A dreadful curse was laid on two families in 1497 when a wife murdered her husband of a few hours. He had intended to kill her for refusing his advances on their wedding night, but she had turned the tables on him and he was the one now dying. She could not escape, as he had wrapped a chain around them both and had affixed a padlock. She was in love with his brother and he with her, but the elder son had forced her into marriage while his brother was away on an errand for their duplicitous parents. As he lay dying, he laid a curse upon both families; hers and his brother’s. She thought quickly, and told him, contemptuously, that the curse would not be condoned by the gods until there was also some means to see it lifted. He was not sure he could believe her, but what if…? He considered, in the short time still left to him, and stipulated three impossible conditions that would see the curse lifted. They were mirrored on what was happening to him. He knew they could not possibly be met. They required that a young woman of that line, must see the man who would be her lover, killed before her eyes, just as she had killed him; She must be chained to a dead man for the duration of a night, just as she soon would be to him; and she, and that dead man, must make love, as no dead man might ever do. The centuries passed. Then, unexpectedly, the first of those impossible conditions was met in China. At that point there was a sudden revival of those disembodied entities that had waited for so long. Now, they needed to bring those other two events to fruition, but how? Gradually, the necessary conditions are brought to one place and time. They are to take place at a girls’ boarding school in northern England just after the second world war, when a blind man is reluctantly hired as a teacher.