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listened for a moment before she knocked.
    ‘Enter,’ said a distant voice.
    With an expression of morose disapproval on her crumpled face, the servant held the door open for Catherine. Around the housekeeper’s bulky shape, she caught glimpses of a room better lit
than the communal areas. A room intense with distractions about its walls, and one she didn’t make it far inside before coming to a shocked standstill.
    Catherine thought she’d walked into another world. An enchanted but nightmarish glade of an artificial Victorian forest. One in which scores of small bright eyes watched her from every
surface they had clambered upon.

 
SEVEN
    Speechless, Catherine turned about. And saw red squirrels in frock coats paused in the eating of nuts upon the piano. She looked away and a fox grinned at her from the low
table it stalked across. A company of rats in khaki uniforms all stood on their hind legs on parade on the mantel.
    She turned again and came face to face with a crowd of pretty kittens in colourful dresses, jostling to get a look at her from inside a tall cabinet. Some of them were taking tea. Others
curtsied.
    Animals cluttered the room, all silent and still with what felt like caution at her intrusion. Or perhaps they were poised in anticipation of their next moves. Not a square foot of any surface
was free of them.
    Beside a vast ornamental fireplace of marble, Edith Mason sat alone within the confines of a black antique wheelchair and seemed pleased with her guest’s reaction. Beside the chair, a long
red setter had stretched itself around one wheel. A dog that watched Catherine with a single wet brown eye under a raised brow. In the sunlight that fell through the arched windows the dog’s
ruby fur shimmered. The dog, at least, must be real.
    ‘Even now my uncle’s marvels can still affect me, and I see them every day. But for you, I think the cat will have your tongue a while yet.’ The woman smiled and her thin teeth
looked yellow within the small mouth. ‘Please take a seat. Maude will bring tea,’ Edith Mason spoke without acknowledging the presence of the housekeeper, whose removal from the room
was announced by the angry thud of the door pulled shut.
    But even a perfectly conserved Victorian drawing room filled with preserved animals could not upstage the visage of Edith Mason in the flesh. So much powder clung to the woman’s ancient
face that the skin papered to the bony features looked bleached, and her tiny eyes were made ghastly by their red rims. The lips about the teeth were non-existent and the nose was a blade, the
light seemed to pass through the side as if it were pure cartilage. It was a difficult face to look at and Catherine struggled to do so.
    Her scrutiny moved to the elaborate hair, styled about the shrunken head in a cottage-loaf fashion. A mass of silver hairpieces threaded with the woman’s own grey wisps. There must have
been a kilo of padding inside the arrangement. Catherine had only seen the style in costume dramas, or photos of women in the early 1900s. She was tempted to believe the outfit was for her benefit,
some bizarre display of fancy dress prepared and laid on for the valuation. She didn’t know how to react, what to say, or do. She just stared.
    ‘I’m ninety-three, my dear. And I have not once been tempted to paint that hideous rouge upon my mouth.’ Edith Mason stared hard at Catherine’s lips. ‘Once upon a
time it was considered offensive. The mark of a whore.’
Whore
came across the room with sufficient force to make Catherine blink. The word was delivered with spite, a riposte to her
horrified leering at the elderly woman’s head.
    She should leave. Despite the evident riches a single room promised her bewildered eyes, her most trusted instincts warned that if she were to stay, she would be made to suffer. In her
professional experience, the greatest treasures were most often guarded by the slyest and cruellest dragons.
    ‘But what