PROLOGUE

She sat in the sun making daisy chains, happy in her own world, enjoying the warmth on her face and the simple spring beauty of the white May blossom tumbling overhead against a clear blue sky.

Her fingers moved steadily and expertly, a thumbnail splitting a short green stalk, then feeding the next one through the hole and splitting that one, then threading another. It was repetitive work but, as is the way with some manual labour, it freed her mind to think of other things, such as the little lost ones for whom she made the chains and how pleased they should be to be garlanded with them when they were all reunited. They would feel the tickle of the daisies round their necks and know she had never forgotten them, and they would also know she had always kept on believing that, no matter how violently the happy promise of past once upon a times had been betrayed and no matter how sharp the sorrow of the present, the future might still lead to a shared happy-ever-after.

In the other world, the unhappy one that was not her own, she sat in shadows, almost invisible, frequently forgotten (especially at meal times) on a wooden stool propped in that dusty corner of the Itch Ward reserved for the weak-brained and the addle-pated, the ones M’Gregor the superintendent called the moaners and dribblers. She neither moaned nor dribbled but just sat there, head angled slightly as if trying to catch some imaginary or distantly remembered sunlight, face slack and unexpectant and grey, her hair pulled loosely back from her forehead, her only movement a tiny repetitive business made by her fingertips working against each other, as if–said M’Gregor’s wife–she was hemming her own grave-cloth.

She was well enough behaved, and only when given to shrieking fits (which afflicted her occasionally) was there any pressing need to discipline her, customarily with beatings and overnight solitary exile in the Eel House, on the other side of the water meadows.

She ate her slop when prompted, and washed and took care of her own privy needs according to some inner timetable, but she did nothing else, neither cleaning nor stone-picking nor bone-grinding, which made her a Useless Mouth in the account book and thus one that the M’Gregors visibly resented feeding.

“She does nothing,” they said bitterly. “Nothing, by God. She does not even speak.”

And it is true that as the world turned and the months and years ground away, she did not do anything at all. But one of the things that she didn’t do, even in the depths of the coldest winters or the loneliest dead watches of the night, was this:

She did not die.

And that was the reason she did nothing else: the living ghost of the Itch Ward needed every ounce of strength in her body and mind to just remember to keep on living.

And who to kill.