The House of the Crimson Flower

It would be nice to believe her dreams had meaning. If only Isabelle Lockwoode could remember her dreams. But she never does.

How strange then, to awaken with the certainty of having dreamed, yet have no recollection of the dream itself.

After folding back the bedding to allow the mattress to air - the sheet would need to be changed: Isabelle had bled in the night - she turned to her bedroom window and drew open the curtains.

Instead of a sunlit and dew-wet garden, there - pressing against the window-glass and obscuring everything - was a red mist.

Mistress Rose guides them through to the hall. The walls are lined with the skulls of the dead. His Lordship walks beside Isabelle; oft reaching out to palm the cranium of one or other old acquaintance.

Here is the house of all lost secrets and forbidden loves. This is the dream twelve year old Isabelle can never recall.

'The girls will be with you shortly,' says Mistress Rose. 'If you'll amuse yourselves in the parlour?'

She pushes open the heavy door. The noise and the heat surprise Isabelle. They sting with the fury of a cannon's rolling retort. The parlour reeks of powder-smoke and hot blood. There is nothing to revere in the human flotsam that litters the room.

A dead child emerges from the press of bodies to show them to their table. His left eye is missing; the empty socket an angry and puckered scar. Yet Isabelle thinks him beautiful - though his beauty is unique. Like a broken doll.

The weight of his Lordship's arm is an anchor on Isabelle's shoulders; his lips pressing close to her ear. 'Only the dead serve,' he tells her, 'the living and the loveliest await.'

'Why can I not have this one?' asks Isabelle.

'Do not pout,' his Lordship chastens her. 'I have spoiled you.'

He guides Isabelle through the raucous and revenant host with a firm and steadying hand.

The stories he tells her are of dark misfortune. And his tale of the House of the Crimson Flower is the darkest yet.

'Having sufficiently recovered from that which Surgeon Tyrell had described as a minor alteration - twin incisions in the outer labia so the left could be excised and the right drawn across and stitched in place to close the entrance to the vagina - eleven year old Lilt Lanahann was bonded in service as "Ship's Boy" to Captain Jon Gaunt, master of the Argo. A whaler and fur sealer out of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Lilt's hair has been cut, queued and tarred stiff, and he appears on deck dressed in canvas trows and a short jacket of blue wool. Only some few days after setting sail, the ship's crew are summoned, one by one, for questioning. Seeking Lilt in the night, Captain Gaunt had stumbled over the child's dead body. A sailor's skinning-knife had been driven into Lilt's left eye. No one confesses to the crime: all are suspect. Lilt's body was stitched into a canvas shroud and stored in the ship's hold.'

'Until it could be delivered, here, to the House of the Crimson Flower.'