My grandmother left me a house, a debt to the village grocer, eleven cardigans, and a man in the parlour.

The solicitor hadn’t mentioned the man. He’d mentioned the house, which was falling down. He’d mentioned the debt, which was small, and the cardigans, which he seemed to find funny. He’d handed me a ring of iron keys across his desk in town and told me the parlour key was the little brass one. Your grandmother kept that room locked these last years, he’d said. Private, she called it.

I didn’t think about it again until I was standing in her hallway, dripping rainwater onto the runner, breathing in thirty years of lavender and dust.

The house was exactly as I remembered it from the last time I’d visited. Which was to say, it was exactly as I remembered it from twelve years ago, because that was how long it had been. There’d always been a reason not to come. Work. Distance. The long drive up the mountain. A grandmother who wrote me careful letters on blue paper and never once asked why I didn’t visit, which somehow made it worse.

Now she was gone, and I was here, and every room smelled of her.

There was a letter on the hall table. Blue paper. My name on the envelope in her slanting hand.

I didn’t open it straight away. I walked through the house first, turning on lights. The kitchen, with its chipped enamel and the kettle still on the stove. The sitting room, with her reading glasses folded on the arm of her chair. Upstairs, the bedroom she’d slept in for sixty years, the bed made tight and neat, as if she’d only stepped out.

Then I came back down to the end of the hall, and the parlour door.

It was the only door in the house that was shut.

I found the little brass key on the ring. It turned stiffly. The door swung inward on a breath of cold air and something else — something faint and dry and sweet, like old books and pipe smoke and candle wax.

The parlour was dark. Heavy curtains were drawn across the windows. I fumbled for the light switch and found it, and the old glass shade overhead flickered on, yellow and dim.

There was a man sitting in the wingback chair by the fire.

I didn’t scream. I think I was too surprised to scream. I just froze in the doorway with my hand still on the switch and my heart slamming against my ribs, while every part of my brain tried to make sense of what I was seeing.

He didn’t move.

He was sitting very straight, his hands resting on the arms of the chair. Long legs crossed at the ankle. He wore a dark tailcoat and a waistcoat of deep green brocade, a cravat of ivory silk. His hair was black and swept back from a high, pale brow. His face was beautiful in the way old paintings are beautiful. Long nose. Sharp cheekbones. A mouth that curved faintly at one corner, as if he’d just heard something amusing and was too polite to laugh.

And it was porcelain.

All of him. The face, the throat above the cravat, the long, elegant hands on the arms of the chair. Smooth and pale and faintly luminous, glazed so finely it seemed to hold the lamplight inside it. Tiny, delicate brushstrokes had painted the faint flush on his cheekbones, the dark sweep of his brows, the lines at the corners of his eyes.

His eyes were glass. The deep warm brown of strong tea.

They were looking straight at me.

I let out a breath that shook on the way out. “Oh, for God’s sake,” I said, to no one.

It was a doll. A life-size doll. Some antique, probably, one of those Victorian curiosities rich families used to commission. My grandmother had always had a weakness for strange old things. That was all.

I made myself walk in.

The parlour was tidy and cold. The fire was laid but unlit. Beside the doll’s chair stood a small card table with two chairs drawn up to it. A game of cribbage was set out on the green baize, half-finished. The pegs stood in the board. A hand of cards lay face down on each side.

On the side nearest the empty chair sat a teacup. Cold, with a ring of dried tea at the bottom. And a pair of reading glasses, folded.

Something tightened in my throat.

She’d played cards in here. On her own, in the evenings, with this beautiful porcelain man sitting across from her. She’d dealt him a hand. She’d poured herself a cup of tea. And I’d been three hundred kilometres away, too busy to drive up the mountain.

I went back out to the hall table and opened her letter.

My darling Nell,

If you’re reading this, I’ve gone, and you’ve found the parlour. Don’t be frightened. And don’t let that dreadful man from the solicitor’s talk you into selling him to a museum.

His name is Aurelian. He’s been my companion these last eleven years, since your grandfather passed. I know how that sounds. You’ll think your old Gran went soft in the head at the end, and perhaps I did. But he kept me company when no one else did, and he never once let me feel alone.

