I’m sorry,” I murmured. “I’m so sorry.” I lifted my head groggily and opened my eyes. The face of the school nurse swam into focus. Sarah was hovering next to her anxiously.

“Are you okay, Evie?” Sarah asked. “What happened?”

“My head…I must have fainted. Stupid of me.”

“You’re prone to this, aren’t you?” the nurse asked briskly. “This is what comes of riding in the freezing cold and getting exhausted and then baking yourself next to the fire.” She sounded severe, but she fussed over me kindly. Brushing aside her suggestion that I should spend the night in the infirmary, I pleaded with her to ignore what had happened. “I’m not ill,” I swore. “It was like you said: The fire was so hot, and it was really stuffy after being outside. It’s nothing serious.”

Eventually she took me up to my dorm, making me promise to let her know if I got dizzy again. Sarah reluctantly left me at the door of the dormitory and went to look for Helen to tell her what had happened, while the nurse made sure I was tucked up in bed. As soon as she had gone, Celeste, who was lounging on the window seat painting her toenails, sneered, “Quite the little heroine with these fainting fits, aren’t you, Johnson?”

“It’s just a sad attempt to make herself interesting,” added India.

“Absolutely pathetic.”

It wasn’t worth rising to the bait and arguing with them. I drew the drapes around my bed, though I was sure I wouldn’t be able to rest. But the nurse had been right when she had said I was exhausted, as a few moments later I felt my eyes droop and I fell into an uneasy sleep.

I didn’t dream.

The next thing I knew was that I could hear someone pacing softly across the floor of the dorm. I sat upright and listened. Perhaps it was Helen. Cautiously, I pushed aside the drape and peered into the dimly lit room.

I had to force myself not to cry out. It had happened again. I was seeing into a different Wyldcliffe, not the distant time of the old nunnery, but the rich, splendid heyday of the nineteenth century, when the Abbey had been Agnes’s beloved home. I was in the same room with the arched windows and the cushioned seat below them. But the walls were no longer bare and white, and I could no longer see the beds of my dorm mates. Through a kind of mist, I could see richly colored wallpaper and carpets, velvet curtains and hangings, a heaped silken bed, carved furniture, and glowing candlelight. It was Agnes’s bedroom, and she was there in front of me, pacing up and down.

Agnes seemed to turn and see me, though I couldn’t be sure. Then she threw a shawl across her shoulders, opened the door, and went out of the room. Without stopping to think I got out of bed. My feet felt the usual scuffed linoleum on the floor, though my eyes saw the richly woven carpet. I was somehow hovering between two worlds. I followed Agnes into the corridor and she led me to the top of the marble stairs. The landing was decorated with a profusion of pictures and mirrors and exotic ferns in ornate pots, but the white marble stairs were exactly the same as I had known them.

Slowly, as though hypnotized, I followed Agnes down the stairs, unable to speak. But with each step I took, her outline became fainter, and soon I could no longer see her.

“Wait, Agnes, wait!” My voice came back to me, but the hangings and pictures vanished, and I was left with only the bare white steps, leading me down and down and down….

Lying across the bottom step, like a broken doll, was a young girl. It wasn’t Agnes. I was firmly back in my own time, and the girl lying unconscious at the bottom of the stairs was Harriet Templeton.

I was allowed to go and see her in the infirmary a couple of days later.

“She’s very lucky to have gotten nothing worse than a broken wrist and a concussion after that dreadful fall,” the nurse scolded. “Why didn’t you tell us you were prone to sleepwalking, Harriet?”

“I…um…I didn’t think it was important,” she muttered.

“With all these stairs and twists and turns in this old building? You need to be much more careful. Anyway,” she went on, softening slightly, “here’s your friend to keep you company for a bit, so don’t look so miserable. It’s a good thing that Evie heard you in the night and came to fetch me. And there was Evie dropping down in a dead faint herself the other day. What a pair you are!”

“I’m absolutely fine now, I promise,” I said.

“But you can only stay ten minutes at the most. We don’t want Harriet to get too tired.” The nurse bustled out, leaving us alone.

“So how is your wrist, Harriet?”

“It’s nothing. It’s my head that hurts.”

We looked at each other rather awkwardly. I couldn’t help feeling guilty that I hadn’t made Harriet go to the nurse when I first found out about her sleepwalking, and yet somehow I was angry with her. In a weird way I felt we were now tied together by this secret. But I didn’t want to get closer to Harriet. I didn’t want the school staff thinking that we were special friends.

“Thanks so much for finding me and getting the nurse when I…um…fell down,” Harriet said, blushing with embarrassment.

“Yeah, well, you should have told them before about the sleepwalking—gotten a dorm on the ground floor or something,” I grumbled. “You could have been killed!”

“I know.” She played restlessly with the fringes on the edge of the blankets, frowning to herself. Then she suddenly leaned over and grabbed my arm, her eyes wide and afraid. “Evie, did you see her?”

“What do you mean?”

“That woman, you know, that night on the stairs?”

I stared at her in disbelief, not knowing what to say. Was she talking about Agnes? Could she possibly have seen her too?

“Um…what kind of woman?”

Harriet frowned again. “I don’t know; I can’t really remember. All I can remember is her voice, leading me on somehow…and now I can’t get rid of it.”

“Get rid of what?”

“Her voice in my head.” She began to cry quietly, like an overtired child. “Sometimes I think I’d like to fall asleep in the snow and never wake up.”

“I think I’d better go, Harriet,” I said, feeling alarmed by her fragile state of mind. “You need to get some rest.” I went to fetch the nurse and then slipped away, trying to work things out. Perhaps Harriet had somehow tuned in to Agnes’s presence on the stairs and it had given her a kind of psychic shock, which had made her slip and fall. Or perhaps she really was related to Agnes and now Agnes was trying to reach her, just as she had reached out to me? For some reason I didn’t like the idea of that. My relationship with Agnes was special; I didn’t want anyone else butting into it. But that was so petty—how could I be jealous of poor Harriet?

I walked slowly back to my dorm. Not everything that happened at Wyldcliffe had some mysterious meaning, I reminded myself. It was probably all very simple. Harriet had been sleepwalking, she had fallen and banged her head, and now she was confused and upset. But Harriet’s problems were not my problems. Her world was not my world. And in my world I had to concentrate on the job I had to do, not get sidetracked by every drama that boarding school threw up. I began to run down the corridor. I had to find Helen and Sarah and get back to work.