Evelyn was sitting in a deck chair with Mama’s ball gown in her lap.

“Found him!” Lily cried.

Evelyn was still out of breath and struggling to conceal it.

“Jolly good,” she said, but did not look up. She did not want to lay eyes on the boy.

“Gosh, Sissie, look at your knees!”

Evelyn looked. Her nightdress was tented between her bony legs, and the material was dark with dirt and grass stains.

“Spot of weeding, that’s all,” she said.

“I thought you were sewing?”

“I am. Now.”

She covered her knees with the ball gown and started to thread the needle.

“You know that can wait,” said Lily. “I think we’re all feeling like death warmed up today.”

“If I don’t mend this now, you’ll be complaining about it later.”

Lily didn’t say anything.

“Where was he, then?” Evelyn said.

“He was in that far corner. Behind the pampas. Sitting on the wall like a garden gnome!”

Evelyn pricked herself with the needle. She hissed and sucked on her finger. It was covered in dust from the floor of the sunroom. She raised her head and addressed herself to Lily alone.

“What was he doing on the wall?”

“Not a lot, by the looks of things.”

Evelyn finally looked at the boy. Pale and contrite as ever. Perhaps this explained why he was so sickly. Perhaps he had caught something from going inside the house.

“Don’t climb on the wall. You’ve already broken it once.”

He looked at his feet. “Sorry,” he said.

“And you need the glasses, too. You don’t want to go blind, do you?”

“To be fair to him,” said Lily, “he came all this way without them. Walked for miles and miles. Maybe you don’t need sunglasses after all? Another thing Mama got wrong! I’m starting to think she didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.”

“And you’d know better, would you?” snapped Evelyn.

“Calm down, Sissie.”

“I’ve had enough of you talking about Mama like that. And I’m sure she’s had enough, too! Sometimes, Lily, I don’t think you understand the first thing about what she did for us. The rules are there for a reason. We wear the glasses for a reason. We stay out of the house for a reason. Can you not grasp that?”

Lily seemed to be on the cusp of an apology, but then she glanced at the boy and gave a faint smile. As if they were guilty siblings, standing before a parent. The boy kicked at the gravel with his old boots.

“Well,” said Lily eventually, “you obviously got out of bed on the wrong side this morning. I feel god-awful, too, Sissie, but I’m not taking it out on you. Come on, beast of burden, we’ve got logs to split.”

“I told you we need to fix the sunroom.”

“And I told you it can wait. If we’re doing anything today, we’re collecting firewood. Would you rather be warm tonight or keep a few squirrels out of the house?”

Lily didn’t wait for an answer and led the boy away. Evelyn watched them go. There was an impertinence in the way Lily had spoken to her that was new and unsettling. At the corner of the house the boy stopped and glanced back, but Lily clicked her fingers at him and the pair disappeared from view. Evelyn started over on her sewing, and as she plunged the needle into the fabric she found herself reminded of sewing the boy’s wound, the soft white thigh, the bright red smear of his blood.