I was hired to sit with a man the doctors said had five days left. One night I laid my teething baby on his chest — and his fingers moved. Then he whispered: don’t tell anyone I’m awake.

I had been walking Theodric round the staff quarters of that enormous house for three hours.

He is nine months old. He was teething and he had a temperature and there was no settling him, and I had tried everything I know and I know everything there is.

My name is Calla and I am twenty-nine and I have been doing this work for eleven months.

I carried him. I sang. I fed him at half one and again at ten to three.

He kept crying.

So I went into Rendel Ashgrove’s room, because it is the far end of that floor and because it is the only room in the house where nobody would hear him.

That is the whole reason. There was no kindness in it. I want that on the page at the start and not buried at the end, because everything else in this account depends on it.

The doctors said he had days.