Of cours-s-e you know where this is, Maud…Of course-s-s-e you do…
Latchkill. She was inside the place of nightmares, the place of huge heavy doors, the place where spider light lay thickly on all the rooms all the year round, so you could never be sure what might be crouching inside it, watching you. The place mamma used to stare at through the thick iron bars of the gates. But what mamma could not have known was that the inside of Latchkill was so full of pain and fear and despair that there seemed to be hardly any room for all the people who came and went.
People came and went in and out of Maud’s own little room, which was quite bare, apart from the bed and a cupboard next to it. The woman everyone called Matron, who had a face like a slab of concrete and tiny mean eyes, came in quite a lot of times, and some nurses came in as well. At first Maud had hoped Bryony Sullivan might be one of these. She did not know Bryony very well, but she knew she was pretty and clever. She would be someone Maud might be able to talk to–she might explain why Maud had been brought here and what was going to happen next. But Bryony did not come.
Father came, although not very often. Maud was taken to a special room for his visits–a proper bedroom, it was, with a frilled bed-cover and cushions, a dressing-table with an embroidered runner, and a little table and chair in one corner. There was a marble washstand in the other corner, with a flowered jug and basin. Father liked the room. He looked round approvingly, and said, My word, very nice, very comfortable, and he was glad to see Maud was being properly looked after.
‘I don’t sleep here,’ said Maud. ‘I have another room. Not nearly as nice,’ and father looked immediately worried, and said he would speak to matron about it. Maud did not really understand this, but she was more concerned with finding out if Thomasina and Simon had been found yet. She listened carefully, but father did not mention them at all. He just talked about ordinary things–about what was happening in the town–and he did not mention Twygrist or ask why Maud had been there that night.
Did this mean Thomasina and Simon were still in the mill? Surely it must. After a while Maud could not be bothered to listen to father’s babbling any longer. She hated him because he had brought her to this place and was trying to pretend it was for her own good, and she did not think he believed her about the room. So she stared at a single point in the wall, which she had found was quite a good way to shut everything out–father’s stupid talk, the nurses telling her to eat this, drink that, my word, you’re a silent one, aren’t you…One day she would have a very good revenge on all of these people.
But the one thing she could not shut out was the growing conviction that Thomasina and Simon must still be inside Twygrist. Were they both alive? Maud began to believe they might be–they were so sly and so clever, those two.
What if they were still there? They would not look very nice by this time. Their skin would be yellowing and dried out from being in the dark for so long, and the bones of their hands would be sticking through the flesh from where they hammered against the ancient bricks to get out.