The blurb

It should be a young boy's paradise.  Yes, the Great War is raging, but that can't affect 15-year-old Jack. He's too young and anyway is recovering from scarlet fever. To recuperate, he's been sent by his soldier father to the country house of a friend. When Jack arrives in the West Country to stay in a castle full of lonely women where he is, 'the only thing you'd call a man that isn't long since decrepit in the whole area,' he thinks he looks like something that would cause Dr. Frankenstein  to burst into tears and take up dentistry.

The looks he's getting from young Abigail, the maid, however. .. And is the shy Italian artist, Eleonora, interested in him as more than just a model? Bridie the cook, Miss Brampton the governess, 17-year-old Deirdre and even her mother, the horse-riding Lady Charlotte, all perhaps overly concerned that he should recover his strength.  The stuff of a young man's fantasies?

Well, yes, but Jack is more than the sickly youth they think him to be. In fact, Jack is more than Jack believes himself to be. He isn't troubled by the ghosts who roam the castle and watch his recovery because he can't see them. That voice in the back of his head, though. Jack isn't entirely sure that it's his. And those things in the woods at night, what the hell are they?

Worst, though, is the knife in his bag. It's the kind made only for killing. So how come a fifteen-year-old has a surgeon's knowledge of how to use it? That can worry a boy with a name like his.