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pools.
    ‘What news of Myrtle?’ I asked, bellowing against the sea wind. Myrtle had been sent away to a boarding school in Southport. I’d seen her but once in two years, the time she’d come home for the Michaelmas holidays. She’d said she was glad the stain had gone from my lip.
    ‘Miss Myrtle,’ George corrected.
    ‘Miss Myrtle indeed,’ I said. ‘I never doubted it.’
    ‘She’s on her way to becoming a lady,’ he conceded.
    ‘Does she take to it?’
    ‘She blooms,’ he replied. ‘And excels in French.’
    I had a photograph of Myrtle, though it was only me who would have known it. It had been taken in old Mr Hardy’s bedroom and thrown aside on account of coming out black. I’d made pin holes in her eyes and scratched lines where her hair might have been, and in time I believed I saw her plain, though possibly she was in my head and it was my mind that printed her likeness.
    At Little Crosby we left the shore, taking the cinder path through the sand dunes, until we reached the inland road and trotted a silent mile between potato fields. I had been brought up hereabouts, my mother being a drudge to a farming family in the hamlet of Sefton.
    Crossing over the little humpbacked bridge, the rushes impaled in the frozen stream, we entered the leafless woods to a clamour of rooks. At the noise of our approach the lodge keeper hobbled out to see to the gates. He was so slow and crippled in his walk that George ordered me down to help him. No sooner had I done so and the great iron gates had swung inwards, than the carriage bowled up the drive, leaving me to follow on foot. I half thought of turning back, out of spite, but curiosity got the better of me.
    I’d travelled this route once before, sent by my mother when she lay dying, only that time it was high spring. I was seven years old and there were pretty patches of heaven, lupin blue, dancing above the budding trees. Now, the path stretched dark and moody as a photograph, the winter branches stark against a cold white sky.
    Blundell Hall was a gloomy edifice, low built of sandstone and timber. On either side of the porch crouched a stone lion with a man’s head between its shoulders and a mocking smile to its mouth. I went round to the back and was told by a stable boy, just then unloosing the horse from the carriage shafts, that the gentlemen were in the glasshouse beyond the kitchen garden and I was to fetch the photographic apparatus along with me. When he saw the collection of bottles and trays that required shifting, he very civilly went off and brought back a wheelbarrow.
    The glass-house was fully forty foot in length and no longer put to its original purpose, the long trestle tables being empty of pots and supporting instead a quantity of statues, all without a stitch on them and hung about with cobwebs. Mr Blundell was a collector of such things, and had been in the newspapers for it the year Prince Albert came to lay the foundation stone of the Sailors’ Home.
    The ape took me by surprise. I had expected it to be three times larger than myself and to find it wildly prowling its cage, but it was no bigger than a small man and sat inert against the bars, slumped amid a mess of sawdust and yellowing cabbage leaves. Fear left me; I even poked at it with my finger. Its skin was patchy, its eyes dull as mud. It stank of old age.
    William Rimmer and George were busy sorting their instruments. Laid out alongside the scissors and punch-forceps sat a heap of cotton pads, a wire contraption with a coiled spring, an India-rubber bag with a length of tube looped into a metal basin, and a bottle of colourless liquid. The ape was looking past the table, in the direction of a marble statue with a severed leg. The statue was male, with a cock folded like a rose-bud.
    ‘Ho, ho,’ I cried. ‘A Judy wouldn’t find him of much use, would she? Even the monkey thinks so.’
    “The ape is all but blind,’ William Rimmer said.
    George didn’t say a word, which