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Isolde stayed. That's the first and most significant thing I know about her in the years since the family scattered — she didn't leave. While the rest of us were filing for emancipation or slipping out through walls or simply drifting away from the address, Isolde remained in Milkbank House and, as far as I can piece together from what little has filtered through, continued the work.

Her work, specifically. Not the father's work, not the Academy's work — hers. The testing that Reginald ran on her was brutal by any honest accounting, the kind that would send most people in the opposite direction as fast as they could manage. Isolde apparently looked at it and thought: I want to know what else. She stayed in the labs and ran her own experiments and kept going, and I find I can't decide whether that's the most admirable thing or the most alarming.

Both, probably. With Isolde it's usually both.

What I remember about her — the quality I always trusted and sometimes found difficult — is the precision. She doesn't editorialise. She doesn't soften. She assesses a situation and reports what she finds and if what she finds is uncomfortable, that's the situation's fault and not a reason to adjust the findings. In a house full of people managing their own narratives, Isolde's flatness was either a relief or a threat depending on what you were carrying at the time.

I carried quite a lot, most of the time. I found her more relieving than threatening, on balance. She was one of the few people in that building who spoke to me the same way regardless of what the father's current assessment of me was. Her interest in a person didn't seem to route through his approval first.

She'll be there when I arrive. I'm almost certain of it — she's been there, and she'll still be there, because that is simply what Isolde does. She stays and she works and she doesn't require the rest of us to stay in order for the work to be valid.

I'm looking forward to seeing her more than I expected to be. That's worth noting.

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