The Silent Companions

A newly widowed young woman, sent pregnant to her late husband's isolated estate, who is later found mute in an asylum.

Lifelike painted wooden figures found in a locked garret, one resembling Elsie, which seem to move about the house.

Elsie's husband and heir to the Bridge, who dies weeks after the wedding.

Rupert's reserved, unmarried cousin, who lives at the Bridge and becomes Elsie's only companion there.

A seventeenth-century ancestor whose 1635 diaries tell how the painted figures came to the house.