" Edward confessed to me that for all of the tales of mystery and horror that he had read and heard and invented for his sisters, the night in the clearing of the woods, when he fled for his life and sought refuge in this house, was his first experience of true fear. It changed him, he said: terror opened up something inside him that could never be properly sealed. I know now exactly what he meant. True fear is indelible; the sensation does not recede, even when the cause is long forgotten. It is a new way of seeing the world: the opening of a door that can never be closed again. "

― Kate Morton , The Clockmaker's Daughter