No matter how hard she tried Gretchen struggled to imagine Mrs Prewett in all her charming glory sneaking through the walls of her own home and so she instead conjured up the vision of Mr Prewett as a boy doing just that. It was not a tough stretch of the imagination given that he was barely above the age when such shenanigans would have been common place and they were in fact doing that just now.

Was he that much older than her? She couldn’t really tell – Gretchen had thought him much older than her but in the dim light he seemed like a very young young man. He wasn’t married but that didn’t signify much.

“Is this it?” Gretchen asked, reaching out to push a panel speculatively. Her eyes widened in delight when, at her touch, it slid sideways and revealed a nook just big enough for two people and a passage that stretched into the darkness. “It’s like something from Mr Poe’s stories.”

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