‘There was a painting my family set on fire. It burned to ashes, and then it came back.’ So opens Nell Stevens’s latest novel, which is set in a decaying Gothic house, haunted by rancour and madness, hallucinations and superstition, in the late 19th century. Stevens delights in subversive riddles and the splitting and doubling of characters. The primary narrator, Grace Inderwick, whose parents reside in separate lunatic asylums, has been consigned by her splenetic uncle and aunt to a lumber room for unvalued belongings, along with an inherited ancestral picture, The Drag (painted in 1747). She teaches herself to paint by copying it.

This grotesque work is reputed to show Grace’s ancestor Hodierna, ‘poxed, shrivelled, pitiful’, dying beside the ‘mangled corpse of a pheasant’ she’d been attempting to succour, a rare act of compassion among the Inderwick dynasty. The Drag is reputed to carry a curse: should the family eat pheasant, the Inderwick ‘line of male heirs would fail’. But who credits such tosh in the modern world? By late Victorian times, the Inderwicks are tucking into roast pheasant without a care. When her uncle has The Drag destroyed, Grace, now a budding artist, misses its louring presence. Ugly though the picture might have been, she appreciated its forsakenness. She silently substitutes one of her copies for the original, whereupon male heirs start dying off. The last survivor, Grace’s seventeen-year-old cousin Charles, also an artist and the sole Inderwick scion who cares about her, runs away to sea and is subsequently believed to have drowned.

Years later, someone calling himself Charles Inderwick returns. Our first glimpse of the new Charles is of a porcine man, returned from his travels, ‘lying flat on his back, an open leather diary obscuring his face’. But is he the original Charles or an impostor? For one thing the old