He’s very old, Nell. Much older than the doll. Something was put into him a long time ago and has never been let out. He can’t move much, or feel much, or do much at all except talk. But he talks beautifully. He read me every book in this house twice. He cheats at cribbage.

Be kind to him. He’ll be lonely now.

There’s a key in his back, between the shoulders. Don’t wind it unless you mean it.

All my love, always,

Gran

I read it three times. Then I sat down on the bottom stair with the blue paper in my lap, and I laughed until I cried, and then I just cried.

When I was done, I locked the parlour door again. I didn’t look at him. I didn’t want to think about it.

I made up the bed in the spare room. I ate toast standing in the kitchen. I went to sleep listening to the rain hammer on the old tin roof, telling myself very firmly that I was a sensible woman of thirty-two with a mortgage and a pension plan, and that my grandmother had been lonely, and that there was nothing more to it than that.

In the morning, there was a cup of tea on the kitchen table.

It was still steaming. Milk, no sugar. The way I took it.

I stood in the kitchen doorway in my socks and stared at it for a long time.

Then I walked down the hall to the parlour. The door was still locked. The brass key was still in my cardigan pocket, where I’d left it. I unlocked the door with fingers that weren’t quite steady and pushed it open.

The doll was sitting in his wingback chair, exactly as I’d left him.

Except that last night, his hands had rested on the arms of the chair. This morning, they were folded neatly in his lap.

And the cribbage game had moved on. One peg had advanced eight holes up the board.

I didn’t go into the parlour again that day. I spent it sorting through Gran’s things — packing the cardigans, sorting papers, filling bags for the charity shop. I kept the radio on loud in every room. I didn’t let myself look at the end of the hall.

But things kept happening.

A book I’d left on the stairs turned up on the hall table, its place marked with a slip of blue paper. The fire in the sitting room, which I definitely hadn’t laid, was burning cheerfully when I came down from the attic. The window I’d left open in the bedroom was shut, the curtains drawn against the cold.

None of it was frightening. That was the strangest thing. It was considerate. Like living with someone shy and very well-mannered who didn’t want to be seen.

Like being looked after.

I hadn’t been looked after in a long time.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in the spare bed listening to the rain and the creaks of the old house, and thinking about Gran. About eleven years of evenings in that cold parlour. Cribbage and tea and a porcelain man reading her every book in the house twice.

He’ll be lonely now.

At midnight I got up. I pulled Gran’s old dressing gown on over my nightdress. It still smelled of lavender. Then I went downstairs in the dark and unlocked the parlour door.

The lamp was already on. Low and yellow. I didn’t remember turning it on.

He sat in his chair by the dead fire, his hands folded in his lap, his tea-brown glass eyes fixed on the doorway. As if he’d been waiting.

“Hello,” I said. My voice came out small. “Aurelian.”

Nothing. Of course nothing. He was porcelain.

I walked slowly across the room until I was standing beside his chair. Up close, he was even more beautiful. Every eyelash painted on, one by one. A tiny, perfect crease at the corner of his mouth. The faint flush on his cheekbones looked almost warm in the lamplight.

I reached out and touched his cheek.

It was cold. Smooth as glass. Exactly what I’d expected.

But beneath my fingertips, very faintly, something hummed. Like a held note. Like a breath being drawn and not let out.

I snatched my hand back.

I should have gone back upstairs. I should have locked the door and called the solicitor in the morning and let some museum pack him up in straw.

Instead I walked around behind the chair.

There was a slit in the back of his tailcoat, neatly hemmed, between his shoulder blades. Through it, set into the smooth porcelain of his back, was a key. Brass, old and worn, its bow shaped like a curling leaf.

Don’t wind it unless you mean it.

I stood there for a long time with my hand hovering over it. The rain drummed on the roof. The lamp hummed. The whole house seemed to hold its breath with me.

I thought about the tea on the kitchen table. The fire. The curtains drawn against the cold.

I thought about being looked after.

Then I closed my fingers around the key, and I turned it.