...Patricia had also been the one to notice that the smell of rank, burnt fat started a day or two before the babies died.

     The Grange was full of ghosts—a creeping feeling on the servants’ stairs, a man’s voice that shouted from the larder—but they were part of the house as much as draughts and creaky floorboards. Patricia talked to them when she was lonely, when Michael was at boarding school. Sometimes they left her gifts that she hid under her bed—a blackbird’s egg with brown speckles on the shell like islands in an ocean, a jay’s feather.

     But Jack Sprat was something different. He only came when their brothers and sisters grew weak and mewled like day-old kittens...