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.

PART 1

The man everybody was waiting to bury moved one hand and closed his fingers around the blanket covering my son.

I stood frozen beside that bed, completely certain I had imagined it.

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.