Summary

In Chapter 1, Faraday, the narrator of the story, remembers visiting Hundreds Hall with his mother. It was an Empire Day party with the boys given commemorative medals and treated to tea. Because Faraday’s mother had worked in the house as a nursery maid and still knew many of the staff members, Faraday got to go into the basement kitchen of the house while she helped wash dishes. A maid took Faraday upstairs to see the main hall of the house. While she ran an errand, he snuck out from the place which he had been told to stay and pried a plaster acorn off a piece of decorative molding. He was so obsessed with the house even as a young child that he wanted to own a piece of it.

Faraday recalls that the Ayers’ daughter, Susan, died just a few years...