“Something rippled round the table: a loosening, a settling, a long sigh too low to hear. Un ange passe, my French grandfather would have said: an angel is passing. Somewhere upstairs I heard the faint, dreamy note of a clock striking.”

“That house shimmered in my mind like some fairy fort that appeared for one day in a lifetime, tantalizing and charged, with those four cool figures for guardians and inside secrets too hazy to be named. My face was the one pass that would unbar the door. Whitethorn House was ready and waiting to whisk itself away to nothing, the instant I said no.”

“I always figured nerves were for Jane Austen characters and helium-voiced girls who never buy their round; I would no more have turned shaky in a crisis than I would have carried smelling salts around in my reticule.”

“Somewhere at the back of my head I heard a click, tiny and irrevocable. Memory magnifies it to a wrenching, echoing crack, but the truth is that it was the very smallness that made it so terrible.”

“I didn't believe her, of course. The lie was transparent—it something that size, someone would have mentioned it during the door-to-door--and it went straight to my heart as no sonata ever could have; because I recognized it. That's my twin brother, his name's Peter, he's seven minutes older than me. . . . Children—it and Rosalind was little more—it don't tell pointless lies unless the reality is too much to bear.”

“But give me more credit than that. Someone else may have dealt the hand, but I picked it up off the table, I played every card, and I had my reasons.”

“In the moment when that glass passed from his hand to mine, something sent up a high wild warning cry in the back of my mind. Persephone's irrevocable pomegranate seeds, Never take food from strangers; old stories where one sip or bite seals the spellbound walls forever, dissolves the road home into mist and blows it away on the wind.”